Baby Castles Zine #2
GAMES THAT WILL MAKE YOU CRY

By Toby Lurio ( Illustrated by Kunal Gupta )

I Wanna Be The Guy :'(

      I Wanna Be The Guy is a game that hearkens back to the days in which video games were long not because they had a lot of content, but because they were designed to make you fail. It will chew you up, spit you out, and then make you laugh hysterically. Why? Because I Wanna Be the Guy is a lesson in self-schadenfreude. Sure, the first hundred deaths in the game put you into a state of pure anguish, but after that, you lose yourself. Death is so frequent that it becomes a reward in itself. Only one other game is similar in this way: Illbleed for the Dreamcast.

      Illbleed is a survival-horror game centered around the thousands of traps scattered about every level. Now, one could potentially, though very unlikely, not hit any of the optional traps in the game, but that was 90 percent of the fun. Every time you mess up, you are rewarded by seeing a tiny clever cutscene that scares your character. It may seem counter-intuitive, but Illbleed in a way convinces you that failure is just as good as success.

      Dying in real life is avoided because it ends everything. Dying in a game is avoided in a similar way because it wastes the player’s time. However, when death becomes as amusing as the rest of the gameplay, it stops the player from putting the controller down and never playing again. The problems plaguing many mainstream games is that death is always dealt with in the same boring way. You either fall off a cliff or your health is reduced to zero and you black out. I Wanna Be The Guy challenges the assumption that video game death is bad by turning everything in the game into unique murder machines.

      A lot of the deaths in this game are extremely avoidable, yet they are there not so much to impede your progress, but to keep you on your toes. One of such is the opening to Dracula’s battle. The dialogue is completely stolen from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, but redubbed by the worst voice actors on Earth. Since it’s a famous monologue that most people who have played the original game have memorized, the player will have a bit of nostalgia for the awful writing. As they ease their fingers off the computer keys and watch the cutscene, Dracula will say his final line of dialogue starting with, “What is a

man?” and throw down his wine glass. The wine glass hits the boy and his blood spatters across the room. There was no way to know that control was regained one second before he threw it. It makes you laugh hysterically because the seasoned gamer already knew that he was going to throw the glass long before it happened, yet they never equated it with anything that could hurt them. Despite the hammering into their head that everything in I Wanna Be The Guy will kill them, the players still lets the game lure them into a false sense of security which leads to this ultimate irony. This game manipulates you and it is worth every deceitful moment.

      Don’t be fooled though: this game isn’t just jokes that you avoid after learning your lesson. I Wanna Be The Guy is out to decimate you. One example is fairly close to the game’s beginning. After getting a TKO by repeatedly shooting a giant Mike Tyson’s face, the main character jumps off of a cliff to catch on fire by entering the atmosphere. The first few times you try this, you will explode as you hit the Earth. You must extinguish yourself in a pool that is as far left as you can fall. You then must trigger all of the traps around you to go off so they won’t bother you later, then keep moving right until a giant moon falls from nowhere and crushes you. After countless more tries, you find yourself running away from the moon in a circle, then finding refuge in a small alcove that the colossal moon can’t fit inside. On the next screen is the most difficult part of this most difficult game: a spike corridor that is moving up and down at high speed. This alone will kill you hundreds of times. The first time you get to the other side, you will not believe that you’ve accomplished the impossible; then you are promptly crushed by the docile-seeming tombstone. I don’t believe that it’s possible at this point to withhold curses. You will really be that angry. By this point you’ll have to stop playing because your eyes will have stopped focusing correctly.

      Back in the game later, you will find yourself trying to get past the corridor again. After just as many tries as the first time, you just barely get to the other side, make sure to jump to the next platform before the gravestone can hit you, relax, then promptly get crushed by another gravestone.

      This is where you scream.

The Company Of Myself :'(

      The Company of Myself is essentially the poor man’s Braid. It takes one of its time elements, specifically the one to make copies of oneself, and creates a short series of levels to accommodate it. They’re simplistic and easy to solve, but what sets this game apart from Braid is the fact that all of the shadow clones become characters that memorize your keystrokes, not projections in a past mirror universe. Rather than

working with something you cannot directly interact with, you get extra characters that you can stand on top of and carry from place to place. An especially neat mechanic is the conditional platform. Sometimes only shadow clones can interact with it, while other times only the player can touch it. This causes players to do all sorts of things like imagining themselves as the shadow clone and jumping one step of a staircase at a time. In reality, the character is just jumping over and over again on the floor. This is one of the few instances in a video game in which one must imagine things happening. Usually, a game puts you in a position to manipulate things on screen. Seldom does it make you pretend to do something that gives no feedback in order to reach a goal.

      Another interesting tidbit that it steals from Braid is storytelling through level design. Each level has a theme based on the story, such as two people working together to signify a romantic relationship or starting a level from a different spawn point to signify looking at things from a new perspective. The story is very different from Braid, though. Braid’s story is intricate, convoluted, and ultimately quite difficult to understand on one’s own. The Company of Myself has an unreliable narrator and you get a skewed version of the story for most of the game, but the end sequence explains it all. It makes you rethink the whole game and leaves you with a blank screen to look back on what you believed you were the hero of for the last half hour.

Every Day The Same Dream:'(

      Every Day the Same Dream isn’t so much a game as it is an experience. You are faced with two options: live your life as you always have or go out of your way to enjoy every little thing that you’ve overlooked. You can keep working at your desk job every day. That’s completely possible. But that won’t make anything interesting happen, and that’s why we play the game, right?

       The social commentary is thick enough to cut with a knife.

      The woman in the elevator of your apartment building tells you at the beginning of each day that you will be a new person in so many steps. Five at the start. Every step is a new way to reject what we are supposed to accept as life: get out of your car in the middle of traffic and pet a cow; let a homeless man bring you to a cemetery. Everything that you must do to become a new person is out of the way and you wouldn’t think of doing any of it if you just continually pressed the right arrow and the space bar, even though the game so conveniently lets you do this over and over. Every Day the Same Dream is about doing things because they make you feel alive, not because they’re presented to you in an easy, packaged form. At the end of the game, in order to become a new person, you jump off a building. The next day, everyone is gone

except for you, the exact opposite of what is expected. Perhaps by experiencing the world, you have found new life and jumping off the building was a metaphor for getting rid of your cubicle-ridden self, as you can only jump when you wear your suit. Since everyone else is gone, perhaps your suicide has caused everyone else to realize the futility of their own lives. On the last screen, you see yourself, or perhaps another identical coworker, fling himself off the roof while you watch. The game ends. What happened? No one is quite sure, but it can be gleaned that the death was empowering.

      Yes, suicide is awful, but this game, through its quiet ambience, has done it beautifully.