Gravity Bone / Thirty Flights of Loving -- Brendon Chung strikes again

Gravity Bone was a free game released several years ago. Thirty Flights of Loving is the newly released $4 sequel.

Made by Blendo Games aka Brendon Chung (Atom Zombie Smasher, Flotilla).



Get Gravity Bone: http://blendogames.com/
Buy Thirty Flights of Loving: http://blendogames.com/thirtyflightsofloving/

Each game is quite short and will take an hour or two to complete.

The rest of this thread will contain SPOILERS. You don't want these games spoiled.

Once again I'm super impressed with Brendon's work. I don't have much else to say except that I think these games work as a great rebuttal against the idea games must be more than mere interactive movies. If this is an art game, it's as much game as art.

Agreed completely on that; in fact I'd take it even further and say, without hyperbole, that Brendon is doing the best work in games at the moment. Everything he puts out is exactly what he wants to be doing and never feels like a compromise. Any limitations in resources he turns into a stylistic choice; I can't imagine 30 Flights or Gravity Bone without the simple block-head characters, or Atom Zombie Smasher and Flotilla without the comic strips. Everything he does is experimental but he's not the least bit self-conscious or pretentious about it. It never apologizes for being weird or seems the least bit defensive about being weird, and it never takes itself too seriously. And as a result, it ends up being a lot more memorable and "meaningful" than anything that tries too hard (or doesn't try at all).

I think he's a genius (and almost ridiculously nice, to boot) and don't mind gushing about it.

Plus he keeps cranking them out: He's going to be showing off a game called Quadrilateral Cowboy at PAX, which is the only thing that makes me regret not being able to get into PAX this year.

That part I don't quite get. I think 30 Flights of Loving is pretty brilliant, but more in the way it handles game narrative than anything else. It's the boldest attempt that I've ever seen at jumping around in time, but it also seems to be inherently cinematic. Most of the time, your actions are extremely simple (e.g. run down this hallway, since there aren't a lot of options), and control is wrested away from you right as you're about to make sense of what scene you're in right now.

I think it's fantastic, but mostly because I took it as an experiment in how much of that cinematic storytelling you can accomplish in a video game -- the player's task is making sense of the story, not the game mechanics or any kind of strategizing. I think it's a fantastic example of exactly how storytelling in games should be done -- putting the player completely into the experience of unlocking what's happening, instead of just telling him a story that's only tangentially related to what he's doing. I loved every second of 30 Flights, although I don't think I really understood it.

But usually when I've heard people complaining about "mere interactive movies," they're complaining about not having enough agency, not having significant decisions, or having the control taken away from them. Am I misunderstanding what you're saying?

I think we're agreeing!

I wanted to highlight the fact that it's OK for a game to lack meaningful player choice if the player feels like they have agency in the world. Thirty Flights does agency really well despite being completely linear and giving you minimal control over the environment.

When people talk about CoD or Final Fantasy etc and use "interactive movies" as a pejorative, my impression is people had problems with the lack of agency. But that complaint conflates "lack of agency" AND "linearity". Over the last few years we've seen this change of gamer opinion saying "sandbox is better, emergent gameplay/story is better in an absolute sense". I think that's mistaken, and the lack of explicit separation between the concepts of agency and 'game-choice' is contributing to this.

PS, and I think the reason Thirty Flights does agency so well is because you become emotionally invested in the characters and, like you say, want to make sense of the story. The player's desires align exactly with the plot's, which is a testament to Brendon Chung's skills.

Oh yeah, then we're 100% agreeing, to the point that it's eerie. I've written a novel's worth of blog posts preaching about exactly that.

If you're this person I just found on Google, stop going back in time and stealing my words like "pejorative" only to use them in an identical context.

Spoiler heavy:

In terms of the brain of B. Chung expressed through the medium of the Quake 2 engine, I thought it was a triumph. In particular the wedding party was hugely evocative - the lanterns and table cloth moving in the rooftop wind will stay with me. The character introductions were spot-on too.

But while there were some memorable scenes, I thought the storyboard (in traditional non-interactive film terms) did it a disservice. Anita bloodied and holding a gun on you would surely have more impact after the drunken-wedding-hookup? Some of the jump cuts seemed a bit out of place as well - some were deliberate flash-back/flash-forward, but others just seemed to be 'we didn't model/script this transition'

TFOL comes with Gravity Bone for free - at least it did on my Steam purchase. Replaying the 'Bone, it's a thinner story, but better told in my opinion.

Yes, this is how I see TFOL and Gravity Bone too. It's not emergent in the sense of a game like Combat Mission or Arma, where dynamic systems create a sequence of unscripted events that you string together into a narrative. Actually TFOL is not dynamic at all, but like you guys said piecing together a story from exploring and being in the game is what counts here. That's why one of my favorite parts was the hideout scene, there's a bunch of details you can examine.

Books don't always spell out everything and let you figure things out too. But actually interacting with the environment, even if only to look around and move freely, and through that discover a story is specific to games. Somebody, I think from the RPS comments, mentioned that you can pick up ammo and guns from the hideout tables, even if you never use them, and that's very cool too, because it adds to the scene of preparation for their heist.

This reminds me of a part in Stalker Call of Prypiat (spoilers) where you had to pick a gas can from an abandoned vehicle column on a broken bridge. To find the right car you had to read through some documents you found and correlate what was written on them to what you saw on the bridge.

Although I don't think a longer game like TFOL would work unless you add more interactive systems, it's a great template for how to tell stories in any other game.

I thought the second cut was unexpected and a bit confusing, the one when you're carrying Borges and you suddenly teleport to another part of the terminal. But otherwise the cuts worked well for me. I actually liked having bloodied Anita before the flashback parts, I'm not sure I can articulate why, but it made sense.

And if you're interested in Blendo Games, there's a good interview with Brendon on one of the latest Three Moves Ahead episodes.

A lof of the jump cuts to me were about controlling pacing. When you're escaping with Borges, the jump cut keeps the tension high rather than slowing down. On the flipside, lack of transition when walking upstairs from the apartment is all about calming the player down, while the later corridors with WANTED signs take enough time for you to go "a-ha!".

What I absolutely love the most about Gravity Bone is how the game ends so completely unexpectedly. It blew me away the first time I played.

Or we could use the tags designed to avoid me accidentally being spoiled.

This is a spoiler thread, I decreed.

Rock Paper Shotgun editorial: Dear Videogames, Stop Telling Me Everything.

Sorry, this sucked in comparison to Gravity Bone.

Also

is a bit misleading for a 10 minute game.

That was the plan - one of my favourite parts of Gravity Bone was the sudden and unexpected ending.

"It sucked. And there wasn't enough of it."

It sucked because there wasn't enough of it. It felt like even less than was in Gravity Bone.

I haven't played Thirty Flights of Loving, but if it's anything like Gravity Bone (which I played on account of this thread) then I'm keeping my money. It felt like one of those games I'm going to go need to read an article about to give it some point.

I guess I just don't see anything particularly smart, clever or even original about it, it just felt like a bit of a waste of 15 minutes of my time.

If that's your take on Gravity Bone, then please, please don't play Thirty Flights of Loving. Or at least, don't post about it afterwards. My eyes already hurt from all the rolling they had to do after the "it sucks cuz it's too short" business.

Oh for goodness sake, if you feel I missed something then post it, don't give me this "Oh I don't want to have to roll my eyes because I 'get it' but you don't". That's the kind of superiority complex that makes talking about this kind of game so bloody irritating.

Sorry, I thought that this was the thread where everybody suddenly decided to be flippant, dismissive, and stifle any further discussion. I was just trying to keep up.

It's possible I simply misunderstood "I see nothing of value in this game and it was a waste of my time," since I took it to be about as pointless and thread-killing as "it sucks." Is it just my superiority complex that makes me think that's pretty unproductive?

You don't have to tell us when you're not playing a game. This is because we don't care about you.

This thread is about both Gravity Bone & Thirty Flights of Loving. Most of my post was about the former, so I fail to see your point. Also, why are you responding? If you don't care then just move on to the next post.

You misunderstood my post. To me it did suck and I did see nothing of the value being assigned to it here and elsewhere, that does not mean I don't want to hear about why others like it so much, or what they think I missed.

The barricades don't need to be manned because someone didn't enjoy a game doing... whatever it was Gravity Bone is supposed to be doing.

I can't believe I've had this whole "message board discussion" thing all wrong all these years! All this time I've wasted, trying to explain my thoughts and trying to raise new topics of conversation, as in my gushing post at the top of this thread. So many useless words, trying to be civil to someone and asking for clarification if I believe I've misread or misunderstood something, before flat out telling someone they're wrong. All that effort to analyze something critically, to hit on at least one aspect of it that would yield actual discussion. Not to mention all the sarcasm!

I never understood that "this sucked, has nothing of value, and was a waste of my time" was code for "Please, I would like to hear more about this." I can't wait to try it out in the tabletop RPG and miniatures games, or this new ballet forum I've found.

Now I'm excited, because there's nothing I enjoy more than defending a game I like to someone who's said it has nothing of value, while insisting that I'm the one with a "superiority complex." When somebody refuses to meet me halfway and mention any specific thing he had an issue with, it means I get to keep guessing!

Is it the overall stylishness of the presentation, deriving jet-set 60s spy movie presentation from the Quake 2 engine and a bunch of low-polygon characters? Is it the way the game takes a lo-fi aesthetic borne of necessity and turns it into a bizarre but fully-realized world? Is it the way the game makes better use of cinematic presentation techniques than most triple-A productions, while losing none of its interactivity? Or how the garbled Charlie Brown voices, scratchy and almost indecipherable audio recordings, and weird mentions of spy organizations with absolutely no exposition, all seem like they'd make the entire thing a confusing mess, and yet it uses simple and minimalist instructions to make it absolutely clear what you're doing and maintain the sense of player agency? Or how even when the game ditches exploration in favor of time-filling jumping puzzles, it makes it engaging by giving a clear objective in the form of pursuing an enigmatic character who interrupts the second act of the game with absolutely no explanation or back story?

Maybe it's that the sudden ending of the game uses cinematic techniques to build an intriguing but ambiguous larger narrative, specifically because it's unexpected in place of the traditional video game end-level cut-scene, and it shows how player agency and non-interactivity work together more effectively than anything in BioShock's climactic cutscene, and all with a bunch of simple, low-poly blockhead characters that don't speak. Because that's the aspect of the game -- the exploration of how cinematics and interactivity work together without being mutually exclusive as in every other narrative based game -- that fed directly into the sequel.

Wow, you're right! "This is a complete waste of my time" yields so many possible avenues of discussion!

It takes longer to read your posts than to finish the game.

That's good, though, right? If your analysis of Thirty Flights of Loving was that it sucked because it was too short, then the longer the better!

(Just between you and me, though: if reading 5 and a half paragraphs is proving too time-consuming, there are people who can help you with that. I've got your back, man. I'm here for you).

You misspelled "Fuck you".

Really. Nothing in all of that that sparked any discussion whatsoever. YOU MADE ADREE READ ALL OF THOSE WORDS FOR NOTHING.

Uhhh... I liked TFOL a lot. I can't finish GB cuz it keeps crashing but the 1st mission at the Saturday Club made me go out and immediately purchase TFOL. I don't think Brendon Chung can do any wrong.

So I picked up TFOL in the steam christmas sale for $2.50, as I was curious what everyone was gushing about.

...I'm still curious what everyone was gushing about.

Just played this. I think I'm going to assign it to my storytelling class and see what happens.

Gonna be a short class.

Yeah. I'll do Gravity Bone too. That should fill an hour of discussion.

Do a class on Frog Fractions instead.

I guess I could do Frog Fractions instead of The Graveyard. It's just The Graveyard makes them so angry and that amuses me.

Posted on the Blendo twitter account:

Brendon Chung talks about the filmic influences for 30 flights.

Apropos of the earlier conversation in this thread, here's Clint Hocking (Far Cry 2) talking about how meaning arises in games, and why it's important to figure this out before the medium can progress. Interesting to contrast Clint's thesis about where agency sits in terms of 'meaning extraction' with the discussion upthread.

A brief Quadrilateral Cowboy video.



The upgrade from the Quake to Doom 3 engine looks nice -- something about low poly count models with good lighting and shadowing makes them so much more appealing to me.