Stuck In The Midden With You

[utilitymonstergirl]

Terrans tend to feel they've got to get ahead, make progress. The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One,  feel that progress is less important than presence.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness


It's been rare, these past few months, for me to be up for playing any game more cognitively demanding than Balatro. I broke free of the gravity well with Tactical Breach Wizards a few weeks back, and I just rolled credits on Sable, albeit with plenty of sidequests still undone.

Right away, the game wears its influences on its sleeves - Breath of the Wild, Wind Waker, Shadow of the Colossus, Journey, the art of Moebius. They're brought together in a sleek, restrained package that's very deliberate with what it leaves out: combat (or any way to die at all), gratuitous UI elements, dense lore drops, and the overall constant key-jingling of so many other open-world games. Sable trusts that slow-burn exploration and atmosphere will be enough of a draw; a derelict spaceship on the horizon needs no overexplanation.

I'm reminded of what mu suwi has written about pacing in games:

upy has been showing me ult‍rak​ill this past week... its so cool! though making me kinda overwhelmed/overstimulated at times, i get this feeling sometimes lately where a game is so desperate to be fun and instantly responsive and keep my attention at all times that i feel condescended to

you can't turn off the feature where if you press mouse 1 at the death screen it instantly respawns you and puts you back in full control within 1 frame of you dying and it's so disorienting. can you not bear to punish me with 30 frames of inactivity between attempts, game?? is that really too much?

i feel so insane for framing instant responsiveness like a bad thing but i don't want games to "respect my time" as much as i want them to respect my attention span

The existing mechanics are fine-tuned for this feeling too: this world is vast, and even an upgraded hoverbike will take a while to traverse it. Movement on foot is a little slow and clunky in a world not meant for your convenience. There is only one type of collectible doodad with a direct mechanical benefit, and it's up to you to find where to cash them in. The slow pace of the tutorial village feels like an homage to Wind Waker, but once the world opens up, the story and mechanics start to mesh beautifully.

History is over, more or less. There is nothing metaphysically special about you; you are going on a perfectly normal coming-of-age journey. (This is also a brilliant way to justify the "pursue the main questline or just fuck about for however long, up to you" nature of an open-world game.) There are still joys and sorrows on a personal scale, but nobody ever talks about repairing the broken spaceships strewn across the desert. A colossal statue on a bridge commemorates a grave betrayal, but it's hard to fathom anything that dramatic happening here again. The largest settlement around is just a few city blocks in size, and even its citizens are sick of the constant hustle.

Exploring the crashed ships reveals a bit of this world's backstory, but only a few fragments; I would like to have learned more, but I get that having a much deeper story would have required a completely different game prone to nightmarish scope creep. Besides, this is just our first coming-of-age trip; our dissertation can come later. Even the planet's name, Midden, is a grim joke with gravitas: an archaeologically-fascinating trash heap.

I'm impressed at the balancing act that went into making "indie Breath of the Wild" feel neither overstretched nor desperate to impress. This is a knockout first game from Shedworks, and I can't wait to see what else they make.