E3 2011: The Top Five PS3 Games for Artistically-Inclined Gamers to Anticipate: Part 1: Papo & Yo

E3 2011 has come and gone, and with it a whirlwind of information on upcoming video games and consumer electronics, all of it filtered through the corporate mouthpeices of game companies, with snippets from the nerds whose work keeps them talking. The main focus of E3 is on huge commercial productions like Call of Duty 37, Halo 16, 3D Playstations and novelty consoles from Nintendo. Along with these chest-thumping endeavors, though, is the feeling of the new, the novel, the changing, The Future. Even for ideas and promises that won't see fruition or that will clearly bomb, E3 has a largesse for optimism, freely imbuing anyone who follows it with an excitement for what is to come. It is with this mind to seeing how gaming is changing and how it can be changed that I begin this list. I wanted to highlight a few games, some big, most small, that I'm most looking forward to.

Papo & Yo

In Braid, Jonathan Blow sought to create a game whose mechanics directly related to and deepened its themes. The game garnered heavy praise and I personally enjoyed it thoroughly; it was also  one of the few that my girlfriend got hooked on. However, serious critics gave Blow a good deal of flack, claiming that it failed to properly achieve its aim, that the connection was lacking between thematics and gameplay. I tend to agree with them. The poetic level introductions set up a decently mature storyline and we were told, both in-game and through promotion, that the gameplay mechanism of time manipulation was meant to serve as a philosophical correlary to the story. Press square. Reverse character motion. Induce reflective moment. When I actually played the game though, it felt like a very clever platformer/puzzler with a beautiful aesthetic that was enhanced by the story set-up. The reflective part never really came into the equation for me.

In hearing about Minority Media’s first full game, the upcoming PSN download Papo & Yo, I’m wondering if we have a new shot at Blow’s dream, a game that does emotional depth through its gameplay. I’m guessing it won’t turn the gaming world on its head, but the possibility is still exciting. Despite its shortcomings, Braid was still a fantastic game head and shoulders above most, and if Papo & Yo feels even half as fresh, it’ll be worth the price of admission.

The game’s title is a thinly vield Spanportuglish mishmash that translates as Father and Me, a reference to creator Vaner Caballero’s experiences growing up with an alcoholic father in Colombia. The metaphorical stand-ins for father and son are a boy named Quico and his pet monster, Monster. I’m already endeared. The game’s adventures occur in Quico’s imagination as he attempts to escape the harshness of life in an unnamed South American favela. Monster tags along to help out on the puzzles and challenges that arise in Quico’s mind quest. Monster, however, is not as sweet as he seems at first: he is rabidly addicted to eating frogs and will sometimes  act so impulsively in his pursuit of more frogs that he screws up Quico’s pursuits. I’m not much for summary (and I’m summarizing from what I’ve read anyway), so I’ll leave the rest of the description to a quote from IGN:

In his mind Quico can adventure in a surreal world where he can move houses simply by pushing around cardboard boxes, or where he can tug magical ropes to make stairs raise out of the ground. It's semi-realistic looking in its presentation, but mixes in enough strange scenery and bizarre looking environments that playing it is akin to moving through a waking dream. It's striking.

Video games tend to be an insular, thematically slight medium in which much of the meaning that is explicit often refers back to other games themselves (I’m still looking at you Braid). Whoever observed that there are more books written about other books than any other topic would have something to say about the nostalgia binge of the last five years. In this light, it’s exciting to hear about an atmospheric, thematically ambitious game that not only takes on the typical, if excellent, triumverant of nostalgia, coming of age and fantasy, but does so with a clear consciousness of weighter issues, namely global poverty and the harm it wreaks on families. I’m not going to get into the possibility of game published on Playstation Network potentially implying methods of resistence to the neo-liberal order (a guy can dream can’t he), but I’m already seeing monstrous potential for this game to mix fantasy, personal emotion and political reality in stunning ways (pun intended). All it needs to do is be touching though, and I’ll love it just the same.