No real new experiences in the last four hours. I made the sneaking easier, which aided in navigating the levels, but even with the aid of a guide, finding the various collectibles was not trivial. They're so small and often tucked away in isolated corners.
I'm not sure how I feel about playing the game in this detail-focused way. There's something distasteful about doing a scavenger hunt trough a ghetto. I suppose it's a disconnect between medium and the message. They're trying to tell a serious story, but because it's a video game, you still have to do all these silly little errands in order to make it sufficiently "video gamey." From that perspective, it is perhaps overly perverse of me to fault it for that. On the other hand, it's the Holocaust.
I don't really care for the seriousness of the game's subject matter. Call me shallow if you will, but I like frivolity in my games. Obviously, serious games should exist. I can't even fault an artist adding excessive darkness to a work. Whenever I try and do anything artistic, I start out with the intention of doing something fun and funny and it always somehow morphs into something introspective and cynical. Yet because of this tendency, I admire the ability to create something breezy and cheerful.
Velvet Assassin is, of course, the opposite of that. I can recognize its value as a unique perspective on the story of the second world war, and as a meditation on the nature of evil. Nonetheless, I am glad to be moving on to something a little less bleak (I'm not even sure what I'll be playing next, but I can say with absolute certainty that it will be less bleak).
No comments:
Post a Comment