It's Grim out there. With a capital G. Britain is flooding, sirens are sounding the breach of Chesil Beach, and on the other side of the Atlantic, North America and Canada are gripped by a blast of arctic air that will freeze your breath in the air as soon as it leaves your face. If I were a Viking, I'd be saying Ragnarok is upon us.
Of course, the world isn't ending, but we are in January. Grimmest of all the months. We're all broke because we spent all our money on Christmas. We go to work in the dark and come home in the dark. The only sun we see is through the workplace window, if we're even lucky enough for that. It's cold, it's wet and we're all miserable because we're starving ourselves on post Christmas diets.
January is rubbish, and the moods it inspires in some people seem to have permeated the games I've been playing of late. Truth be told, this started before January, but I'm in the middle of a run of some of the bleakest, saddest games I've ever played. It started with Tomb Raider, where Lara gets beaten senseless by her surroundings as she tries to escape a weather beaten island somewhere near Japan. There's a complete absence of hope for a lot of the first half of the game. Lara is a lamb thrown to Yamatai's wolves. Playing it is draining.
In a bid to brighten things up after Tomb Raider was finished, I got Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. The demo was bright and breezy and thoroughly enjoyable, but it concealed the full game's dark heart. I covered this in my last post, but it bears repeating. Brothers may be my game of 2013, but good lord is it sad. Every moment of levity is brought crashing down around you by some kind of tragedy just minutes later. The game eventually builds to the saddest thing I've seen on screen since the first fifteen minutes of Pixar's seminal Up. After that, I just decided that games didn't want to make me happy at the moment and got stuck into the next.
The next game wound up being Deadlight, which I downloaded in trial form upon release and forgot about. It popped up for under two quid in a post Christmas sale on XBLA with Flashback and I Am Alive, so I decided to get the full version. Deadlight turned out to be a sort of cross between Limbo and The Walking Dead set in the 80s. While the story was a bit generic Zombie Apocalypse, it was well told and looked fantastic. The mood was consistently downbeat though, and while I enjoyed it, there wasn't a lot to smile about while playing it. Once the tragic ending had played out and the credits rolled I dived straight into I Am Alive, a sort of Assassins Creed meets The Road kind of game. It's the greyest thing I've ever played and I put it down after getting to the protagonist's flat. All the end of the world was getting too much.
Still, I'm a sucker for punishment, so Metro: Last Light is in the disc tray at the moment. I'm a fan of the first game, and a fan of the concept and the fiction in general. I don't think a post apocalyptic civilisation has ever been better portrayed in anything than in Metro. It's such a coherent universe, and pretty unique in western gaming. It's developed by Ukrainian team 4A and based on a Russian sci-fi novel of the same name. Metro is so convincing, and I think it's because of its Ukrainian origin. As anyone who's heard about Chernobyl knows, the Ukraine has first hand experience of what it's like to be on the receiving end of a nuclear disaster, and if you look at any photos of Chernobyl you can see how the place has influenced the aesthetic of the post Armageddon Moscow surface. Most of the game takes place in the populated tunnels of the Moscow Metro, and it's uniquely creepy. The best worst moment so far has been the flashback to ground zero on the day the warheads fell from the perspective of the crew of a flight back from Majorca. If you've never played it, click the link and watch it. You need to see it. Metro: Last Light is proving to be fantastic at the moment, and is a definite improvement on the previous game, but it's still pretty grim and I've been needing to something brighten up the winter darkness.
Enter Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass. It may be a game about sailing over the sea that's flooded a long dead civilisation and therefore in keeping with the Grim January theme, but it's so happy about it that it's not something you think about when the gulls are wheeling above your bows while you hunt for treasure. I'm pretty late to the DS Zelda games, but in a month like January, I'm happy that I have them. Say what you like about Nintendo, you can always count on them to brighten up a cloudy winter afternoon, no matter what your gaming tastes.
Here's to you Link!
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