This Is Not The Ending (You're Looking For)

 

According to Steam it took me exactly twelve hours to finish Unavowed. It seemed a lot longer. 

There often seems to be a disparity between how long Steam thinks I've been playing certain games and how long I think I've been playing them. Californium, for example, is a game that, in my memory, I played for quite a number of sessions, all of them lasting several hours. Steam tells me it took me just a shade over five hours to finish. I guess conflating "five hours" and "a number of sessions" doesn't necessarily form a paradox.

The Neo Cab demo, I apparently wrapped up in sixty-nine minutes. I'd have sworn it was at least twice that, probably three times, but now I dig into my memory I seem to remember I finished it in a single session so I guess just over an hour is possible.

Then again, according to Steam my total time spent in Doki Doki Literature Club amounts to forty-nine minutes, which is clearly nonsense. As it happens I tallied up the sessions I'd played and the time they took in the one post I wrote about the game: "I played for about an hour, my first session...Next evening I played again... around the end of the second hour I hit a major decision point... it took me another two hours to reach what is apparently known as the "best" ending". That's at least four hours.

In DDLC's case, there's clearly some miscounting going on. I wondered whether it was because I had the game downloaded separately from Steam but if I ever did I can't find any evidence of it now.

In most of the examples above, though, I'm fairly sure any variation can be accounted for by the way the brain works. These kind of games involve a lot of decision-making and a lot of new experiences. The brain handles the new and the important differently from the way it deals with the routine and the familiar. It's one of the reasons time seems to speed up as you get older - you're experiencing fewer and fewer events that you haven't experienced before.

 

When I think about it, twelve hours to finish Unavowed actually feels like quite a long time, anyway. While it has a reasonable amount of puzzle solving and some typical adventure game toing and froing, mostly what you do is listen to people talk, often to each other and not always involving you. It's the equivalent of sitting through six two-hour movies or sixteen forty-five minute TV shows. That would feel like a marathon.

Even as I was playing I was aware of the situation. Several times I had the thought that Unavowed would make a much better movie, or better yet a TV series, than it does a video game. 

It has a good plot with some excellent twists. All the main characters and many of the supporting cast have backstories that show potential for considerably more exploration than they get. There's evidence of good chemistry between some of the actors which the format simply doesn't allow to develop the way it could if they were able to react to each other in a more natural manner.

 

Conversely, the puzzles, while very well done for this type of game, can't help but feel awkward and artificial. There were numerous occasions where the solution to a problem was obvious within moments of entering a scene but the game required a long and laborious chain of actions to bring it about. 

Thankfully, there were few of those infuriating adventure game impasses where everything comes to a grinding halt because the action necessary is something only a character in a video game would ever think of doing, but even so, with a story this good, puzzles just feel like an unecessary obstacle.

There are certainly games that tell stories movies or TV shows could not. Doki Doki Literature Club is a perfect example. Unavowed didn't feel like one of those to me. Instead it felt strangely like the video game spin-off of a pre-existing property, the sort of game you play because you loved the show and the characters and can't get enough of them.

One thing adventure games can do that movies and TV shows really can't, however, is multiple endings. To many people I'm sure that's evidence of the superiority of gaming as a medium. Only I don't much like alternate endings.

 

My suspicion is that plenty of people aren't all that comfortable with games having several possible conclusions. If that wasn't so, we wouldn't need terms like "best ending" and "perfect ending", which I see used so often in guides, walkthroughs and discussion threads.

The existence of alternate endings in other media tends to derive from commercial rather than artistic decisions. The ending of Pretty in Pink was infamously re-shot following negative screening reactions from audiences, who didn't get the concept of two "losers" who ended up winning. There's much dispute over whether the commercial ending was better or worse but the fact remains it wasn't the one that was originally written.

In video games, though, the alternates are entirely intended and that can't but mitigate against emotional involvement. If you get the "bad" ending you can just load up a save, make different choices and get the "good" one. Which is exactly what I did last night when, first time out, I got the ending where everyone dies and the Big Bad goes on to destroy the world.

The problem with that ending isn't that it's nihilistic and deeply disturbing, although it is exactly those things. It's that it isn't "real". Instead of leaving me feeling numbed or tearful I just felt pissed off, very much as though I'd blown my cooldowns on a fakeout in a PvP match and now some jerk was teabagging my corpse.

 

It's a strange kind of fictional narrative that leaves the reader or the viewer feeling as though they've done something wrong. I've read plenty of novels and seen plenty of movies where I hated the ending but I can't recall ever thinking it was my fault.

Doki Doki Literature Club can make you feel just that way and that's the point. It's a clever metatextual examination of the nature of narrative fiction that uses the particular processes of the media platform on which it's built to emphasize the points it wants to make.

Unavowed nods to metatextuality occasionally (mainly with the references to the fictional Trollgate) but mostly it's a genre fiction tale like countless others. Were a genre fiction story to end with the death of all the main characters and the triumph of the villain it would be a bravura move. If that was Unavowed's only ending, Unavowed would be an amazing game.

With three other possible endings, one of which is all but literally the main characters walking arm-in-arm into the sunset, Unavowed is ultimately just a fun few hours. It's not going to resonate because nothing really happened. 

 

But this is a problem I have with video games in general. I find it problematic when my character is allowed a second chance (or, more likely an infinite number of chances) to defeat an opponent. In my mind, if they don't succeed on the first try, they fail. Except I hate games that really do require you to succeed on the first try because obviously I'm not and never have been good enough to pull that off.

I think that's one of the reasons I get on so much better with mmorpgs than most kinds of video games, or used to, anyway. For many years mmorpgs didn't really come with much in the way of narrative or plot but they did come with some kind of premise that your character was unkillable. There's often an in-game explanation as to why you keep getting up again.

Thost two factors mitigate strongly against my lack of belief in what I'm doing. There's both an internal logic and a lack of external contradiction. The only story is my character's story and my character never dies so trying again and again until I get the result I want seems logical and consistent. Add an overreaching, external narrative and it's less so. Remove immortality from the character but replace it, functionally, in a saved game file and second chances make no emotional sense at all.

 

In an odd, paradoxical way, I could have expected a clean ending from Unavowed. For almost the whole of the game you feel the steady hand of the narrative guiding you down a certain path. Mostly it's extremely forgiving and there's always a way out of any puzzle but there are a few occasions where you can box yourself into a corner. 

If that happens the game just rewinds time and puts you back before you got stuck. It doesn't even tell you it's doing it. The first time it happened to me, with the Dryad in North Woods, it confused the hell out of me. I thought I was bugged at first, then after I'd tabbed out to check if it was a known issue I found it was just a device the game used to push you towards making the right choice. 

That the "right choice" happened to be something I categorically would never have had my character do broke the game for me right there. It was still good entertainment after that but it wasn't the same. It was also evident that the game was going to tell one story and one story only no matter what choices you made along the way.

Until it didn't. There are four endings. Two of them require you first to take a conversation option that quite literally looks like the pause button you'd press if you wanted to go make a cup of coffee before you carried on. The third, which I would loosely categorize as the overtly "evil" one (I haven't played through it so I can't be sure) does at least look like a logical outcome of the choices made.

And then there's the apocalyptic ending, in which you rely on everything you've learned so far, remain consistent with your previous actions, and get an entirely different result. Maybe there's a moral purpose to that. A lesson to be learned.

All I learned was that I shouldn't expect internal consistency from a video game. It's a lesson I keep being taught but it never seems to stick.