Year: 2017

Developers: USC Game Innovation Lab

Website: Walden, a Game

Genre&Topics: biographical, educational, poetic, naturalistic, philosophical, cultural, narrative, graphic adventure, survival, exploration, Ecology, History. Literature

Walden, a Game is one of those pleasant surprises you don’t expect. Just when you think you’ve played all the best games of 2017, right in the middle of 2019 you find Walden on your Curator page on Steam: the developers want to know what you think about! The first reaction is to be honored by their attention; then you remember that months and months ago you were intrigued by this game halfway between educational and entertainment, and you asked the developers for a copy. Better late than never! With my usual calmness I started playing Walden with no particular expectations and I took all the time to complete and review it. Video Games & Art is not for profit, but just cultural aimed; sometime I have written not so favourable reviews of games received from developers. This is not the case, because I was pleasantly surprised and kidnapped by the unusual and original experience proposed by Walden since the first hour of play and I have been enthusiastically sipping it within a week. A title that fits perfectly with the mission of Video Games & Art, always in search of new and extraordinary narrative and expressive frontiers of Video Games.

The impact was like a thunderbolt!

Have you ever felt that rare sensation of calm and inner peace that cradles you when, far from the world and people, you find yourself alone, surrounded by sky, water and sun, cheered by the singing of birds, the croaking of frogs and the chirping of insects, totally immersed in nature? I would never have thought of enjoying such sensations through a Video Game! Unbelievable but true! It doesn’t exist a medium more technological than that, a screen and a PC in a living room of a metropolitan city; out of the windows the traffic, the shouting of people, the daily routine. You start playing Walden and after a few minutes you feel immersed in an elegiac nature, your senses are pleasantly deceived by the virtual experience. It is the first time that I experience similar feelings in Video Games. It’s a paradox, but to find a spot of genuine nature not invaded by tourists is an impossible mission today; I could not imagine to find it in Video Games! Really, congratulations to the developers who have recreated a truly convincing, highly detailed natural environment, full of sounds, noises, animals, plants, with a day-night cycle of rare beauty. An immersive experience, one to take slowly, where walking, exploring, contemplating and taking screenshots becomes an enormous pleasure to sip. A few minutes of play and I was already fascinated by the experience.

I tried to rationalize and understand why the experience offered by Walden is so special, original and attractive. I realized it’s the fruit of a commendable artistic and expressive research that lasted 10 years, so much it’s the time dedicated to the development of this little gem. I realized that the unique and precious feature of Walden could not reside just in graphic and physic simulation of nature; it’s not a high-budget game, the graphic detail is not comparable to that of AAA titles of today generation; if you go near the plants and other objects you realize the limits of textures.

Walden’s secret weapon is the poetic and elegiac inspiration that it manages to instill in the game world, a Nature that is anything but naturalistic and scientific. Walden is a bit like a dynamic picture where the artist manages to recreate an idealized and romantic Nature that immediately envelops the viewer; plus the ability of Video Games to immerse the player in the three-dimensional virtual interactive space in first person view. But let’s proceed from the beginning.

Walden starts as a project with educational intent. It was developed by the Game Innovation Lab directed by Tracy Fullerton within the University of Southern California (USC). The USC Game Innovation Lab is well reknown as the studio that developed one of the first art games, The Night Journey (2007), in collaboration with artist Bill Viola, even before Dear Esther (2012, The Chinese Room) and The Path (2009, Tale of Tales). Walden, a Game is the virtual transposition of the book Walden or Life in the Woods (1854) by Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau is an American essayist, historian, naturalist, teacher who lived between 1817 and 1862 in Concord, Massachusetts; he is part of the cultural movement known as Transcendentalism, whose best known representative is Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the few NPCs in the game. Without going into too much detail, Transcendentalism is the American version of nineteenth-century european romanticism, permeated by a strong idealism and spiritual and religious elements deriving also from Indian theologies as well as from Christian ones. At its core there is the belief that individuals and nature tend to be pure and that a certain type of society and institutions, like those of the time, tends to corrupt such purity; Transcendentalism professes the self-determination of the individual who must seek the ideal lost purity of the world and therefore place himself as a critical and transformative element within society.

It is no coincidence that Thoreau was a convinced abolitionist of slavery, so much to invoke the exit of the southern States from the USA; he refused to pay government taxes and went to jail because he did not want to support the war between United States and Mexico in 1846-1848. He also wrote an essay about civil disobedience which greatly influenced the doctrine of non-violence by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. In 1845 after the death of his brother and more and more intolerant of the society of the time, he decided to undertake a spiritual and naturalistic experiment in search of the lost purity; he lived for two years in the woods of the Walden Pond, near Concord. The poetic and fictional synthesis of that experience is reported in his famous book Walden or Life in the Woods. Thoreau is an ecologist ante litteram and is the historical figure that inspired Chris McCandless, the protagonist of the popular movie Into the Wild (2007).

Before any prejudice moves you away from playing Walden, I can assure you that the developers’ approach is absolutely free of any exaltation of Thoreau’s philosophy. My personal approach to reality is anything but idealistic and romantic, on the contrary it is empirical, scientific and disenchanted, and therefore I cannot completely share Thoreau’s vision; however, I appreciate the writer’s civil battles against slavery and war. I think we must always strive to improve the world. I challenge anyone to deny that sometimes we are all a bit tempted to run away from the daily routine and take refuge in Nature just as Thoreau did! Developers followed a philological approach faithful to the book, recreating a three-dimensional and immersive version of the Thoreau’s poetic experience. The Nature of Walden, a Game is the idealized, domesticated, poetic and elegiac Nature told by Thoreau, not the scientific one; that’s what makes the experience fascinating and gives you that strong feeling of escaping the ordinary reality, a sensation that probably you will not be able to find anywhere in the real world but only in the world of Art. That’s why Walden, a Game is first and foremost an artwork with clear expressive purposes, before being an educational game. Art deceives and cradles us with its “Pindaric flights”, and at the same time expresses profound contents we are forced to think about. Walden, a Game can be safely compared to the movie Into the Wild, which fascinates us but at the same time invite us to reflect about the ecological and romantic approach of Chris McCandless to nature and society. No forced interpretations.

Walden is aimed at the romantic spirit that lies in each of us, regardless of whether you are cynical empiricist like me or irreparable idealst like Thoreau; it cleverly plays with our illusions and makes us think as only artworks can do .

It is very nice to review a game just like any other intellectual artwork! But now let’s get into a more traditional analysis of the peculiar features of Video Games.

Walden, a Game is a 3D graphic adventure in first person view. You find yourself in Thoreau’s shoes and experience his life in the woods. Gameplay is very rich. You have to survive: you need to get food, pick berries, fish, cut wood and warm up, mend your clothes, build and maintain your hut in the woods, keep your poetic inspiration high by not overworking for too long time. To this end you have to search for bonfires and particular spots where you can find isolation and poetic inspiration; otherwise you risk your view to be literally covered in a sad black&white! At the same time you can explore and contemplate the lush and warm nature that surrounds you, observe and catalog plants and animals, from the owl howling at night to the hawk that dominates clear skies by day or the fox that faces the icy snowy winter; you can admire sunrises and sunsets over the lake with colors that would envy the greatest painters, go boating in spring and skate when it’s freezing in winter, wander as a restless spirit during the dark night illuminated by your dim oil lantern. All within magnificently rendered day-night and seasonal cycles where time obviously flows much faster than the real one. The play time is around 7-8 hours if you choose to leave Walden after one year (as in the book), double if you choose to stay in Walden for another year (as actually Thoreau did) and complete all the side quests. The naturalistic experience is seasoned with the poetic and spiritual reflections of Thoreau, whose voice is beautifully interpreted by the actor Emile Hirsch, not surprisingly the same of Chris McCandless in Into The Wild! I appreciated so much the use of acting voices for reading the numerous letters that Thoreau exchanges with his family, friends and acquaintances. There are a lot documents to read, but reading with the aid of acting voices makes the whole thing less static and more interesting.

Thoreau did not spend those years in complete isolation, in fact he often moved to Concord to visit his family and his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson; developers have decided to mix the experience described in the book with the real life of the writer for educational purpose. A happy choice, because it enriches even more the already substantial interactive experience. In town, for example, you can be hired for small temporary jobs actually performed by Thoreau when he was in financial straits; for example you have to check the alignment of roads and railways around Concord, another secondary quest that contributes to make gameplay very varied. There are also an emporium, where you can buy necessities with the money earned from your small jobs, and a post office, where you can send your manuscripts in the hope that they will be published and bring you some income. Which is why you will often shuttle between the pond and Concord, or rather a small excerpt of the town. Here is one of the limits of the game. If Walden Pond is a huge and perfectly reconstructed playable area with plenty of landscapes and details, on the contrary the city area is extremely small; therefore you cannot feel the romantic contrast between Nature and Civilization, probably due to budget constraints. What a pity! Financial limits are also evident in interactions with NPCs, really rare as well as poor from a technical point of view.

You can often visit home of your friend Ralph Waldo Emerson or meet him in the woods. Unfortunately the interaction with Emerson is one of the weak points of the game. In fact the dialogues are managed by a cumbersome and ugly interface that invades the screen. More than anything else it is Emerson talking and asking you to find books lost in the woods, one of the secondary quests of the game; you are only able to choose between a few and simple conventional lines of dialogue. I would have liked to start philosophical conversations with Emerson, somewhat in the wake of the philosophical conversations in The Talos Principle. What a pity! Animations of NPCs are not so good, animations of the animals in the woods are much and much better. Furthermore you cannot meet your family, not even your beloved sister, whose voice will keep you company constantly thanks to a pleasant series of letters delivered to your hut and thanks to a secondary quest, a sort of treasure hunt through the woods . When you visit your home in Concord you always find it empty; I don’t know if such absence is desired by developers, yet I have always felt the desire to meet my sister or my mother or my father and take them on a boat tour on the lake; to my regret, the game does not allow for it.

Beyond some budget limits, unavoidable in independent productions, this is the game for you if you sometimes feel yourself like philosopher or poet in search of refreshment and inspiration in a bucolic corner far from the civilized world; or simply if you look for a vitual escape from everyday stress to recharge yourself with new energy. At the same time it manages to be a highly educational game, oriented to culture, research, exploration and knowledge, as well as a real poetic and spiritual experience, the right balance between art, entertainment and education.

L.F.

Rating: 87/100