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Eternal Darkness earned fame for toying with the player as only a game can toy with a player of the game. For example, the game might drop a player's full life meter down to near zero while he's in the middle of a heated battle. We have a "sanity" meter that tells us when, roughly, these insane things are going to happen. Denis Dyack, producer of that game, was admittedly a big fan of Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid's freak-out game-referencing sequence, in which the boss Psycho Mantis reads players' memory card save files and asks them, "You like Castlevania, don't you?" If you have a vibrating controller plugged in, Psycho Mantis asks you to put the controller on the floor, and watch as he moves it. This little scene rips the player out of the movie-like world of the game and probably impresses the hell out of him. It impressed a lot of game designers as well, most notably Dyack and Tetsuya Mizuguchi, who probably correctly deciphered Kojima's hidden meaning in the vibrating controller bit. Said Kojima, to me: "I thought -- the controller vibrates! Didn't anyone else realize how weird that was? I just wanted to do something that made people realize, hey, I bought this controller, and it vibrates. It wasn't until the controller was out of the player's hands that the vibration really looked profound." Years later, Kojima made Metal Gear Solid 2, to which Eternal Darkness and killer7 both owe large chunks of their souls. Near the end of Metal Gear Solid 2, the game starts to cut to the "game over" screen and back as a means of messing with the player. Metal Gear Solid had done the same thing during the Psycho Mantis battle, and Metal Gear Solid 3 would eventually use the technique once again in perfected form. Eternal Darkness would draw on this now-classic freak-out again and again; it's worth noting, again, that Eternal Darkness has a sanity meter which lets us know, roughly, when the weird things are coming. killer7 gives us no quarter. It is not so much a videogame adaption of the games (that) an insane mind plays on its carrier as (it is) an artistic representation, and as such, it is chaos. This isn't John Romero, where the good guys kill the zombies -- it's Takashi Miike, where people die, kill, and are killed by humans who look like monsters or monsters who look like humans, and no one offers an edgewise word why. The moments when chaos reveals its random head are as unpredictable and unfathomable to a Resident Evil veteran as this game is different from Kirby's Dreamland.
(You do realize that the same man who produced Kirby, Masahiro Sakurai, produced this, right? He also worked with Tetsuya Mizuguchi on Meteos. Curious.)
Looking at just the first stage of killer7 (I dare not spoil any more), we can see "the self referential videogame, v2.0" in advanced beta build. Rather than feature life meters that rise and fall just to mess with the player (while the game of course keeps track of all the real numbers and hides them), killer7 doesn't really feature a life meter at all. It doesn't jump out and ask you to look at this, or look at that, and it doesn't ever breathlessly implore to agree when something is fucked-up. It's more or less subtle. You're walking down plotted paths by holding the circle button, occasionally stopping to talk to the ghost of the first man you ever killed, who says nothing useful, or the ghost of an S&M freak, who says nothing intelligible, or to look at a dead body in a washing machine, or talk to a man holding an egg, whose name is Korean yet whose voice is that of a fax machine. The dead body in the washing machine gives you a "flame ring," which you can then use to light the candles in a candelabra in room #201, which is the only room you're offered the option to enter. You approach the candles, choose the option to light them, and are then faced with a super-fuzzy digitzed photograph of a candelabra; it looks like something out of a Super Famicom game, or else one of those old PC adventure games that operated like an interactive postcard collection. Each candle is numbered at its base. You light them in the order of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and you're finished. Then a hole in the wall opens, and you take your prize, which you'll need soon to unlock something else. However -- get this -- there is another option available to you upon entering the room: "Air-conditioner." You can turn the air-conditioner on. This creates, well, an air-conditioner sound, and sends a breeze into the room. It otherwise does nothing. However, should you try to light the candles when the air-conditioner is on, they will immediately be blown out. So you turn off the air-conditioner, and then light the candles. This is crucial: the air-conditioner exists only so that some people might turn it on before inspecting the candles, and then have to turn it off and light the candles again. The candle-lighting ring has unlimited use, just as all your guns have unlimited ammunition. What's the point of the air-conditioner? It has its own digitized image, hanging there on the wall. It gets its own command in this crowded little room. What lesson does it teach otherwise? None at all.
There are many things like that air-conditioner, spread around throughout the game, used like visual motifs. The puzzles, for the most part, involve walking from location to location, picking up new items, then going back to the place where you obviously have to use the item. It's not so obvious that the ring lights the candles, though really, at this point in the first stage you've passed by one thing that requires your input (the candles) and received one item that looks like it can do anything (the ring) so you put one and one together and get eleven.
Back and forth, solving puzzles, stopping when you hear a chuckle, shooting the bad guys, sometimes charging up special attacks specific to characters. (The girl, Kaede Smith . . . slits her wrists.) You move, on rails, up staircases winding around the building as the sky glows ominous colors in the background. The rails, at least, take us past interesting places. The story hides more things from us than it reveals, and I'd like to say that it is tightly woven and features loops upon circles and "riddles heaped upon secrets ladled over puzzles" or something like that, though really it doesn't. The story arc could be best illustrated by an animated .gif image of a dog chasing his tail; it doesn't go anywhere, it doesn't seize any of its big moments, it doesn't ever get its teeth on the prize, yet it is so highly visually entertaining that we are reduced to staring.
Like the work of man-against-the-system ex-game designer Kenji Eno, this game is not for everyone. I say this with full knowledge that no game is for everyone, just as no food, sport or sexual position is for everyone (some people are missing certain fingers, teeth, et cetera). However, let's get down to business here: this is a horrifying piece of entertainment, and as such, people who play games like Resident Evil or Silent Hill might think they might like it based solely on that merit. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them found themselves wrong. Resident Evil games, as steeped as they are in situations requiring players to expect the unexpected, as scary as zombies might be, as helpless and surrounded as the player might feel, always allow the player to store up his resources and arm himself for any battle; they always resolve in complete conversations with someone who's responsible for the big catastrophes going down. Silent Hill games evoke familiar cinematic techniques while, all along, remaining videogames. I remember Eric-Jon Waugh and Chris Woodard gaping at a preview of Silent Hill 4 at E3 2004, commenting on the use of the same angle Alfred Hitchcock used to portray blood spiraling down a drain in "Psycho." killer7 has a look all its own, with viewing angles that represent where one might be able to put a camera. Yet the director never buys into the Hitchcockian theory that there is only one right place to put a camera. He's contantly toying with obscure angles, and though the flat-shaded, constantly-shifting two-tone graphics are always showing us something impressive, it never quite seems like that's the game's aim. No, the game's aim is, however humbly, to make us feel what it feels like to be trapped in this mind. It does this admirably, if not always likably.
The rub is that killer7 offers no remorse, no resolution, and most alarmingly, no sense. It's very easy to die, and even easier to get yourself into a situation wherein all your teammates are dead and you're stuck with someone like Kevin Smith (wonderful name, there), whose knife-throwing you don't like much. The walls close in, and the game feels impossible. I'm reminded of Beat Takeshi's Takeshi no chousenjou, which begins with a preface warning the player that the man who made this game hates videogames. You wonder, after long enough playing it, if Mr. Sakurai likes videogames or hates them. His Kirby game, right from the start, allows players to simpy press "up" on the control pad to inflate and fly freely wherever they want to go. The same kind of reckless abandon can be found in killer7, and playing it for twelve hours or more makes me see the sinister undertones of even the most innocent Kirby title. In those games, the player is Superman; he's the hero who can't really die by way of anything that doesn't look like a dumb technicality. killer7 is something of the aesthetic inverse of a Kirby title, and I say that with shivers running down my spine.
I mention the instruction manual many times in this review. Though it is (in its Japanese form, at least) polished and thoughtfully graphically designed, I'd tell you to ditch it and promise not to look at it until you get horribly stuck in the game and/or reach the point of mental exasperation wherein you declare, possibly out loud, while alone in a room late at night wearing headphones, that you're "never going to play this game again!" The reason is, the instruction manual spells too many things out. It was obviously an afterthought. This game is meant to have no manual. I'm convinced. We don't need all these comic-booky illustrations of Harman Smith or his multiple personalities and long blurbs telling us who is who. The game, in the tradition of the Great Two-Dimensional Famicom Game with a Solid Black Background, works best at allowing our imaginations to fill in all the interesting parts. As it is, and as it begins, if we have no clue what's going on, it's able to freak us out more effectively, and after more than a dozen hours spent wondering if it's possible to win, you'll probably have concluded that freaking you out with its atmosphere and its more-David-Lynch-than-David-Lynch plot progression is the game's sole purpose. This is a little cruel to the player; not as overtly cruel as Beat Takeshi's long-ago game endeavor, though still, kind of cruel -- cruel like when your mom went to the video store when you were in elementary school on a Friday afternoon, way back before the age of Blockbuster and No Late Fees, and, upon seeing that Super Mario Bros. 3 wasn't in, rented the first bizarre side-scroller published by Nintendo that she laid eyes on. You get your hands on this game, and you boot it up, and you get stuck not three seconds in; the fools at the videostore photocopied the instruction manual, for whatever god-forsaken reason, and it's missing the page that tells you how to get a weapon. Hours ensue wherein you figure it out for yourself, feeling cold and lonely, yet also feeling like you're accomplishing something. That's how I first played Faxanadu, come to think of it. Yeah -- Faxanadu was cruel to me, just like Rambo: The Videogame was cruel to me, and killer7 reminds me of Faxanadu and Rambo rolled into one, only, in killer7's case, the little quirks in graphics, sound, voice, translation, and play are so historically past and above the point of a Famicom-era adventure game that they can only be intentional. That the game's richest cruelties are intentional makes them all the more worth recognizing, admiring, and being offended by.
At the end of the day, I myself am not even sure I like this game. To paraphrase what Roger Ebert said of "Road to Perdition," I'm quite sure I admire this game, I'm just not sure I like it. "Road to Perdition" was a movie that more or less asked audiences to like it (any film starring both a child and Tom Hanks must want to be liked), so if Ebert didn't like it, he had a reason to give it two and a half stars. Raw admiration doesn't cut it for movies. killer7 is so well put-together and exudes signs of such painstaking effort and forward-thinking that I must give it four stars, and then dock it half a star for being not likeable. It doesn't exactly ask me to like it, nor does it reach out and make me like it. The game is very much like the emaciated ghoul Travis, in his "FUNK" shirt, trolling around with no eyes, neither telling you to get the hell out (TURN THE GAME CONSOLE OFF NOW") nor to come into the back for some cookies and punch. The Japanese version sold not too well -- just 13,000 copies so far in three weeks -- and the advertisements running in Famitsu are of a curious breed that's been popping up lately: that is, with critical praise translated from American magazines and websites. There's a Gamespy.com quote on there, for example. I'm sure that the eventual Western critical response will be frothing and positive, and I'm not going to wonder why. It's a dark game with an interesting visual style, plenty of blood, lots of guns and explosions, and near-pornographic cinematic freak-out moments. Its story and logic are impenetrable to rational analysis, and therefore will be hailed as art; as Mark Twain's character The Duke says in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, "If that don't fetch 'em, I don't know Arkansaw."
***
I wonder about the American version. I mean, I wonder if they're going to translate the script correctly and put real voices into it. I think doing such a thing would be beside the point, and ruin the experience completely; after all, you spend as much time talking nonsense to random ghosts who pop out of nowhere as you do shooting things. I'd like to see how they handle the subtitles in the American version, too. Subtitles are dead-on necessary if you want to understand the words the freaks are saying, not that they really make sense either way. In the Japanese version, the text hovers what looks like an inch of the screen, dancing and pulsating to the sound of the computerized voice. Words like "DEATH" and "KILL" are expressed in huge, red kanji --
死 -- 殺
-- their strokes comprised of claw-slashes, pulsating like with heartbeats and dripping blood.
What will truly sell this game to current-generation players and players five or ten years in the future is its visual style. Don't call it cel-shaded -- the characters are made up of intentionally blocky polygons with oddly-moving faces (if the faces even move at all -- half the characters in the game are already dead (maybe)). Clothes, walls, bookshelves, staircases and other hard-edged objects are shaded flatly, with one solid color to denote the object's properties and black to represent shadow. The objects move well, and animate smoothly. Above all, they move and animate exactly as well as the producers want them to. Some wonder if the Nintendo Gamecube version might have been "dumbed-down" so that the PlayStation2 port could go more easily. This is nonsense -- the graphics are far below what the Gamecube can handle because the developers knew exactly how much they needed. Animation of characters, monsters, and guns is less important than fluorishes like the pulsating blue moon, the wonderful rounded television screen menu, or the flickering, boxy static that jumps up to engulf the screen just before our character can touch a door handle (it's not a loading screen; it's a mental overloading screen). Watching the game run circles around its self-imposed limitations is probably the greatest joy it offers inquiring players who've already solved its challenges, seen that it offers no "and then he woke up" Kobe-Abe-styled ending, and are ready to play with the lights on. It really brings back that old-Nintendo-game feeling, where music in Megaman was so good because to make any music that sounded good at all required complete mastery of the hardware. killer7's team have lowered the bar, and then proceeded to master everything they can do with the bar lowered to such a position. It makes me wonder if Nintendo's Revolution might live up to its name after all, if less power and forced ingenuity is the key to the future of videogames. Whether the answer is yes or no, as it stands now, killer7 takes its seat next to Mother 2 at a long table in a grand ballroom somewhere hosting a party for videogames that play exactly as they mean to play, look and sound precisely how they mean to look and sound, and do exactly what they set out to do. With all luck, more guests will be arriving shortly.
tim rogers,
07012005
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