VIDEO GAME PREVIEW: CURSED MOUNTAIN!
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Cursed Mountain
Tight corridors. The living dead brought about by unethical scientific experiment. Confusion about where you are, where you've been, and where you're going. Counting yourself lucky if the night is bright enough to produce any shadows at all. You, curled up, near fetal, in front of the glow of your television, gamepad gripped with all your might, sweating over what might be around the next corner. This is survival horror, right? Developer Deep Silver Vienna thinks otherwise. See, they think that by avoiding all of these conventions they can scare you better. And I think that maybe they're right.
The pitch for their upcoming Wii game Cursed Mountain is simple: Eric Simmons goes searching for his missing brother in a quest that will take him 27,000 feet up the Himalayas, and deep into the Bardo, the realm between Earth and Nirvana in Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Along the way he'll face ghosts, demons, and creatures all taken from or inspired by actual folklore from that region, defeating them with his trusty pick axe, some blessed artifacts, and the ability to send weakened spirits on to their next lives. The games developers harp on the fact that the material that inspired this game is all believable - necessarily so, because after all, there is an entire culture that believes it. During the demonstration, Deep Silver's Martin Flipp kept harping on words like "True" and "Authentic." He says that "stories a player can believe are more effective." And while you couldn't get a skeptic like me to buy the supernatural elements of the game's story, I certainly appreciate the decision to to root the game's horror in something other than science-gone-wrong melodrama.
Deep Silver shows great respect for Cursed Mountain's "source material," but they also show deep knowledge. The game is filled with references to - and explicit operation of - the rituals center to the beliefs of certain sects of Buddhism and traditional Tibetan folklore. Narrative beats are all often made with (or without, for worse) a major spiritual activity. Prayers before climbing bless the journey; burning incense at shrines recover energy; a reference to a tantric ritual ("Buddhism has sex rituals, that's a fact!" says Flipp); Even the reason for the lack of traditional survival horror zombies is due to religious ritual (In Tibet, monks perform "sky burials," an act that involves slicing into a corpse and leaving it to be eaten by birds of prey, putting the soulless bodies of the dead back into the circle of life.)
The most important way that ritual appears in Cursed Mountain is in its gameplay. Besides pick axe swings, bullets of spiritual energy, and a psychic lasso (yes), Eric Simmons has a major weapon against the enemies he'll face: prayer gestures. After weakening an enemy with your other tools (or snaring them with a special weapon) you can perform a series of gestures with the Wii Remote and Nunchuck to dispel them forever, and regain a bit of health in the process. Outside of these gestures, and the ability to aim your psychic blasts while fighting ghosts in the bardo, all of the combat is done through button presses. it is intentional, paced similarly to the Wii release of Resident Evil 4 - which is a good thing.
While it's easy to dismiss the prayer gesture gameplay as standard waggle-fest Wii design, Flipp was vocal in the defense of its inclusion, and brought two points to bear. First, Cursed Mountain has been in development since the Devs first got their hands on the Wii hardware years ago, and the gestures were the feature that the game was designed around. Second, and more interesting, is that the gestures force the players to handle playing the game in a way they're unsuited to. Flipp describes the average survival horror play experience in terms similar to the ones I used in my intro. He paints a picture of players leaned over on their couches, clenched up and tight, cowering and covering their bodies protectively, out of instinct. "Studies with people we brought in from the street show that the prayer gesture combat forces players to open up their stance, and that when they do that they are taken into the game experience more." In short, waggling means it's easier to be scared. (My studies show that flailing your arms about results in hilarity, but what do I know.)
The fact is that the desire to break standard horror game paradigms has led Deep Silver to make a handful of really interesting design decisions. Unlike labyrinthine settings like Resident Evil's multi-leveled mansion or the open city of Silent Hill, Cursed Mountain's environments are decidedly linear. Your goal is at the top of the mountain after all, so, what do you do? "Go up," says Flipp. "The player will always know they are headed in the right direction." This is supported by an aesthetic decision to keep most of the game's world visible at all times during your ascent. While you'll be going into monasteries and hillside farming villages, you will always have the peak of the mountain ahead of you and the safety of the city where you began at your back. This replaces claustrophobia with agoraphobia and vertigo, and is an effective way to mix up the formula.
Not everything in the title is without precedent, though. Flipp had some other words he kept coming back to: Cinematic, traditional, conservative. Cursed Mountain knows its roots. The game is set in the late 1980s, so that the protagonist goes without modern technology and convenience, and the structure of the title seems to be from the late 80s too. Each level is a level, in the classic sense, and has a boss fight at the end. Some bosses will come back later - shades of classic beat 'em ups here - and each will be based around a distinguishable pattern. The story draws just as much on filmic convention as it does rural folklore, and the game's cutscenes parallel the game's plot in their speed and technique - the closer to climax, the more cuts there will be. Even the true antagonist of the game reeks of the late 80s, but I'd rather not give more away.
Flipp says that the 236 member team that developed the game had no ulterior motive in these design decisions: they just wanted to make a good game. But as Carl Jung says, "one can paint very complicated pictures without having the least idea of their real meaning." The intentions of the author/creator are not always comprehensive. Sometimes there is value that the artist simply never considered. I think that despite their pedestrian aspirations, Deep Silver has struck something that every Wii developer wishes they could: A gateway drug. By building on cinematic horror conventions, traditional game design (remember, as Wii gamers some of these players may have last touched a video game in the late 80s), and an adequate control scheme Deep Silver could be contributing to the birth of "re-gamers," who will love the familiarity and low bar of entry, and maybe end up thirsty for more. Let's just hope that the ghouls and ghosts of the Himalayas don't scare them off first.
Austin Walker
US / Canada Editor
One Last Continue
www.OneLastContinue.com
www.twitter.com/austin_walker
Tight corridors. The living dead brought about by unethical scientific experiment. Confusion about where you are, where you've been, and where you're going. Counting yourself lucky if the night is bright enough to produce any shadows at all. You, curled up, near fetal, in front of the glow of your television, gamepad gripped with all your might, sweating over what might be around the next corner. This is survival horror, right? Developer Deep Silver Vienna thinks otherwise. See, they think that by avoiding all of these conventions they can scare you better. And I think that maybe they're right.
The pitch for their upcoming Wii game Cursed Mountain is simple: Eric Simmons goes searching for his missing brother in a quest that will take him 27,000 feet up the Himalayas, and deep into the Bardo, the realm between Earth and Nirvana in Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Along the way he'll face ghosts, demons, and creatures all taken from or inspired by actual folklore from that region, defeating them with his trusty pick axe, some blessed artifacts, and the ability to send weakened spirits on to their next lives. The games developers harp on the fact that the material that inspired this game is all believable - necessarily so, because after all, there is an entire culture that believes it. During the demonstration, Deep Silver's Martin Flipp kept harping on words like "True" and "Authentic." He says that "stories a player can believe are more effective." And while you couldn't get a skeptic like me to buy the supernatural elements of the game's story, I certainly appreciate the decision to to root the game's horror in something other than science-gone-wrong melodrama.
Deep Silver shows great respect for Cursed Mountain's "source material," but they also show deep knowledge. The game is filled with references to - and explicit operation of - the rituals center to the beliefs of certain sects of Buddhism and traditional Tibetan folklore. Narrative beats are all often made with (or without, for worse) a major spiritual activity. Prayers before climbing bless the journey; burning incense at shrines recover energy; a reference to a tantric ritual ("Buddhism has sex rituals, that's a fact!" says Flipp); Even the reason for the lack of traditional survival horror zombies is due to religious ritual (In Tibet, monks perform "sky burials," an act that involves slicing into a corpse and leaving it to be eaten by birds of prey, putting the soulless bodies of the dead back into the circle of life.)
The most important way that ritual appears in Cursed Mountain is in its gameplay. Besides pick axe swings, bullets of spiritual energy, and a psychic lasso (yes), Eric Simmons has a major weapon against the enemies he'll face: prayer gestures. After weakening an enemy with your other tools (or snaring them with a special weapon) you can perform a series of gestures with the Wii Remote and Nunchuck to dispel them forever, and regain a bit of health in the process. Outside of these gestures, and the ability to aim your psychic blasts while fighting ghosts in the bardo, all of the combat is done through button presses. it is intentional, paced similarly to the Wii release of Resident Evil 4 - which is a good thing.
While it's easy to dismiss the prayer gesture gameplay as standard waggle-fest Wii design, Flipp was vocal in the defense of its inclusion, and brought two points to bear. First, Cursed Mountain has been in development since the Devs first got their hands on the Wii hardware years ago, and the gestures were the feature that the game was designed around. Second, and more interesting, is that the gestures force the players to handle playing the game in a way they're unsuited to. Flipp describes the average survival horror play experience in terms similar to the ones I used in my intro. He paints a picture of players leaned over on their couches, clenched up and tight, cowering and covering their bodies protectively, out of instinct. "Studies with people we brought in from the street show that the prayer gesture combat forces players to open up their stance, and that when they do that they are taken into the game experience more." In short, waggling means it's easier to be scared. (My studies show that flailing your arms about results in hilarity, but what do I know.)
The fact is that the desire to break standard horror game paradigms has led Deep Silver to make a handful of really interesting design decisions. Unlike labyrinthine settings like Resident Evil's multi-leveled mansion or the open city of Silent Hill, Cursed Mountain's environments are decidedly linear. Your goal is at the top of the mountain after all, so, what do you do? "Go up," says Flipp. "The player will always know they are headed in the right direction." This is supported by an aesthetic decision to keep most of the game's world visible at all times during your ascent. While you'll be going into monasteries and hillside farming villages, you will always have the peak of the mountain ahead of you and the safety of the city where you began at your back. This replaces claustrophobia with agoraphobia and vertigo, and is an effective way to mix up the formula.
Not everything in the title is without precedent, though. Flipp had some other words he kept coming back to: Cinematic, traditional, conservative. Cursed Mountain knows its roots. The game is set in the late 1980s, so that the protagonist goes without modern technology and convenience, and the structure of the title seems to be from the late 80s too. Each level is a level, in the classic sense, and has a boss fight at the end. Some bosses will come back later - shades of classic beat 'em ups here - and each will be based around a distinguishable pattern. The story draws just as much on filmic convention as it does rural folklore, and the game's cutscenes parallel the game's plot in their speed and technique - the closer to climax, the more cuts there will be. Even the true antagonist of the game reeks of the late 80s, but I'd rather not give more away.
Flipp says that the 236 member team that developed the game had no ulterior motive in these design decisions: they just wanted to make a good game. But as Carl Jung says, "one can paint very complicated pictures without having the least idea of their real meaning." The intentions of the author/creator are not always comprehensive. Sometimes there is value that the artist simply never considered. I think that despite their pedestrian aspirations, Deep Silver has struck something that every Wii developer wishes they could: A gateway drug. By building on cinematic horror conventions, traditional game design (remember, as Wii gamers some of these players may have last touched a video game in the late 80s), and an adequate control scheme Deep Silver could be contributing to the birth of "re-gamers," who will love the familiarity and low bar of entry, and maybe end up thirsty for more. Let's just hope that the ghouls and ghosts of the Himalayas don't scare them off first.
Austin Walker
US / Canada Editor
One Last Continue
www.OneLastContinue.com
www.twitter.com/austin_walker
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