This is the seventh article of a long series concerning the best games of the decade 2010-2019. As usual, I’m focusing on story, aesthetics, contents, interactive language.

Games of the year (in alphabetical order)

This time I am not able to select one single game better than the others. All three games selected have something special and innovative and excluding one would be unfair.

ABZU (Giant Squid): The title by Giant Squid, behind which hides Matt Nava, one of the creators of Journey, is a spiritual experience for discovering enchanted worlds through crystalline waters teeming with life and full of lights, musics and colors. Someone has ironically referred to Abzu as a new Journey set in the abyss, but i think Abzu has a greater aesthetic appeal.

Everything in Abzu is ethereal and fluid, such as the sinuous and choreographic movements of your avatar, a Diver who seems to dance harmoniously, with great sense of inertia, an essential feature to really make feel yourself suspended in fluid; bright glares and bubbling water complement the amazing sensoral and physical picture. You are literaly enraptured by flood of lights, colors and marvellous scenarios that leave you in awe, depicting a visual composition that enchants the view and lulls your soul. All this happens in a dynamic environment, a continuous “panta rei” of colorful fishes engaged in a perpetual dance, swaying aquatic plants and chameleon environments. Each element is in harmony and in sync with your movements and responds perfectly to your interactions, thanks to a highly advanced artificial intelligence that characterizes each aquatic species, even able to realistically manage the collective behavior of dense fish herds and “tornados”. The harmonious music by Austin Wintory is epic, choral, orchestral, and is able to support any event at the right time and with the right register; it’s the intangible backbone of the whole experience. The game engages you in a holistic experience, which surprisingly pivots around an implicit narration rich of deep contents.

You are exploring not only several ecosystems in the mythological underground ocean, but also colossal and enigmatic vestiges of ancient alien civilizations, , so that you are wandering even through cyberpunk scenarios! The game does not hide its symbolic content and its ecological message, resulting in a clear metaphor for the flourishing of life following an ecological catastrophe. You can even read a metaphor for procreation and artificial insemination. Here it would open up a wide reflection on artificial intelligence and definition of life, but we would go too far and risk to make spoiler. ABZU, despite ensuring a short play time, up to 3 or 4 hours, is a highly interactive and engaging holistic experience, complex and dynamic, showing high level aesthetics research, able to express universal and symbolic contents and intellectual and scientific reflections. In a word, it is a true artwork, a point of arrival and departure for the art of video games.

INSIDE (Playdead): After Limbo (2010), independent Danish development team Playdead produced its best game. It is a 2.5D platform, scrolling both horizontally and vertically; your avatar is a faceless child constrained to move only along these dimensions, while the virtual camera has access to the third dimension. The game world has seemingly realistic connotations, at least at the beginning, when you are in a forest and get closer to what looks like a farm; almost immediately it acquires a metaphysical and hyperreal meaning, appearing as a succession of huge enclosed space, claustrophobic and artificial, occasionally counterpointed by outdoor escapes in twilight but no less degraded and distressing scenarios. The best moments of the game are under water; you often immerse in enormous reservoirs surrounded by colossal and enigmatic technological structures giving a metaphysical effect of suspension from reality. Sometime it symbolically recalls the suspension in the prenatal amniotic fluid, which has a lot to do with the purpose of your adventure. Even the ending is a strong metaphor for procreation.

Starting from the first minutes of the game you understand that you are in a sort of huge farm where strange experiments are performed on animals and on humans, especially children. You will have to front mind control experiments, zombie pigs with implanted worms (self-quote from Limbo) and creatures of the deep reminiscent of Samara in The Ring (2002)! All symbols of a dystopic reality. Gameplay is based on solving environmental puzzles, but very different from those of Limbo; the difficulty progression is much more gradual and there is no need to die dozens of times before being able to succeed. Inside also play with physics as much as Limbo; best puzzles introduce an alienating and brilliant effect: water suspended on the ceiling! Movements and child’s interactions, and more generally the game physics, reach the state of art. Playdead remains faithful to its inspiration aimed at exploring the darker sides of existence and humanity, and delivers an indefinite narration with a fairly pessimistic global sense that leaves no hope. I therefore do not recommend it to those who suffer from depression! Don’t miss the ending scene, reminiscent of the classic movie The 400 Blows (1959) by Truffaut.

THE LAST GUARDIAN (GenDesign, SIE Japan Studio): The spiritual successor of ICO (2001), first masterpiece by Fumito Ueda . TLG is the story of another deep emotional bond, this time between a kid, your avatar, and a strange and enormous beast with mythological features, Trico. Epics and myths are trademarks of Ueda productions, which have reached the pinnacle in his second work as well as his absolute masterpiece, Shadow Of The Colossus (2005); Trico’s plumage, which we desperately cling to, reminds the climbings of the colossi! TLG follows the development of an intense relationship between player and AI, kid and Trico! At first, the two are not perfectly synthonized, the beast is not immediately able to understand kid’s orders. Communication with the beast improves as the two characters face together the pitfalls of the alien and maze-like locations, characterized by caves, temples and especially archaic and crumbling high towers. Another amazing achievement in aesthetics! Trico begins to understand perfectly the kid’s orders and becomes the key for escape and salvation. The two need each other. Characterization of the beast leaves you amazed, sometimes you are not believing it is an AI! Here we have the first huge leap forward compared to ICO; by the time the implementation of the Yorda AI was remarkable, but now it is well beyond. After two hours of play, you’re already feeling Trico as your giant home puppy! You can feel tenderness and emotional bond, because he behaves like a real animal, midway between the domestic and the wild! He has a strong personality and a definite character. He responds in a complex manner to stimulations coming from the child and the environment.

Sometimes Trico executes preordinate actions triggered by environment, such as looking in one defined direction or rising up on two legs or playing with some furnitures or items, in order to suggest you the next action to be performed. Sometimes you have to give precise orders and direct the beast in the right direction, a task not always easy, but it is part of the realism and beauty of this unique relationship. Trico doesn’t execute only the correct orders, often he tries to do whatever you are ordering, even with wrong outcomes! Its imperfectly tamed and instinctive character is so funny; sometimes before you could get its attention and make him to do the right action, you have to work hard, because your friend is busy to fiddle with items, sniff right and left or stroll around, so be patient! Not to mention the times that it is irresistibly hypnotized by its beloved barrels of phosphorescent molasses; it is practically ungovernable and you have to eliminate the cause of distraction. Trico animation is extraordinary, every part of its body reacts and expresses moods: ears, eyes, nose, tail, legs, plumage, etc.

He is a tragic figure, a Michelangelesque character, a bit of a demon and a bit of an angel, upon which you can see the visible signs of suffering and atonement of his “original sin”….. Thanks to this smart and empathetic beast with a dark past, constantly persecuted, riddled with spears, always bleeding and aching, Fumito Ueda manages to create a sense of epic drama that transcends reality and becomes hyper-real and metaphysical. Long after you complete the game these feelings emerge strongly and powerfully, and are the proof of the depth of Ueda art, which once again does not disappoint. On the contrary you’ll forget the technical defects, which the mainstream magazines have unnecessarily spilled rivers of ink about, neglecting what is essential and deep in the Ueda artwork! Yes, there are some flaws: the kid would need better animations and movements, virtual camera would need optimization, it’s clear that the game would need refinements, development was very troublesome and irregular. Btw Fumito Ueda succeeded in delivering to the History of Video Games another metaphysical masterpiece: a metaphor fora rise from hell to heaven, from damnation to beatification, a path of atonement at the cost of great sacrifices and sufferings. No doubt Trico is a martyr who suffers and catalyzes all the evil in the world to protect the child, and as such he is immortalized in History and Myth!

Most appreciated games (no particular order)

FIREWATCH (Campo Santo): One of the first narrative game to successfully integrate gameplay and storytelling; story is not limited to cut scenes as dressing for traditional gameplay; storytelling does not introduce strict restrictions to interactivity and doesn’t reduce the game almost to a movie. Story is aimed at mature audience and is narrated entirely within the gameplay, in real time; player is active part of the story. No cut scenes, except the first one in the prologue. That’s possible thanks to the triggering of events by player’s inputs and to the main mechanics of the game: talking through walkie-talkie for sustaining multiple-choice dialogues with the sensual voice of female NPC Delilah. In the shoes of Henry, you’ll be engaged in the middle of an original story set in a natural park full of mysteries that will keep you glued to the screen for 5 or 6 hours! Visual aesthetics is amazing thanks to beautiful low poly graphic style; scenarios seem painted in pastel colors and reflect perfectly the moods of the protagonist. Some features reminded me of one of the best movie of the great British film director Hitchcock: Rear Window. The game, just like the movie, is a metaphor of voyeurism, the attitude of people who cannot or want not to consume sexual or romantic relationships and derives pleasure from peeking! Sense of repression, castration, interruption, obstruction or fear of romantic relationships is the key to understand the whole affair. Campo Santo has done its magic trick: you play all the time in first person and real time, explore the park, have an intriguing long distance relationship with Delilah, unveil dark secrets and misteries, explore the suffering souls of the two protagonists, but at the same time it is like watching a movie that keeps you thrilling from start to finish, a movie where you are co-director and actor at the same time.

THE TOWN OF LIGHT (LKA): A game you cannot miss, an underrated hidden gem! Granted by VGArt! It has been developed by italian team LKA, actually developing a new narrative game called Martha Is Dead. TTOL has been built with Unity 5 as first person view psychological thriller, where you are free to explore photorealistic 3D environments. It is strongly founded around engaging story and deep contents. An immersive descent into the abyss of madness through the disturbing corridors of an abandoned psychiatric asylum suspended between past and present! An intriguing story based on real historical facts about an old psychiatric asylum really exisisting in Italy. You are engaged in thrilling investigation for revealing the mistery about the past of young female patient Renée that suffered the horrors of the asylum. Not the usual fictional, superficial and simplicistic approach as in movies or comics, with sadistic doctors and cruel nurses torturing defenseless patients; it’s a more complex analysis of an uncomfortable and ambiguous truth, where the borders between reality and imagination, rationality and madness, innocence and guilt are undefined; no one is totally wrong or right, the whole hypocritical society is responsible and guilty. It goes deeper than many famous movies about the same subject, e.g. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) or Changeling (2008), able to catch the complexity of reality with no easy interpretations; and you are inside, yes, completely immersed in the experience, discovering step by step an unsetting and surprising truth! I loved the deep atmosphere in the digitally rebuilt old abandoned asylum, very thrilling and realistic. You have to solve the mistery through exploration, visionary and immersive flashbacks, collection of clues (documents, medical records, diary pages, etc.), in order to reconstruct past memories and a not pleasant truth. I also loved how the past facts and memories came out from investigation! It was very emotional! It makes use of a creative crossover of different expressive media: illustrations, animations, gameplay, texts, acting voices, lights, sounds, musics, etc. It’s not properly horror, but it’s able to engulf you in a terrific and dense atmosphere stimulating your deepest fears with no need of trivial jump scares. Narrative mechanics are not so innovative, LKA recycled traditional 3D games mechanics for narrative purposes; however the result is satisfactory. Story is beautyfully written and narrated, you are going to easily not forget it for a long time and to play it a second time to relive the same emotions. It’s plenty of mature contents, not only about madness and psychiatric asylums, but also about mother-daughter relationship, abuse of minors, sexuality, social criticism, etc. Don’t miss the beautiful OST.

LAYERS OF FEAR (Bloober Team): Horror game by independent Bloober Team from Poland. It was inspired by Playable Teaser by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro. Luckily, Layers of Fear is not a survival horror. Yes, luckily, because it is a genre that has made its days; nowadays horror games have to look for new expressive dimensions and partly LOF succeeds in. It’s a psychological horror with gothic atmosphere and walking simulator (wrong term indeed!) gameplay. In fact there are no monsters to fight or to run from; puzzles to be solved, as well as objects and clues to be collected, they could be counted on one hand fingers. Gameplay is mostly based on exploration of a Victorian mansion. That’s all? Well yes, if it were not for the haunted mansion that seems to have a life of its own! Walls, furnitures, rooms, etc., everything is trasforming and changing in real time while you’re playing: at one point you turn around: just a moment before there was a wall, now there is a door; you walk around a rectangular hall, but at every turn you always find different furnitures; you have just entered a room that has no other exit, then go back to find that the rest of the house has completely changed; at one point you look up, and where before there was the ceiling, now you can see only an infinite number of floors endlessly rising up to the sky like a skycraper! A triumph of amazing AI, which completely fulfills the player’s actions. It’s what I call interactive environmental metamorphosis! I played very slowly, sipping every moment of tension and mystery; but even when sometimes I went in a hurry, the environment transformations remained perfectly synchronized, giving me a deep sense of loss at the mercy of some kind of malignant and metaphysical entity. It can be read as a journey into the diseased psyche of the main character, a painter who has lost his mind, has become alcoholic and has sacrificed his family and his loved ones to chase in vain his artistic dream and a fleeting inspiration. The madness is well represented by the last white canvas that threateningly stands in his studio; player’s aim is to achieve his latest masterpiece, the one that will give him fame and success. But it’s a cursed painting, whose colors are made of grisly ingredients. Your mission is to recover these gruesome ingredients through the spectral rooms of the mansion, facing the ghosts of crazyness. You will report to your memory the most tragic and unpleasant events discovering various clues scattered in the ever changing rooms. A premise worthy of the best Gothic novels by Edgar Allan Poe or Oscar Wilde, it is impossible to not appreciate. We have to kneel in front of the amazing aesthetics, which finally, after decades of ignorant splatter, divinely recover gothic horror atmospheres.The immersion in the gothic atmosphere of the Victorian mansion is the fundamental pivot of the title; no horror game is able to give such an aesthetic experience. For further details see the complete review.

BOUND VR (Plastic Studio): I can remember very few PSVR games with such clear, vivid and beautiful graphics and deep 3D effect! No blur, high definition graphics with bright colors, charming low-poly modern-art aesthetics, great light and contrast effects, great sense of three-dimensionality! A joy for your eyes! Contrary of most VR games, it’s in third person view, you’re not embodied in avatar. That’s because you have to enjoy the dance moves of the female protagonist, very realistic thanks to state-of-the-art mo-cap of professional dancer. Protagonist with no face reminds of metaphysical school by De Chirico; the low-poly environment reminds of neo-plastic art by Mondrian; you can find echoes of surrealism by Magritte and of illustrations by Escher, especially in the astonishing surreal sequences of the up-down stairways with no ending. Bound is an interactive compendium of modern and contemporary art. Many times while you keep walking the whole world revolves around you and the up becomes down and viceversa, against the gravity law; it’s a marvellous sensation, an extreme VR experience. To be immersed in such wonderful virtual world and to follow closely the sinuous and fluid dance steps of the protagonist is a real joy for eyes and mind. Bound is a piece of dynamic and interactive art. Environment composed by abstract geometric shapes changes, pulses, ondulates continously following player inputs; it seems that a giant creature is living underneath. The protagonist dances in harmony with the surrounding whirlwind of geometric shapes. Great achievement in interactivity. Developers focused on plastic and dynamic art. Sinuous moves of the protagonist are really fluid, accurate, harmonious, in synchro with the living environment. Even the good post-modern musical commentary is worth of attention. As a whole it is a living dynamic interactive painting, an artistic contemplative interactive experience of great objective value. Such wonderful modern-art aesthetics sustains a deep and meaningful story. Bound is a sort of psychoanalytic seat, a dream full of metaphors and symbols, transfiguration of real life experiences. I’m saying no more for avoiding spoilers. I want just advice you that the ending is very touching and moving. See the complete review for further details.

HERE THEY LIE (Tangentlemen): One of the first PSVR titles, alternative game aimed at mature audience, very courageous experimental production going beyond usual entertainment. Grotesque and visionary horror with few but heavy jumpscares; VR makes real and amplifies the repulsion for vicious anthropomorphic creatures with animal masks; you have the goosebumps when they come near or touch you or when they are waiting for you in the dark. Exploration of open air scenarios with deep 3D effect is very impressive; the AAA sequence in the city is an unforgettable immersive experience, a real artistic nightmare worth of David Lynch movies and Goya paintings; people with animal masks involve you in disturbing situations. City slums are the quintessence of decay, degeneration, degradation, decadence; uptown futuristic cyclopic architectures remind of De Chirico metaphysical school and, as consequence, of Ueda‘s architectures in The Last Guardian. HTL proposes a provoking and pessimistic visions of life: common people are the evil, hell is here on Earth. Plenty of strong and sometime explicit sexual suggestions, very unusual in video games.

Honorable Mentions (no particular order)

1979 REVOLUTION: BLACK FRIDAY (Ink Stories): The reconstruction of the iranian revolution of the late’ 70s in the form of Interactive Drama, coming with high historiographical value. The innovation lies not in game mechanics, which are borrowed from Telltale 3D third person interactive novels like The Walking Dead , but how these mechanics are combined with serious contents, psychological depth and historical accuracy. Our avatar is a young iranian photoreporter facing doubts, contradictions, dangers, anguish, terror and pain about an event larger than life, which finds him inevitably unprepared and changes his life forever regardless of his will. We face a deep experience of universal value, a reflection about History, about social, political and economic dimensions; while locked in our blind individualism, we tend to underestimate and ignore such dimensions, but at any moment they may hit and devastate our individual lives and certainties with the force of a tsunami. 1979 BF is a human drama that beautifully combines micro and macro history. We must be aware: we could find ourselves in the same situation someday. Geographical distance and cultural differences do not matter. History does not distinguish between countries, religions, cultures, etc. When irrationality, ethical and moral degradation, religious obscurantism, ignorance, selfishness, egoism, speculation, inequality, unbridled ambition for power, violence, dog-eat-dog and “homo homini lupus” attitudes, when all this take over, we are all together on the same boat, defenseless and condemned.

The pleasant graphic novel aesthetics will bring us among people, palaces and streets of iranian cities, getting closer to a world we perceive so far and different because of our dated mental images, full of prejudices and distorted by media; a world that on the contrary is quite similar to ours.

We will have opportunity to attend important historical mass events, to hear the words and feel the strong influence of charismatic leaders immortalized by mass media of the time, such as Ayatollah Khomeini. Our main task is to take photos, each of which will be the starting point for deep historical studies, avoiding to make the game didascalic as a documentary movie.

The main plot is about the personal drama experienced by the photoreporter, the memories of his childhood, his complex family relationships and his hard experience in prison where torture is commonplace. In the end we will discover that there are no political ideas better than others, no charismatic leader wiser than others, no political party or religion better than others, it’s only a question of power and survival; fighting for our loved ones and for a better world against obscurantism, ignorance and abuse of power, this is the only wise thing to do.

It is a fairly short experience and your choices do not affect the main storyline but only secondary events, making the game partially replayable. Don’t forget it’s an indie production short on budget. An adult game, a must for videogames art lovers.

OXENFREE (Night School Studio): 2.5D graphics adventure where the protagonists are five teenagers around 18 years old: Alex, Clarissa, Jonas, Nona and Ren; the player controls Alex, the blue-haired girl. The story begins on a empty ferry carrying the teens to Edwards Island for a simple trip with friends; so from the beginning they appear suspended and detached from the rest of the world, just to symbolize the limbo of adolescence. Characters move along with perspective and parallax in backgrounds that seem hand-painted in pastel colors and that portray in a minimal but aesthetically pleasing way the scenarios of the the fictional island on which the whole story unfolds. The island is completely uninhabited and has a fairytale and at the same time disturbing atmosphere, especially at night. The plot has thrilling elements. It is rumored that strange phenomena occur in the caves of the island, especially if you tune your radio in certain frequencies… Alex goes to the caves and awakens mysterious spirits; the five teens will be possessed in turn by such restless ghosts and trapped in time loops that will force them to confront their adolescential anguishes. Action is always framed from afar, so the characters appear small on the screen in comparison to background. It leaves plenty of room for the big comics-like balloons where dialogue options are displayed. Indeed, multi-choice dialogues are the main mechanics of the game; while talking, two or three ballons will appear above Alex’s head, corresponding to three different dialog options. Dialogues are all voice acted and constitute a true torrential river of words around which the whole narration is centered; all the informations you need for understanding the plot are essentially provided by protagonists voices and reinforced by some environmental elements.

In addition to the predominant dynamics of multi-choice dialogues, gameplay consists in searching and gathering objects to solve simple environmental puzzles (essentially opening doors), investigating the ghosts mystery and exploring the island. An original mechanic is the one related to Alex’s radio; you can use it even while walking, its dial appears above Alex’s head. It is used for various purposes: listening to music, stimulating events and supernatural appearances by searching for the right tuning, or opening closed doors through the phenomenon of resonance. Another mechanics is related to a few strange and huge recorders in the style of ’50s with magnetic tape reels; by running them at the right speed, it is possible to get out of the time loops where ghosts try to imprison Alex and her friends; music recorded on the tapes has a rather unusual timbre. As already seen in Telltale’s interactive drama (e.g. The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us), relationships between characters depend on player’s choices; you can create sympathies and dislikes, love and hatred. Main story is not very influenced by such choices; there are, however, three ending variations that depend upon player’s choices and collected objects, so don’t miss anything. Main content is about adolescence, the core of the whole experience. See the complete review for in-depth analysis.

VIRGINIA (Variable State): Virginia is a narrative experience coming with not linear nor traditional approach. There are no dialogues, characters do not speak! No problem, Virginia tells more than so many games or movies full of words! It does not resemble X – Files or Twin Peaks, although actually the surreal style of David Lynch is the backbone of the title. It’s more similar to Mulholland Drive! Virginia melts dreams, visions and reality; it avoids to offer rational and logical explanations, and forgets the cause and effect principle, mixing past, present and future. It’s a flow of imaginative metaphors and symbolisms that revolves around a just mentioned plot; it’s aimed to dig deep into the existential and introspective dimension of the characters and to express universal messages and concepts, but in an abstract and surreal way.

Virginia imports from movies the editing films techniques into video games! It’s a first-person view game where you play a young black woman, Traver, recently recruited as an FBI agent. You live the story through her eyes, but it is as you were filming through the camera! In fact, the frames cut is distinctly cinematographic; so you are at the same time director and main character! Editing, cutting and mounting the scenes are provided by games AI; for example, while you are walking down the hall, suddenly you find yourself going down the stairs and then suddenly opening a door; while you are traveling by car, suddenly you find yourself inside the place where you were going. Action is not in continuos time as in traditional games, where you are able to freely move across the environment, and to get from point A to point B you have to walk all the space between; it is like in movies, where action is more dynamic thanks to the editing cuts, which eliminate what is not essential. At the movies it’s a common experience, but in videogames it is really a curious experience! It is no coincidence that Virginia ends in just two hours and costs as much as a movie ticket! Variable State team took inspiration from a very short indie game, Thirty Flights of Loving (2012), for the absence of dialogues and the editing film techniques; nevertheless Virginia reaches higher expressive degrees.

Virginia is not exactly similar to titles like Dear Esther, Gone Home, Firewatch etc; it gives a more extreme interactive cinema-like experience triggered by player inputs. The purpose of the game is to explore the existential and introspective sides of story and characters and decipher the visual metaphors. For further explanations about the meaning of the experience, read the complete review.

THAT DRAGON, CANCER (Numinous Games): TDC is an interactive personal diary, a multimedia intimate confession, far away from the traditional concept of video game as challenge. It is appreciated for the bold choice by game designer Ryan Green to exorcise his pain for the premature loss of his son Joel through a multimedia artwork. For the record, Joel died at the tender age of 5 in 2014, due to a brain tumor diagnosed when he was one year old. Ryan, an independent game designer with a little experience in the field, began developing the title before Joel death, but after the tragic event he rewrote it almost completely with the help of a small team known as Numinous Games.

The driving force of the project is the Christians faith of the Greens; they want to send a message of faith and hope to people facing similar pains and tragedies. One of the scenes of the game shows the strong response received from those who have faced the same difficult experience before: hundreds of solidarity messages symbolically hanging throughout the Green’s house, all readable and original! The same solidarity allowed the game to be published thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

In early December 2016 TDC received some media coverage for the participation of Ryan at The Game Awards 2016; the intervention of Ryan impressed the audience, because he couldn’t contain his excitement, and created a genuine moment of true emotion and empathic personal confession. A truly unique event within a videogames festival, which clearly denotes the on going cultural evolution of the medium.

TDC is a very intimate and explicit dramatic confession, where Ryan collects everything he has to say about his family tragedy and builds around it an interactive experience with clear artistic intents. Memories, facts, emotions, pain, fears, hopes, etc. they are all expressed quite didactically, often by texts appearing on the walls or in the background, or by monologues, a sort of stream of consciousness, just like rivers of therapeutic words. By pointing and clicking your mouse you can move the characters and have them interact with various objects in order to activate associated memories. You play Ryan in first person, rarely in third person. Sometimes you play even other protagonists of the drama, his wife and Joel himself.

I spoke of artistic intents because the scenarios are not realistic, they are abstract, a sort of psychoanalytic transposition of the drama created by Ryan psyche, as if it came out from the pages of Freud’s “Die Traumdeutung”. Abstraction is revealed especially by Joel avatar with no face, who looks like a figure from De Chirico paintings; sometimes he is not even represented in the scene, but we can hear his voice and laments and see the objects with which he is interacting. The events are not linearly narrated, they are recalled to your mind by metaphors, symbols, voices, monologues, abstract scenarios, surreal details, voids and absences more than presences.

Sometimes you find yourself playing weird meta-games; the fight against Joel cancer is seen as a challenge in an old arcade game where Joel is the hero and the cancer is the dragon; unfortunately in the end the arcade breaks. There is also a sort of Super Mario Kart race: Joel is on his tricycle and has to get as much medicines and pills as possible to gaining points and energy. Well, I’m not fan of challenges everywhere, it was not the case to force challenges in such dramatic experience. Game is not the same as challenge, what matters most is interactivity. In the end credits, the Greens thank the audience for playing their life and death; that’s a meaningful concept: to experience someone’s life and death through videogames; btw we don’t need game over metaphor, so trivial!

The artistic intentions are all there and the experience is touching and worth living. The results are appreciable, but they are not up to the intents. It’s a low-budget indie production, with low quality graphics and aesthetics limiting the starting ambitions. The creative inventions are significant but not particularly original. The title shows the limits of a “home made” production.

I appreciated TDC for the mature contents, for the courage to confess a personal tragedy in an intimate way through a not traditional medium. An important sign that the direction taken by videogames is the right one: the path to expressive art!

FRAGMENTS OF HIM (Sassybot): Game aimed at expression of deep and social committed contents. It depicts very well the complex web of relationships and feelings of the protagonists; it features deep psychologic and existential analisys. Texts, dialogues and acting voices have nothing to envy of best novels and movies “d’auteur”. Despite the low budget and the poor package, it features very interesting and effective interactive mechanics with narrative purpose. E.g. you can follow several characters, the so called multiplicity of avatars; it implements environmental metamorphosis, very useful for storytelling; you can also play flashbacks concerning the past of characters. FoH is able to create a compelling atmosphere even thanks to the particular graphic style, poor just on surface, but really rich in expression. Voice acting could be better. I suggest the title to lovers of narrative games as Dear Esther, Gone Home, What Remains of Edith Finch, Firewatch, Life Is Strange, etc.

Best of 2015 / Best of 2017