Red Gems, Please.
whatifoundthere recently shared some magnificent insight on Papers, Please, "A Dystopian Document Thriller." Papers, Please is a time-management game of sorts that you "play" as a border guard for a grim, grey eastern European country at the height of the Cold War. True to life, corruption and bribery abound, and there is no right or wrong way to get through the game. Though, most of the choices you make lead to endings wherein you're imprisoned or executed. Glory to Arstotzka.
As was pointed out by women much wiser than myself, it is nearly impossible to play as a "good guy" in Papers, Please. If you follow the admittance rules to the letter, you inevitably wind up separating families and imprisoning good people. If you don't follow the rules, your pay is docked, making it much harder to take care of your perpetually sick, cold, and hungry relatives. By the way, if your relatives all die, you're fired for failing to maintain the image of a robust family. Glory to Etc.
Anyway, Papers, Please got me thinking about how few games foist gut-wrenching choices upon you. Sure, you can be "good" or "bad," or you can just put a bucket on the shopkeeper's head and rob him blind while he yacks about his wife instead of calling the authorities. But how many games have made you seriously pause and say, "Well, shit?" I can think of one off the top of my head, and it's a weird bird: Illusion of Gaia for the Super Nintendo.
Colourful though it may be, Illusion of Gaia is a grim little game. It's the second title in Enix's likely-dead Soulblazer series. I believe chronologically, the first game is Terranigma, which details the birth (rebirth?) of Planet Earth courtesy of the game's hero, Ark. Illusion of Gaia comes next in the timeline, and best I can tell, evolution and progress have stagnated thanks in part to an evil comet that's shadowing the planet and stifling the human race.
In a word, Illusion of Gaia is melancholy, though it relays its dark bits through its environments and events rather than dialogue. Bad things happen to good people, particularly in the alleys of the town called Freejia (the translation for IOG is, uh, not good). Freejia is a showy tourist town, but it's also a showcase for child slaves, which is pretty heavy shit for an SNES game.
Now, the path to saving the world is never straight in an RPG, and in addition to killing Mr Asshole Comet, Illusion of Gaia also charges you with collecting "Red Gems" on the side. There are 50 Red Gems, and you need every single one to receive your rewards. Collecting Gems is optional, but also necessary for certain restorative items and permanent stat boosts that can't be gotten elsewhere.
Most Gems can be found in pots, in bins, or by completing certain tasks. And one of those tasks, is, uh, to rat out a slave who's in hiding.
No, really: There's a young boy who ran away from his masters just before he was set to go on the auction block. He begs Will to keep his location a secret. Sure, easy enough -- until you find the slave master who promises to reward you if you give him any information about the missing kid.
There is no other way to get this particular Gem. Either you squeal and receive an irreplaceable payment, or you clam up and miss out on a valuable item. It's a tiny part of the game, but holy moly it made an impact on me.
(By the way, the game makes no secret of the fact the kids are shipped off to a diamond mine to be worked to death. Yay for video game parallels to shitty real-world situations! Also, if you don't believe Illusion of Gaia has some of the greatest music composed for the SNES, you are silly.)
Going back to Papers, Please for a second, what a strange, wonderful age of gaming we live in when an indie title that displays fewer colours than an old Windows 3.1 game can make such an impact.
As was pointed out by women much wiser than myself, it is nearly impossible to play as a "good guy" in Papers, Please. If you follow the admittance rules to the letter, you inevitably wind up separating families and imprisoning good people. If you don't follow the rules, your pay is docked, making it much harder to take care of your perpetually sick, cold, and hungry relatives. By the way, if your relatives all die, you're fired for failing to maintain the image of a robust family. Glory to Etc.
Anyway, Papers, Please got me thinking about how few games foist gut-wrenching choices upon you. Sure, you can be "good" or "bad," or you can just put a bucket on the shopkeeper's head and rob him blind while he yacks about his wife instead of calling the authorities. But how many games have made you seriously pause and say, "Well, shit?" I can think of one off the top of my head, and it's a weird bird: Illusion of Gaia for the Super Nintendo.
Colourful though it may be, Illusion of Gaia is a grim little game. It's the second title in Enix's likely-dead Soulblazer series. I believe chronologically, the first game is Terranigma, which details the birth (rebirth?) of Planet Earth courtesy of the game's hero, Ark. Illusion of Gaia comes next in the timeline, and best I can tell, evolution and progress have stagnated thanks in part to an evil comet that's shadowing the planet and stifling the human race.
In a word, Illusion of Gaia is melancholy, though it relays its dark bits through its environments and events rather than dialogue. Bad things happen to good people, particularly in the alleys of the town called Freejia (the translation for IOG is, uh, not good). Freejia is a showy tourist town, but it's also a showcase for child slaves, which is pretty heavy shit for an SNES game.
Now, the path to saving the world is never straight in an RPG, and in addition to killing Mr Asshole Comet, Illusion of Gaia also charges you with collecting "Red Gems" on the side. There are 50 Red Gems, and you need every single one to receive your rewards. Collecting Gems is optional, but also necessary for certain restorative items and permanent stat boosts that can't be gotten elsewhere.
Most Gems can be found in pots, in bins, or by completing certain tasks. And one of those tasks, is, uh, to rat out a slave who's in hiding.
No, really: There's a young boy who ran away from his masters just before he was set to go on the auction block. He begs Will to keep his location a secret. Sure, easy enough -- until you find the slave master who promises to reward you if you give him any information about the missing kid.
There is no other way to get this particular Gem. Either you squeal and receive an irreplaceable payment, or you clam up and miss out on a valuable item. It's a tiny part of the game, but holy moly it made an impact on me.
(By the way, the game makes no secret of the fact the kids are shipped off to a diamond mine to be worked to death. Yay for video game parallels to shitty real-world situations! Also, if you don't believe Illusion of Gaia has some of the greatest music composed for the SNES, you are silly.)
Going back to Papers, Please for a second, what a strange, wonderful age of gaming we live in when an indie title that displays fewer colours than an old Windows 3.1 game can make such an impact.