Thoughts on games, work, and… well, mostly games

I wrote this back in June of this year.  Since then, Shadow Complex arrived on the scene, and I’m considering treating it specially.

Many games concern themselves with unlockables, I tend to be more interested in unreachables.

I will never forget a sheer stone wall to the left of one of the first towns you encounter: as a young player, you can’t jump over it or traverse it in any other way.  There are no indications that there’s anything interesting on the other side, but for some reason it was enticing.  Maybe it’s because it was only several tiles high and not an outright barrier as tall as the screen.  Only much, much later do you have the skills necessary to reach its top and move on to what lies in the leftward screen.  (Heh, I forget what it was…)

Fable II had some unreachables but I don’t recall them being very potent.  The first Fable II DLC, Knothole Island, had an interesting weather-altering device that, when you emerged from the cave that housed it, had an effect on the land that allows you to reach certain areas that were previously unreachable.  I think one of the Super Mario games did this, too.

Faxanadu was another game that featured unreachables prominently.  Thief III did as well.

Ico and Shadow of the Colossus come to mind as having featured unreachables, the latter moreso than the former.  Shadow of the Colossus was more vast than anything else.  The unreachable areas were closed off by gates that could only be opened once certain in-game conditions were satisifed.  So while the gate was enticing, the game didn’t really tease the player; you couldn’t see anything in the unreachable area unless the gate was open.

You know, even F-Zero had unreachables, even if unintentionally.  Certain jumps on the track could, if you hit them correctly, launch you far into a distant area of the map where you’re certain you can see another track.  (Why is it there?  It’s clearly not part of the track I’m on.  Can I get to it?  What happens if I do?)  Apparently the developers stored multiple tracks in large bitmaps.  Sometimes you could see “other” tracks from the current track.

We have to mention the strangest unreachable of all: the Minus World in Super Mario Bros.  Even the name was cool.  This was an area so unreachable that you had to step outside the rules of the game to reach it.

But the king of all unreachable-based games was Riven.

(Uru might have been better had it been completed.)  Riven’s used unreachables the way they were meant to be used: as foreshadowing.  You’d arrive on a new island and immediately be able to explore.  But off in the distance, high on a mountain ridge, was clearly a building that didn’t belong there.  On Boiler Island in Riven we see a structure in the side of the mountain, in the distance toward the left.

On the Jungle Island, there’s a small hut embedded in the side of a mountain.  Clearly it’s reachable, but how?

It isn’t just scenery, it was clearly a destination.  But no matter how hard you try, you can’t reach it.  And it’s not “locked” in any way you can see; by all accounts there is no path you can traverse to reach it.

And that’s true, from your current perspective.  Only later do you discover a second entrance to the island.  When you enter the age that way, you can find the path to the moutain ridge building.  And the real kicker occurs when, while on the mountain ridge, you’re afforded a view of the beach where you puzzled so long and hard over how to reach the spot where you’re currently standing.

It’s a moment that makes you chuckle and shake your head, because you remember the time you spent with the game earlier.  You remember all the emotions you had, and all the things you tried.  You remember the moments of cleverness and the moments of infuriating frustration.  It brings you closer to the game, and keeps you from forgetting that time spent playing.  It prevents the game from being perceived as a strictly linear obstacle course; it reinforces your viewing the game as a cohesive whole.

I wonder if unreachables are more enjoyable when the game forces you to take your attention away from them in order to reach them.  The unreachables I’m talking about aren’t those found in Braid—the key trapped in the high chamber or the puzzle piece that requires time-shifting acrobatics to acquire—those don’t evoke the same sensation.  The unreachables in Braid are things, not places, and they all occur in the tightly-wrapped context of a single level.  And I think that’s the key distinction in my mind: unreachable places are what I like to encounter.  I actually find unreachable items to be frustrating.  (Note that unreachable things can be hidden in unreachable places.)  You know you’ll get them eventually, and you know they’re significant; you probably even know exactly why they’re significant.  Acquiring something that you basically know everything about isn’t nearly as interesting as acquiring something (read: reaching a destination) you know nothing about.

I can’t think of a concise name for concept I’m trying to capture except maybeunreachable areas?  Whatever I call it, an unreachable area is characterized by some combination of:

• Being an explorable area in its own right, geographically disjoint from the explorable area the player currently resides (though it may not seem very explorable from the player’s current vantage point).  This is manifested in the game as one or more vantage points that show no obvious (given the player’s current abilities) route to the unreachable place.  (Of course, this may render any current area A as unreachable from the point of view of another area B, even though B seemed like an unreachable area when discovered from area A.)
• Remaining visible but unexplorable early in the game, explorable only late in the game.
• Being only partially visible from any given vantage point.  For example, a single unreachable structure have only its observation deck visible from one vantage point and its front gate visible from another vantage point, even though the unreachable is only one structure.  Indeed, a single or area may be crafted to reveal what seem like distinct areas when viewed from different vantage points.  There is some reward in the player’s being able to unify multiple impressions once they are able to explore the area.
• An entry or exit point that, once traversed, cannot be re-traversed.  Metroid often did this: letting gravity or dynamic walls act as one-way gates between areas.
• Offering some hint of reachability, like a raised bridge, a slightly-too-tall wall, or sheer out-of-placeness etc.
• Invisibility that causes the unreachable area to be disguised until revealed, like Metroid’s one-way, invisible passages that, prior to entering them, didn’t even appear to be passages.