If you have not already listened to the podcast of this category, this is the final results, so this will spoil the course of the discussion on that podcast! Be warned!
This category was Bottle Crow host emeritus Emily’s idea. Just saying that, in case you didn’t like it. That makes it her fault.
The Winner
Spelunky HD
It’s just rough to any game released in the same year as Spelunky, you know? The three person team of Derek Yu, Andrew Hall, and Eirik Suhrke built more than a great game, they built an example of what the roguelike genre could do. No game since has been able to match Spelunky’s elegant mechanical depth, expertly tuned gameplay, carefully managed procedural generation, and its confidence. Spelunky doesn’t drag you in with the promise of unlocking upgrades for your next run, or promising you another morsel of story if you’re very well behaved. All it offers is the opportunity to see and play more of the game, and it’s enough. It’s ironclad, and the best game of its generation.
Oh, sorry- no game has been able to match it except perhaps Spelunky 2.
The Runners-Up
Journey
I’m not as fond of the Hero’s Journey as some, even some here on Scanline. I bristle against the formula, I want to see games take more chances. I’m disappointed when they fall back on a structure as old as the act of writing fiction. But as Kyrie has pointed out, on the other hand, how can you mess up your story’s structure when there’s a good one right here that’s been used BILLIONS of times?! So perhaps the Hero’s Journey is worth celebrating. And in structure, that is the purpose of Journey- as the name implies.
In reality, I think it’s more than that. Journey is about all journeys, not just those of heroes. It’s about chance encounters on the road, or leaving things behind. It’s staring in amazement at a vista, it’s getting lost, it’s being found. It is nodding at a friend who will be right back, and you never see them again. It’s beautiful, it’s simple, and it is no frills, because have you ever worn something with frills?! They’re so uncomfortable and unnecessary! Journey doesn’t want you getting distracted from the game, but does want you getting distracted from the road. Because what you do at the rest stop is as important as where you’re going.
Thirty Flights of Loving
I stand by making this a runner-up, not the winner, but the most powerful point anyone makes in our discussion of this category is Jen bluntly laying out that the recent trend of One Cut camerawork in video games is pathetic, because it completely misunderstands the challenges and appeal of the form. No one is impressed that you don’t know how to move your camera to create striking angles. It’s impressive in film because it’s literally a physical camera that someone has to move, and there is a character and personality to that. When it’s an invisible character using noclip it’s just garbage.
If you don’t believe me, or if you need to see it for it to connect, play Thirty Flights of Loving. It’s short, there’s no real difficulty barrier, and it will show you just how much can be done through clever use of camera and scene. It’s been more than a decade now, and still no one is picking up the masterful lessons Brendan Cheung dropped in everyone’s laps with this game. We’ve gotten games wishing desperately that they were big budget films. We’ve got games wishing desperately that they were LOW budget films. But Thirty Flights of Loving is a game that genuinely takes the lessons of filmmaking and transforms them beyond imitation. For all the cinematography, Thirty Flights wouldn’t work as a movie- or as anything but a game. And not because of how fun it is to play, or the tightness of its systems, but because of the way it uses formerly filmic techniques to transform the experience of an interactive story.
Damn.
That’s it for this week! We’ll be back next week with more Awards- our final week, with four Awards to give out including the not actually prestigious Game of the Year. I hope you’ll join us for that.
Our art for the Gimmick Awards 2022 is a commission from @inkopolis on Twitter.
