More Gloom: All Our Friends Are Dead

As if to drive home the point of last week's post, All Our Friends Are Dead has been making the rounds lately, on dessgeega's blog and the select button game club, amongst other more high profile blogs...



I had read that the game was like La La Land mixed with Contra, though it feels more like Silent Hill mixed with (obscure 2D PC shooter) Abuse to me. You control a machine-gun weilding cat-like thing who battles abstract wraiths that disintegrate under your gunfire into decaying static and hissing screeches of dying modems in dithered shades of black, red, and white, progressing through a nightmarish dungeon of bone, blood, and jittery noise, accompanied by ambient drones and manipulated sine waves. But after being bombarded with blood-red runic inscriptions, bleeding skeletons, and occasional snippets of poetry for a half hour, I felt the game was trying a little too hard. The influence of La La Land is evident, but La La Land's mysterious musings always felt like they meant something, even when that something was almost entirely opaque and unattainable. But All Of Our Friends Are Dead sometimes comes off as being cryptic for its own sake.

It's interesting to me because it seems to try and marry the plaintive abstract atmosphere of such "zen platformers" (I love that term) as Seiklus and Knytt stories, along with the surreal, dream-like progression of La La Land with traditional run and gun game mechanics. In other words, All Our Friends Are Dead is the first conscious effort I've seen to make an "art" game into a "real" videogame. So there are boss battles, destructible environments, locks and keys, platforming challenges, etc... I always appreciated games like La La Land and Seiklus for eschewing these sorts of things, but I think AOFAD does a great job making everything work together.

For instance, one scene forces you to perform some simple if perilous platforming across a pit of acid to grab a key, and then return across the gap to open a locked door. Of course, because of conveniently inconvenient architecture, the return trip is more difficult. This kind of challenge is common to platformers, but it takes on a new, more sinister character in this context... the return voyage becomes an object of dread, and being stranded in the room with the key with no easy way back creates a feeling of lonely isolation. For the most part the level design is very careful to synergize with the game's aesthetic ends instead of working against it... It's far from perfect, but they mostly heighten each other. Of course, the force of the game's presentation is generally strong enough to overwhelm any frustration from repetition or arbitrary difficulty, which helps.

In light of last week's post, though, I still want to ask: is this "fun"? Despite taking such a heavy-handed approach, the game's presentation effectively creates a looming sense of dread and terror hiding just beyond the edge of the screen. What drove me to finish the game was more morbid curiosity as to what would happen next more than the raw pleasure associated with the act of playing. But if it isn't "fun", then what is it? Certainly it's still entertaining and compelling...