As a Friday treat, take a look at One Chance by AwkwardSilenceGames. Here's the pitch:
You are a scientist. You have invented a cure for cancer, and you are the toast of everyone. Then it is discovered that your cure is actually a plague on all living things. In six days every living thing will be dead. You have one chance.
What follows is a simple adventure game where you can walk around, talk to people and open doors. You have a wife, a child, a car, workmates and so on. As you walk around your little dying world, subtle shifts in the backdrop happen on a day to day basis. One day the street is filled with bustling life, the next angry protesters. One day the trees look a little more yellow.
Every day the game changes the scenario up a little bit and reinforces the message of how much time is left. In the end, which I won't spoil for you, the results are stark and affecting.
Thauma
The seven or so minutes during which you will play One Chance are undoubtedly thaumatic. As with all good games, who you are in the game doesn't really need to be elaborated and the game sets your situation up very quickly. The focus of the game is the world as it is and your interactions within it.
At several points the game then surprises you. You think you have it figured out, and then something changes and it sneaks past your defences. You might feel appalled or just freaked out that this little Flash game is somehow getting to you, and you may well feel conscientious and even guilty about the situation that the game places you in.
That's thauma down to a tee. It's delicious and depressing all at once. As though you were playing a version of The Road, but you are the cause of the end of the world. (PS: Read The Road. The film is good but the book is amazing.)
One Play Through
The biggest flaw with One Chance is that it is only good for one play through. If you play it a second time (as is easily doable) the strings and switches of the game world become completely obvious, and the thauma of the experience fades quickly. It becomes, like many adventure and roleplaying games actually are, a permutation game.
That's one view. The other is to say that by deliberately making the game only let you play once, the designer has made a stark artistic choice that should be respected. I am inclined to agree if One Chance is viewed from the lens of a concept piece, there's no problem with that. If you go to the Tate Modern you can see plenty of modern art that requires you to be quiet, and to respect it for what it is.
The inner solution hunter within me, on the other hand, does not like the feeling of being denied the chance for victory. As a game, I'm inclined to think that the designer's choice is bold but ultimately unsatisfying. Having had the thaumatic impact of failure the first time around, the lack of replay feels immature. Most kinds of art are able to withstand the viewer making their own judgement and viewing it on their own terms, and I see less reason why this should be so for a game than any other art, as games are by their nature interactive.
If players want to obsessively solve the game, why not let them? The art is for them after all, not the artist.
Clarity
The other game-side flaw is that there is no sense of a solution. I didn't solve it either time that I played it, and although I found the paths down which I went interesting each time, I did feel as though the game was just deliberately obscuring a solution. This meant that although the game was thaumatic, it really wouldn't have managed to sustain such interest if it were longer.
One of the key flaws of the point-and-click adventure game type was always it's lack of clarity. Most of these games became intently annoying because their puzzle solving element would often reduce the player to trying every object in their inventory against every object in the world to unlock the next section, and One Chance is the same. Only a few more minutes of play and the game's thauma would have fizzled into annoyance.
Clarity, literalism and symbolism are important in games because they help the player scan and comprehend the world from a gameplay perspective quickly, and thus establish fairness. Fairness is often missing from games which are opaque (as One Chance is) which is unsatisfying despite their aesthetic elements. That is, I think, why the adventure game ultimately was left behind as a game type.
Yet again, however, it's worth stating that for what it is, One Chance is not committing a major sin. It is self-contained, it is intentionally short. It works because there is very little time to even begin to get tired of its opacity before the journey is already over.
Final Thoughts
By all means go and play One Chance right now. It won't take you long and it will faintly depress you of a Friday evening (or lunchtime for you Californian readers). The few minutes that it asks are well worth spending. And then come back here and tell me what happened.
(As an aside, wouldn't it be great if sites like Newgrounds allowed bloggers like me to embed games in their posts as simply as a Youtube clip rather than acting like a portal? I've long thought so, but nobody agrees.)
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