This is a review of a videogame ‘Northern Journey’ by Sild Studios. I found out about it via this video;
I thought this would be interesting to False Machine
readers and OSR types as a game art which has a bunch of OSR-type theming and
but also as a distinct work of art by chad neurodivergent creator who made it
while sitting in a cellar for several years. (Maybe also with fans of 'Thief' and the Thief modding
community maybe? It has that kind of feel.)
Chad Neurodivergent Creator
Interviewer - "Working on your own, you must have
had a pretty deep schedule." Chad - "No I didn't really have a schedule or a
plan. As you are working on something, things, story beats, come to mind. So
for instance you might realise you want some mountains, or you want to fight a
witch. Then you might be in a forest and realise you need something to go
between the forest and the mountains or it doesn't feel right " Chad - "There were a lot of things I didn't spend
time doing. Like sketching and drawing and planning enemies and whatnot. I
usually just made them then and there." Chad - "The game was made in a cellar and there
were a lot of spiders there so there are spiders in the game." Chad - "Anyone can make music really, you look at
pictures of the place you are making music for and start making sounds." So, he made the game by making the game. I will return to this in the end.
The Level Design
Northern Journey combines vast-feeling levels and
wide-open spaces with complex, nested and carefully planned challenge routes.
In the interview above the creator says they often solved design problems by
just removing space, bringing things more closely together. Often the routes and locations are nested vertically,
with looping fishbone paths, leaps and scrambles taking you from one to
another, or caves, long diversions or surprising detours leading you back to
somewhere you have already seen from afar, maybe only a few feet away from
where you were standing, buy previously unable to reach.
The internet tells me that this is “like Dark Souls”. You are almost always in sight of the promise of a future
journey,being shown expanses you might
traverse, places you might visit and methods you might use. There are keys to
open doors but there is also a winch thing you can use to access ziplines which
take you whooshing across these densely-plotted levels - you can see the
ziplines coming in but can't access them till you get this widget. In terms of
level design this is in practice, just another kind of key or teleportation
system, but it doesn't feel like that, instead it feels like an extremely cool
reward for achieving stuff. How could this feeling be expanded to OSR-style games?
With difficulty I think. The functioning of team play using largely the minds
eye and maps doesn’t work the same way as in a videogame. In Northern Journey,
the ‘correct’ or accessible routes are obvious and the language of the game and
movement in its space is easy to accept. You know you can’t climb things above
a certain set incline, so you don’t bother. In an OSR game you can try
climbing things above a set incline, and can try doing a whole bunch of
things that wouldn’t work in Northern Journey. As well, the presentation of a vertically nested
environment is more difficult in map form, and the sheer power of a open view
of a big landscape promising various adventures and possibilities wouldn’t act
the same way. Perhaps to some extent, partial maps, rumours and
‘promising objects’ serve a similar aim in D&D adventures. I tried to do
something a bit like this in Demon-Bone Sarcophagus but apparently fucked it up
☹.
The Music
The music is custom, nothing in its pockets but knives
and lint. It’s dungeon synth/ambient created for each environment. This is
distinctive because there really isn’t a big gap between the sounds of the
environment, the twitchy calls of insect danger (or witches), the wind, the
treetops moving in the wind, the echoing of cave noises and whatever the
ambient music is for that area.
The Fucking Spiders
Or monsters generally, but most of them are fucking
spiders.
None of the spiders are the same, look the same, act the
same or interact with the environment and the player in the same way. Some
crawl in the undergrowth quietly, some swarm in gangs, some hover and leap, or
hang in treetops and drop on you. The enemy design, movement plans and AI loops are
carefully integrated into the environments, the spiders in the trees, the
tree-tops slowly waving, the spiders in the waving grass which bob and move in
the same rhythm as the grass. The juddering, weaving repetitive but incoherent attack
patterns of the insect enemies exist apparently because they were easy to
program - presumably real insects are running something not that much more
complex than the systems in a modern computer. The deep integration with the environments means you
spend a lot of time hiding, listening, watching, stalking and paying a huge
amount of attention to trees, grass, sounds and movement.
The Combat
I feel like there are two main ways to run the combat in
Northern Journey; Doom Style or Cheese It. If you have really good twitch sensitivity and aim then
you could maybe burst into target-rich environments and race around shooting
things while brilliantly swapping weapons for optimal effect. I absolutely
could not do this and so most of the time I just cheesed it by save-scumming,
creeping forward till I trigger one or two enemies then running like fuck away
till they are lined up behind me on an attack run, then turning round and
shooting them, save-scumming and doing the same thing again. The sling was an interesting embodied weapon. You get it
for free, it never runs out of ammo. On pulling out the sling the p.o.v character WHUMPS it
round your head, one, two, three, four, five, six times then puts it away. You
can trigger a cast at the peak of any of those WHUMPS. If you wait till the 3rd
or 4th WHUMP, the damage goes up to 100, which is actually not bad, on par with
other weapons, or you can release early for a faster shot with less damage. This starts as a crap and awkward weapon, but as you get
better with it, it becomes quite workable and your skill with its timing helps
you upgrade it along with your other stuff so it never quite goes out of
fashion.
Characters
Oddities drawn from something like a folk tale; a village
idiot, a suspicious priest, a fool in the stocks, a policeman in his hut, some
mysterious crones with a bubbling pot, a doctor throwing runestones and
laughing, a sketchy soothsayer whacked out on fumes, an isolated engineer
living in a box held over an abyss; there is literally no-one normal in this village, Crones - Lots of crones in this one, a large variety of
tricky witches doing crazy witchy things, trying to push you off bridges,
strand you in infinitely black pools, fly screaming and cackling at you on
broomsticks The Mysterious Flute Player – is he Odin? A wizard? The
Gygaxian Game Master? He feels a little like all of these things. He has his
own theme and you can hear him noodling on his flute as you enter some levels.
At other times a dog or raven will turn up with a rune-stave message.
The Special Missions!
Caving, cave-diving, diving into a haunted, drowned village
in a leaky bathysphere, taking a hang-glider through super-mountains, diving
into a maelstrom & coming out the other side, slowly scaling and ziplining
up a staggered and vast mountain face;
the darkness, fear and paranoia was lovely.
In particular the bathysphere mission and cave-diving was just utterly rich
with darkness and a deep sense of strange otherness. Any Veins of the Earth
fans would enjoy these.
The Ending
There are parts of the end I love, and which feel a lot
like the pure mood of the game and other combat-based parts I don't love
anywhere as much. It feels like a lot of supernatural problems in Norway
are solved with a midnight communal village rave to dungeon synth electrobeats.
Probably this is just how they do it, who knows. The game nearly ends with what
I think should have been the final scene, a game of keep-away with a bunch of
crazy villagers dancing in a circle around a cursed dimensional violator while
the village idiot keeps trying to grab it and run away, while demonic root
monsters run interference. Then there is a tower shooting bit which is less
interesting.
Hyperreality
A game about an environment by a guy who lives in that
environment. The production loop is a hiking loop - guy goes for a hike or
climb in Norway, takes photos, records sounds, observes nature then comes back to the spider-cellar, makes textures from
the plants and rocks, builds the sound of streams from the recordings. All of the sounds and textures in the game are made by
the creator, so those curiously pixelly textured shadows, waving plants,
lichen-spotted wood, are all recovered dreams from the real world.
The combination of the tightly-plotted but
expansive-feeling level design, the intensity of dealing with the FUCKING
SPIDERS and this transposition and concentration of the natural phenomena means
with Northern Journey has a kind of Hyperreality, like its NorwayPlus. The same
hyperreality you would get from surrealism but driven towards a natural
environment, a bit like 19th century romantic paintings of guys staring at the
alps where a natural view is intensified, but in this case it’s a game and a
process of doing which includes movement, exploration and challenge. (I am not saying Northern Journey is 'like being there'
which I think would be a mediocre aim and which I am unable to confirm anyway,
bit it is more like an intense, lucid dream of Norway)
Singularity of Vision
Though original, no single element is absolutely better
than the best in other games, though much is very good. Instead we must speak
of the combination and synthesis of elements in a manner original, expressive
and rare. It would be hard for a large group the make *this particular* game
because things were combined and "cooked" very closely and very intuitively. The textures, plants, sounds, arrangements of form,
living entities, (especially the spiders), etc, are all seemingly drawn from
life and inscribed directly into the game without much pre-decision or
conversation.
For instance; in one level the waving of grass mimics the
colour and movement of the resident spider enemy, which skitters and bobs
exactly like the movement of the grass in simulated wind. in another, the
texture and size of an attacking spider means it blends with and seems to move
"under" the textured knee-high foliage. Combined with its silence
(which would have no significance if not for the aural tapestry of the levels),
this makes it a particular paranoia-inducing threat. There is a level where, after coming out of a deep dark
and claustrophobic mine, you do nothing but climb and zipline up a seemingly
endless series of mountain faces, facing a rolling grey sea, it’s wonderful and
arguably 'nothing happens'. These things, if done as part of a group or company,
would have taken meeting after meeting and description and argument after
description and argument. Here, done by one individual, they are simply created
and arranged immediately, intuitively, in a manner which speaks of a coherent
world, creates beauty and interest in the eye of the beholder an is 'gamic' or
playable, leading to interesting and cohesive play. The whole game is like this; a collage or weaving
together of elements, some drawn from nature, but woven coherently, subtly, to
create a kind of hyper-reality. The sensory aspect of a Norwegian
wilderness/biome, compressed, transformed and made into something that can be
played. Any addition of complexity of the kind a corporation or marketing
director would instantiate would disrupts this clear fluidity and directness of
approach. The credits are literally three lines;
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