Indie Game Review: Alternate Path

Alternate Path asks what a “game” is by playing with the conventions and grammar of video games in general and of the framework created by Shigeru Miyamoto in particular. It is an experiment in form, and I strongly advise that you play it before reading any further; this review seeks to discuss the game in detail and in depth, spoiling every secret and investigating every nook and cranny. A full, complete, and mature understanding of the game cannot be conveyed if I spend the next few pages talking around it and hinting at things that will only be clear in hindsight. So please, dear reader, go and play the game already.

I trust if you’re still reading that you’ve done just that, and now we can get to the business of discussing it. There are a number of ways of looking at Alternate Path: as a collection of puzzles, as an experiment, as a meditation on gaming, as a sort of history of platformers. And I’m sure there are plenty of others that I’m missing but I’ll start with that last one.

The first “level” of the game allows the player to move and to jump using the arrow keys; the only way to dispose of the enemies in this scarcely-populated area is to jump on their heads, ala Super Mario Bros. One touch from any of these enemies will kill us, thus sending us back to the very first level. This is platforming at its most rudimentary.

But as the game progresses, that formula is complicated and transformed. We gain a gun that can destroy barriers– shades of Mega Man 2 and Blaster Master, not to mention countless others. We gain a health bar and lose the ability to jump on enemies, instead utilizing our gun– now the standard for action games. We gain a second weapon and the ability to switch between them instantaneously with the touch of a single button; today’s greatest platformers, such as the Ratchet and Clank series, make weapon-switching a central feature of the game play.

We’ve gone from simple to complex, from light-and-bouncy (or, given the game’s decidedly low-fi visual style, what passes for it) to dark and murky as grays and blacks eventually give way to brooding reds. Now, I’m certainly not trying to read too much into this here– I don’t think, for example, that it represents, say, a lament for the platformer’s loss of innocence or some such nonsense– but I found this meta-narrative, this Short History of Platformers in five minutes or less, to be emblematic of the game’s approach, which is largely referential and metatextual.

Or, to put it another way: structuring it as a history of the platformer makes sense because it foregrounds the fact that this is a game about gaming. Take, for example, the two major puzzles that the game confronts us with.

First, there is the giant pit puzzle. As we enter the room, we are helpfully told to press the F5 function key to save. To our right, there is a large pit, too large for us to cross over even with our recent jump power-up. There are no invisible blocks; we try to jump across and we fall into the pit. The room restarts and we’re told again: press F5 to save. We just might do that, so we can try to solve this puzzle later.

But the solution is staring us in the face: press F5 to save. We jump towards the abyss and press the F5 button and we are “saved”; we arrive on the other side of the ledge.

It’s such a smart little puzzle, calling into question part of video gaming grammar that we had taken for granted: the meaning of the word “save”. It’s an intuitive puzzle– it’s not that hard to figure out, all the clues we need are present– but it doesn’t beat us over the head either. It requires us to think.

Not only does it require us to think in order to solve the puzzle, it requires us to think about the puzzle. About the meaning of “save”. In my case, it reminded me of moments in my life when I had made a boneheaded mistake and wished I could do it over, that I could just reload from a previous point in my day. It got me thinking about how dangerous a place like the Mushroom Kingdom would really be– how many lives would be lost each year as the result of those bottomless pits and wayward turtle shells.

And that got me thinking about how this game doesn’t feature a lives system, and how a lot of modern action games have eschewed that convention as well. And I reflected on the game’s meta-narrative, and I wondered how much richer it might be if the player started the game with a finite number of lives that gave way to the unlimited-lives health-bar system. It got me thinking about other ways the meta-narrative could be complicated and perhaps improved.

And then I reflected on how that really wouldn’t be fair to a player; this pit puzzle, taking place before the acquisition of the health bar, would be brutal if the player had a finite number of lives. But it would still be a cool idea, to do a meta-narrative game, a platformer that encapsulates the history of the genre, and I started thinking about ways to implement such an idea.

All this thinking– thinking about my life, about my gaming experience, about game design: it all sprung out of this little puzzle. And I’m not trying to argue that Mr. Yates intended me to think along those lines when he created this puzzle; I’m saying that he intended us to think, period, to reflect and meditate upon games and language and the language of games.

The next major puzzle, and the one that’s probably the most likely to get people stuck, is the “What do you need?” segment. We’re faced with a door or barrier and we find an rectangular object lying on the floor in the same room. “This is exactly what you need,” we’re told. But what is it that we need? We’re prompted to type in the object’s name.

I got stuck on this puzzle myself, typing “key” and “pass” and other variants. And while those are common barrier-destroyers in video games, it was just as common, back in the day, to use a gun.

And that got me thinking about the ludicrousness of that trope. If I knew someone who used a gun whenever confronted with a door or barrier, I’d frankly be a little frightened of them. But it makes perfect sense in the context of gaming, as part of the language of games.

There a lot of things like that: the idiosyncratic way gamers use “save”, for example. The presence of extra lives and checkpoints. Boss battles. Health bars: why can we function just as well at 10% health as we can at 100? The reliance on violence, even cartoony violence, to solve conflicts and achieve goals.

And all of it, like Miyamoto’s framework, is pretty arbitrary. Sure, it all works, it all makes sense, and it’s all grown organically. But why are those tropes the ones that are dominant? Why is that the language of games? What else is there?

What’s more, this language has nothing to do with life. All other art forms have something to do with life, or else it’s just pretty nonsense. It’s a discomfiting bit of introspection to go through as a proponent of games-as-art.

And, again, I’m not saying that Yates necessarily meant us to think that deeply about that specifically, but his puzzles are constructed in such a way that they ask us to think deeply about something. About games and the way they are constructed.

This comes to a head at the game’s conclusion, in which we’re confronted with the creature responsible for our alternate path: the AntiPlayer. His purpose, he tells us, is to stop us from achieving our purpose; our purpose “was to play this game.” But, one interesting-if-slightly-overlong boss battle later, someone (the game’s creator?) explains that the goal of the game was to defeat the AntiPlayer, and having done that, we have completed the game. This poses the question:

Granted, this is a bit of story, of dialogue; it’s a mimetic thing. At the same time, the game play itself builds to this question. The puzzles are built around it, around the act of asking questions and thinking about the art of gaming.

Alternate Path is an interesting experiment, greater both in ambition and achievement than most indie games. It investigates the way in which meaning is communicated in video games, and asks why deeper meaning– the stuff of life– isn’t communicated through those non-mimetic means.

It’s an important and unsettling question. It does not provide us with an easy or pat answer. Maybe that’s because games can’t tackle the deep meaning of real art on their own.

At the same time, I’d like to think that they can, and the experimental game that pulls it off– that will be something to see, that will be the holy grail. And by demonstrating his capacity to ask these uncomfortable questions, I think Yates is closer to finding that grail than most of us.

I eagerly look forward to his next experiment with the hope that it’s less Godard and more Bresson. Good luck and godspeed.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...