Indie | A Grandmother and her Gutter

That’s when it clicked again. There was something I had missed. Nothing in particular yet; a penny had dropped, but rolled away. Was I being made a fool of? It was impossible to tell.

On the promise of a single feature, a deal was struck and a download link for the “full version” landed in my inbox. Again, I held forward. BEEP! The man was run over by a truck at the crossroads, not even half way across the street. Credits. Shock, followed by a snigger. There was no way around his demise at the hands of the vehicle – something was up.

As it turns out, The Gutter is a ruthless parody of The Graveyard, a “game” by Tale of Tales who are at once the most progressive, outspoken and divisive indie developers currently on the scene. The Graveyard asks the player to guide an old woman through a cemetery, sit her on the bench at the end of the gravel path and then leave the way they came. It was, if nothing else, an interesting experiment that, for all its successes, arguably failed in equal measure. Its core message was foggy to say the least, and it’s difficult to see what it attempted to achieve aside from divorcing player from protagonist in ways that some found uncomfortable.

Players have an innate faith that their button presses will translate into actions on screen, but The Graveyard made a distinct attempt to break down this preconception. The only authority that could be exercised was vague direction using the arrow keys, and the unfriendly camera, painfully slow movement, dead ends and uncertainty over whether the woman would choose to sit or not rather understandably turned many off. Not least Auntie Pixelante, who posts an appraisal of The Gutter permeated by scathing criticism of Tale of Tales’ 2008 effort.

Having played both games, I can say with some confidence that The Gutter is a worthy send-up. The pointless divergent routes, non-player dictated actions and unbearably slow character movement hit just the right juncture between accurate emulation and cheeky caricature. It even apes the “$5 for death” model that the Belgian pair pursued with their project, and to surprisingly excellent effect. It’s of such mischievous self-assurance that it’s hard not to be enamoured, even if I do look like an utter idiot for falling for the trick. However, though The Gutter seeks to undermine its forerunner, it doesn’t wholly achieve this. The Graveyard did some unexpected things as well, and for all its pretentiousness and irritancies, is arguably more valuable than its imitator.

//Computer logic
What Auntie Pixelante – and apparently Nijman himself – dislikes about Tale of Tales’ work is in fact its biggest strength. The player is unsure in the “Full Version” if the woman will drop dead or not. We’re not used to intangibles during play, and games are usually methodical, logical. If I push A to activate the motorcycle’s handbrake, it would only be reasonable to expect it to come to a halt. Games have always been about action and reaction, but wrestling absolute control from the player outside of the expected cut-scenes is something that has not been tried often. The closest comparison can perhaps be drawn with Metal Gear Solid, which has often attempted to concurrently scale the fourth wall and eclipse the player using said structure with alarming unpredictability. Half-Life, too, capitalised beautifully on the personal nature of the first person perspective by forcing the player to experience everything through Gordon Freeman’s eyes. The capture scene from the 1998 original and Metal Gear Solid 3’s torture sequence are the most striking examples of a rigid removal of the player’s ability to dictate the course of events, both of them brave and awe inspiring upon first play.

Though The Graveyard doesn’t come close to such powerful watershed moments, it’s an important piece of the ongoing puzzle of player governance vs. audiovisual feedback. If these ideas are implemented into more games – and we have already seen something resembling this in the developer’s latest project, The Path – we’ll be well on the way to breaking more barriers in game design. Success or failure, both The Gutter and The Graveyard are curios worthy of anybody’s time; if only to catch a glimpse of what we can expect to see emerging from the ever evolving indie space in the future.

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