A Shift in Values

Lately I’ve been in a bit of a Dragon Ball mood, which is odd because I never particularly liked the franchise when I was younger. TV reruns always stopped after the Cell games though so curiosity about the rest of the series finally got the better of me. Quite possibly the Great Saiyaman stuff will now become my favorite part of the series, in no small part because of how awesome Videl turned out to be and how cute the relationship between her and Gohan develops. Once the tournament and Majin Buu stuff starts up the storyline sadly slows down to a crawl again where endless fights take over everything (Saiyaman episodes tend to be from day to day, but Goku’s one day back on Earth lasts between 50 to 60 episodes and his time even got reduced because of the Super Saiyan 3 transformation). Still, I liked it enough to make me want to try out Dragon Ball Xenoverse (2015), and so far it’s been awesome.

A Shift in Values
How Dragon Ball Xenoverse made me reflect on H.P. Lovecraft

It has a surprisingly deep character creator for a DBZ game.

Xenoverse provided me with an opportunity to add something I found sorely lacking in the series: female warriors. Oh sure, Videl is cool and Android 18 is super badass but in the grand scheme of things they are sideshows at best (although to be fair, unless you are a Saiyan, everyone becomes this eventually). What Xenoverse does is give you the ability to revisit important plot points and inject your warrior of choice into them, fighting side by side with the likes of Goku.

When I started out I was fairly certain what I wanted to play as: a female Saiyan who kinda resembles Videl without looking exactly the same (that would be kinda lame). That’s what I did and I’m having a great time. All in all it's a bit of a Mary Sue plot to suddenly have an original character be necessary to save the heroes but hey, you primarily play Dragon Ball Xenoverse to kick ass, not for the high art story.

I named her Amelia, but for reasons
of canon I refer to her as "Selerie".

Since the recent update for They Bleed Pixels (2012) hit, I’ve been playing a bit more of that too (the addition of a Novice Mode meant I could finally beat some of the harder levels). They Bleed Pixels is a 2D platforming game with a simple yet surprisingly deep combat system and features a young girl who finds a strange book that in her dreams transports her to eldritch locations and turns her into a clawed monster. The entire thing is explicitly Lovecraftian in nature, though not quite so pessimistic.

There isn’t really a lot of overlap there but Dragon Ball Xenoverse giving you the ability to inject female characters in an otherwise male dominated series did spark a realization: that’s exactly what the gaming culture itself has been doing with the works of H.P. Lovecraft with games like They Bleed Pixels.

H.P. Lovecraft as an author was brilliant and has had a massive influence on the horror genre (The Colour Out of Space is currently my favorite story). Neil Gaiman going as far as saying he built the stage on which modern horror is played on. However Lovecraft as a person was considered less than progressive even for his day back in the 1930’s.

Consciously or unconsciously, this means that his stories very rarely included female characters at all, let alone as protagonists (on top of the racism). Amusingly the video game world has shown a bit of a tendency to flip this on its head when adapting his work. Possibly the cinematic tendency to employ women as the final survivors (the final girl) of their respective movies has rubbed off a bit on gaming when it comes to horror.

Alone in the Dark (1992-2015)

It’s undeniable that Edward Carnby is the main protagonist of the Alone in the Dark series. However female alternatives do occasionally show up, starting with Emily Hartwood as the second playable protagonist in the first game. Occasionally the player controls Grace Saunders in Alone in the Dark 2, although Carnby is controlled the majority of the time. Grace does star in the short promotional game Jack In The Dark. Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare/ Alone in the Dark 4 features Aline Cedrac as an option, who has an entirely different storyline from (though still connected with) Edward Carnby.

Although hardly Lovecraftian, with Resident Evil taking inspiration from Alone in the Dark I would wager Emily Hartwood also served as the inspiration for making Jill Valentine playable (and in turn Claire Redfield, Rebecca Chambers, Ada Wong, Sheva Alomar and all the others). 

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (2002)

Personally I have not yet played Eternal Darkness and the nature of its plot is such that I’d rather not research into it before having done so. However since it is a beloved cult classic I feel it would be a disservice not to mention it along with its main protagonist Alexandra Roivas. Now if only I had picked it up when I had the chance.

Eldritch (2013)

It’s a roguelike that looks like Minecraft, the enemies have a cutesy design and it somehow still manages to be absolutely terrifying. No wonder as this one has a story definitely set in the Cthulhu Mythos. Eldritch’s protagonist is customizable but is female as a standard, and is advertised as such. It's a pretty weird experience overall (again, it manages to be silly and terrifying at the same time), but one I highly recommend checking out.

Is it too late to move permanently to Draenor?

World of Warcraft (2004)

That’s a bit of an odd one, isn’t it? To a passing observer, Warcraft is set in a fairly standard fantasy setting (or mistaken for Call of Duty by completely clueless moral guardians) and you wouldn’t think it being much inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. Well that is until World of Warcraft where the standard evil fire army (from space!) attempting to destroy the planet has taken a bit of a backseat to the more mysterious Old Gods who have been influencing the history of Azeroth from the shadows for the worse.

While World of Warcraft has an artstyle far too cheerfully cartoony to provide a legitimately pessimistic setting, they are frighteningly effective at introducing cosmic horror elements into their lore. Traveling Northrend in pursuit of the Lich King is bad enough, but then you learn something far worse is locked up deep beneath the continent, and it is whispers are spreading madness throughout it. He’s also not the only one.

I don't raid so I have no screens of Old Golds.
Here's something living at the bottom of the ocean though.

Considering World of Warcraft’s character creator (and the equal opportunity nature of the lore in general) I would call this a pretty big triumph for cosmic horror. Sure, you aren’t fighting Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth personally (that would be a slap in the face of what the Cthulhu Mythos stands for anyway), but you are fighting as the most diverse cast of characters imaginable against their Warcraft counterparts C’Thun and Yogg-Saron.

It's not quite notable enough for a separate entry, but I should probably also mention that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) quest "A Shadow Over Hackdirt" is obviously based on Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Given Elder Scrolls' character creator, this puts it somewhat in line with World of Warcraft.

All in all, hurray for video games for updating Lovecraftian horror.

And I'm off to beat Cell.

Links & References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_girl

Images from
- Dragon Ball Xenoverse (2015)
- They Bleed Pixels (2012)
- Eldritch (2013)
- Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare (2002)
- World of Warcraft (2005)
- http://wowwiki.wikia.com/Yogg-Saron
- http://eternaldarkness.wikia.com/wiki/Alexandra_Roivas

Silent Protagonist - DreadOut

If you followed me on Twitter for the last week, you might have noticed I developed a slight obsession with the Indonesian indie horror game DreadOut (which I hear is a pretty big deal over there) and its main protagonist Linda Meilinda. I connected with Linda as a character early on because I entertained the thought of her being an actually mute protagonist rather than just a silent one and I found that interpretation charming. So if you'll allow me, I'll attempt to talk you through the thoughts I had related to those concepts.

Once You Open Your Mouth...

DreadOut and a Portrait of a Silent Protagonist

Linda as a Mute Protagonist

The idea behind having a silent protagonist is generally so that the player can project their own interpretation of what the character should be like on them as a form of identification, as if they were a blank piece of canvas that the player gets to fill in. It makes sense since, just like how in horror nothing is scarier than whatever your own mind concocts, so would you probably be more likely to identify as (or simply like) a character that you get to fill in the blanks for yourself. The character does have the ability to speak, we simply aren't shown their textbox or hear their dialog because those could break our idea of what the character is like.

"I mean, by having the voice actor speaking out the main character's opinions and messages, I'm afraid that they are going to narrow down the actual characteristics that people can imagine or apply to each character they are controlling, for example."

- Shigeru Miyamoto on Link (Legend of Zelda)

Alternatively there is the possibility that the silent protagonist is simply mute (which I suppose is in itself a way of filling in the blanks).  Personally I think this interpretation works nicely for Linda as a character, although I don’t think a really solid case could be made for either option short of a statement from the developer. However the primary tool and weapon of the game being a smartphone (technically an IrisPhone) and the irony of an apparently mute person wielding a phone of all things did make me wonder how such a character could be handled, which in turn made it an interesting thought experiment for me personally since I myself am trying to insert a mute character into a story.

I guess I won’t just be attempting to make the case for why Linda could work as a mute character, but also why her phone is such an invaluable object to her that she’ll rarely put it away (even before the ghosts show up). This with the intention of dissecting how these characters are developed right now and brainstorming a bit on how actual mute characters could be inserted in fiction in the future.

In DreadOut the IrisPhone functions as both a flashlight and as a method of fighting off ghosts because somehow they are shy about having their picture taken (perhaps Linda's innate psychic powers are simply channeled through taking pictures). In a haunted village at night that by itself would make it invaluable. However to a person incapable or unwilling of speech, text messaging would also be a great tool to help with communication. This isn't explicitly shown in the game since, again, most of this is just me filling in the blanks of a silent protagonist for a certain “what if” scenario.

Stupid doll ...

During a section in Act II where you get to communicate with a (somewhat playful) ghost through a possessed Ira, it appears as if Linda is asking questions and leading the conversation down certain paths. This plays out from a first person perspective so we don’t see (or hear) Linda talking but of course we automatically assume that she is. What if she was actually typing out messages on her phone for possessed Ira to see? If Linda relies on her phone as a primary method of communication it would explain her attachment to it beyond the phone culture we find ourselves in. She's simply naked without it. That's a rather cool idea for a silent character, isn't it?

I suppose a possible counterargument to Linda being mute is a brief scene during the reunion with Shelly where Linda makes an apparent attempt to respond vocally before being interrupted. Of course as this is the only scene in the game (that I caught, anyway) where Linda makes a seeming attempt to talk, this could simply be an example of "expressive silence" which I will briefly discuss next. The actual counterargument would probably be Shelly expecting a response though. If we assume she just fired of a barrage of questions due to panic over the situation and relief of seeing a friendly face however we can just as easily put this scene along with the others where none of the dialog implies that Linda somehow responded.

Expressive Silence

There's a certain paradox in having a (non-mute) silent protagonist in a third-person horror scenario, which requires the character having a visible reaction to their surroundings to be effective. It would be standard bravery in a regular third-person action game but for a horror game our own fear requires a certain vicarious connection to the protagonist and their fear. As such we can't just have Linda be completely emotionless while ghosts pop out with the intention to scare her. This means we still have a window into the character's personality, they just don't vocalize that personality. That makes it one aspect of the character we are supposed to identify with on which we can't project our own ideas.
Rather like how Link from The Legend of Zelda is supposed to be the player's link into the world of Hyrule, yet the designers opted for a cartoony style for Wind Waker so they could better show his reactions. There's nothing bad about doing things like that but it feels rather self-defeating and it naturally leads people to wonder if the character is supposed to be mute rather than be a reflection of themselves.

Linda does this too with big gestures whenever she interacts with her friends. She might not actually be speaking, but that doesn't mean she doesn't say anything. She makes hand gestures to mock Ira for speaking too much, she grabs her cheek after being slapped, she sulks when being teased, chokes Ira in jest and makes a pondering gesture when Ira starts reminiscing. That's her way of communicating with her friends without actually vocalizing. Humorously enough the one emotion she doesn't really show a lot of is fear, which I suppose adds to her backstory that she once threw a rock at a person disguised as a ghost while her friend was just scared. We can easily imagine what kind of a person she is even though she hasn't spoken a word.

Of course that still doesn't mean Linda was supposed to be a mute character, but perhaps developers themselves naturally attempt to compensate their protagonist's silence by proxy by exaggerating their characters' physical responses.

Also she's just really cute.

Coincidentally I read Deus Ex: Icarus Effect a couple of weeks ago featuring a character who has muteness as a character trait. Yelena Federova (spelled Fedorova in Human Revolution) is a Tyrant assassin who is implied to be able to speak, but simply hasn't in a very long time, probably due to trauma. The story is told from the perspectives of Anna Kelso (who is a target of the Tyrants) and Ben Saxon (who is a Tyrant). This means we get to see the Tyrants both as being scarily effective assassins operating in complete secrecy, and as the broken people they really are (exception being Jaron Namir, who has his stuff together so well that it offends Saxon he is allowed to have such a normal life).
So on one side we see Yelena as an assassin operating from the shadows (with cloaking technology, no less) with her muteness being just another factor that enhances how intimidating she appears to Kelso. She is being hunted by an assailant who is difficult to read and one who would be hard to reason with. On the other side the exact same character traits are simply evidence of a broken person whose muteness is the result of trauma and probably acts as a self-defense mechanism.

DreadOut Recommendation

I personally loved DreadOut and its protagonist Linda, however it is a pretty hard game to  simply recommend.

Negative
The difficulty of some of the puzzles is such that you occasionally have to remember environmental details (or take pictures and save them to your gallery) long before they become relevant, and thus likely having missed them. Other puzzles are simply so obscure it required me to consult a walkthrough quite often. These puzzles clearly make sense from the developer's point of view but a bit more playtester input could have been useful (or I'm just bad at these sorts of games). There's also still a fair share of bugs and translation errors that need to be fixed (and a character is named Doni in Act I and Donny in Act II). These things could be frustrating or throw you out of the experience so keep that in mind.

Positive
If the entire above article wasn't enough of an indication, I really love DreadOut's protagonist Linda Meilinda and despite them not being all that developed, I also came to care for her friends. The somewhat weaker gameplay is compensated by how well-crafted all the scenes, atmosphere and character models are (relative to the game's budget and status as an indie game, of course). The game's story is rather confusing but this being a horror game, that ultimately helped in keeping the game in my mind trying to figure it all out. Act II even gives you a bit of player choice regarding the outcome of the story.

All in all, I did love the game, but you should keep in mind that it's still a fairly unpolished indie title.

Playtime to completion: roughly 5 hours to complete Acts 0, 1 and 2. 
(I missed a bunch of collectibles and the village nighttime section on my first playthrough)

The Soundtrack & Manga DLC also includes several costumes to use in game, as well as the ability to switch costumes right away (otherwise requiring you to have finished the game already).

All of Linda's costumes (including DLC costumes)

Conclusion

As I made clear multiple times, I'm not so much attempting to show that Linda Meilinda is a mute rather than simply a silent protagonist, but I hope I've shown that she could have been very easily pushed in that direction had the developers decided to go that route. Perhaps for DreadOut it would have even made more sense to have her be an actual mute. Even if you dismiss this as mere pointless fan theorizing, at least I hoped I provided you with some insights.

Links & References

- DreadOut on Steam Store

- DreadOut Official Page

- TvTropes: Heroic Mime
- Zelda Dungeon: Miyamoto talks about the future of Zelda

Images from:

- DreadOut (2014)

Ghosts are stupid, throw rocks at them

Lili: Child of Geos

It's a game about a girl picking flowers on an island.

No, I'm serious, someone made a pretty decent game about picking flowers.

Lili: Child of Geos

She's definitely not being a hipster. She needs those to see.
The game told me so.

Okay, so basically Lili: Child of Geos is what happens when you take the towns from The Legend of Zelda (I got a Majora's Mask combined with Wind Waker feel), quests and all, and put them in a game of their own. Then you put in enemies that you defeat by running after them, jumping on their backs and picking their flowers while avoiding thorns. Add in a few RPG elements and a little player choice whether they would rather do the quests or deflower (hue hue hue) their enemies and you are set. Meanwhile you also get to collect a bunch of new costumes and masks to dress up Lili.

No really, picking bloody flowers!

The game references other video games and pop culture regularly and is very humorous about it. As I said, it is clearly inspired by and a love letter to The Legend of Zelda. They aren't even at all subtle about this fact. You often collect items straight from those games (including the Master Sword and a piece of the Triforce), one of your pets is Navi (excuse me, "Nobbi") and as costumes you can unlock Link's tunic and his hat. So yes, if you so choose you can essentially play entirely as a female Link, although you'll probably have finished the story by the time you are able to do so.
In this regard, Lili: Child of Geos is rather like a foil to Ittle Dew, another funny game which also takes heavy inspiration from the Legend of Zelda. Except Ittle Dew goes with 2D Zelda and focuses on dungeons, puzzles and outdoor adventuring, while Lili goes with 3D Zelda, quests and town interactions. So if you see someone complaining that Link should be a girl for once, you can point them in the direction of these two games. They go great together.

Not subtle at all.

Our protagonist is the titular Lili, a school girl who arrives on Geos to do a report on flowers. Pretty soon however she gets sidetracked into becoming a freedom fighter saving wooden Constructs from their oppressive masters, the Spirits, particularly from the regime of their leader, the Mayor. You do this by, again, picking flowers. Lili's character development lies in that over the course of the game she goes from being overly concerned with pleasing the professor (who is also her father) with her report to being courageous enough to forge her own path, wherever it might lead. 

Lili is basically the straight girl to all the weird inhabitants of Geos (although occasionally they get to point out some of her weird behavior too). She has the habit of being a kleptomaniac like Link is, with the joke being that Lili really has no use for half the stuff she picks up as they are just mostly humorous references to other games and pop culture. She also picked up Link's tendency to be the scourge of all surrounding pottery.

Girl has priorities.

So the characters, even the villains, are likable and funny (humor is subjective though so no guarantees whether you like them there). It does mean the story is essentially just a lengthy chain of jokes rather than having any sort of consistent narrative. Your end goal is to dethrone the Mayor and his presence is felt throughout the adventure, but that's really just the framework for the humorous situations Lili keeps getting into.

The graphic design is absolutely gorgeous and imaginative. Every corner of every area is stunningly crafted. Geos might not make a lot of logical sense, but it's definitely a place you'd want to visit just for the sights alone. Heck, because of Lili's optimistic nature regarding her adventure, you'd almost be tempted to step outside your door in search of adventure yourself (yes, I tend to enjoy protagonists who are also enjoying the game themselves).

There's a pot in the background. It must be destroyed!

There are really only two major flaws with the game. First is the length. I nearly completed it 100% in less than 5 hours (all what's left is "Break 1000 Vases" and "Scare 500 Birds, which I'm not overly concerned in getting). Just completing the game won't get you over 3 hours. Once you figure out how everything works, finishing all the challenges probably won't give you much of an issue either.

The second is that the game still shows some signs of being made for mobile tablets, specifically the menus and the controls which take some getting used to. It's not a deal breaker, I figured everything out just fine in the end, but the first half hour of the game was really a confused wrestling with the controls.

The entire, kinda small, map.

The game is definitely fun, funny, beautiful and worth at least checking out. However because of the short time you get to spend with Lili you may want to wait for it to be on sale. I definitely hope this isn't the last we've seen of Lili. I would love to go on an adventure with her again.

What a very nice stalker shrine you have there.

Links & References

STEAM - Lili: Child of Geos - Complete Edition
Images from Lili: Child of Geos - Complete Edition

Lili is on the Female Protagonist List