Kairo & Proteus - The Textual Foundations of the Walking Simulator
In Kairo, the player's task is to explore, linearly with the exception of small detours to find hidden areas, an empty, alienating world made of concrete brut in abstract, larger than human-scale shapes. The environment of Kairo is built to awe and confound, light and shadow playing off pure geometry that the player massages and coerces, striking blood from mountain stone to bloom the meadow of the credits sequence.
Proteus has a similar goal, though with a more direct goal. The player wanders the various environmental changes in a forested island. The sun rises and sets in four days, each representing a season. At night, the player goes to a stone circle somewhere on the island to teleport to the next season. The environment is dynamically drawn for the season and in response, the soundtrack of the game is generated from the environment the player moves through, certain sounds emerging in response to certain surroundings.
Both of these games are very "pure" in their intentions and nature. Proteus is about the whole texture of sensation that the natural world produces and mimics it virtually by blending sound and vision in a wholly unified way. Kairo is about life and the world and does so with plays of emptiness and space, light and shadow.
The walking simulator genre is, at its best, oriented around what its name suggests, that the game will be oriented around the act of being within space. Both of these games take this concept to its fullest possible conclusions, by constructing 3D spaces and various languages of navigation within it, a discipline of motion-within-space often only hinted at in various places, nature writing and architecture showing hints and traces of an attempt to dive into this field so rarely looked at face-on.
Proteus has a similar goal, though with a more direct goal. The player wanders the various environmental changes in a forested island. The sun rises and sets in four days, each representing a season. At night, the player goes to a stone circle somewhere on the island to teleport to the next season. The environment is dynamically drawn for the season and in response, the soundtrack of the game is generated from the environment the player moves through, certain sounds emerging in response to certain surroundings.
Both of these games are very "pure" in their intentions and nature. Proteus is about the whole texture of sensation that the natural world produces and mimics it virtually by blending sound and vision in a wholly unified way. Kairo is about life and the world and does so with plays of emptiness and space, light and shadow.
The walking simulator genre is, at its best, oriented around what its name suggests, that the game will be oriented around the act of being within space. Both of these games take this concept to its fullest possible conclusions, by constructing 3D spaces and various languages of navigation within it, a discipline of motion-within-space often only hinted at in various places, nature writing and architecture showing hints and traces of an attempt to dive into this field so rarely looked at face-on.
Comments
Post a Comment