What defines a video game and when do you transition from a great narrative with enjoyable gameplay to a mere interactive movie? After having recently completed Until Dawn, it feels more like the latter.
Gameplay is always the number one most important thing about a video game. If your game doesn’t have great gameplay, you should probably step back and fix that because it’s an issue. The thing with Until Dawn is that the story itself still isn’t very good. It is a cliché horror film with twists that barely make sense and characters I can’t really get behind, which kind of eliminates the whole purpose of the game. The whole purpose of the game being that your choices is what kill or keep your characters alive.
Was it kind of fun to have to make those choices and see what they entail? Absolutely. It really was. I won’t deny the fact that it had really great qualities to it. The acting is pretty great and the game taking place over the span of ten hours is fantastic. The game does make me feel tension sometimes but I wouldn’t say that’s really because of the gameplay. It’s mostly the general tension of being a horror movie, which is what I would prefer to call this game.
I didn’t have fun dealing with the extremely slow moving characters nor did I have a good time dealing with most of the quick time events. It isn’t really fun or interesting. It makes me question the popularity of this “interactive movie genre.”
I played The Walking Dead Game for the first time last summer in an attempt to understand the craze behind this genre. At first, I enjoyed it quite a bit…for the first two episodes at least. Then, I slowly began to realize how awful the gameplay truly is. The story of Telltale’s Walking Dead is pretty good (for the most part), but some of the puzzles are pitiful and frustrating due to the awful gameplay mechanics. I don’t want to have to press a button or two to interact with an object as the entirety of a game’s run time. That’s not what I define as fun.
I would prefer something like the platforming of a Mario game or the dual shooting and platforming mechanics of an Uncharted game. Those two games are wildly different — Mario is completely gameplay focused and it works very well and always has. On the other hand, Uncharted is a gameplay and story-focused adventure that succeeds in nearly every department. So I don’t understand the appeal of the genre beyond probably being a lower budget genre in terms of development.
Again, The Walking Dead and Until Dawn are not inherently awful. They just aren’t really video games — or not what I’d like to call video games — or not what I’d like to show somebody who hasn’t played video games.
The gameplay is inherently boring, tedious and repetitive, and yet, these games receive incredibly high praise. The only reason I can think to praise these titles is the decision-making elements, which are somewhat intriguing. That, and the narratives themselves (although not so much for Until Dawn). If one were to take some of the decision-making elements and simply put them into a more structured genre, it would be far more interesting in my opinion.
What do you think of this interactive movie genre? Can you get behind its popularity, or do you also feel that it’s a very flawed way to craft narratives in video games? Let me know in the comments below!
