Gray Matter - It got me thinking!
May. 5th, 2011 05:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlSo I finished the most recent, and possibly last, adventure game from Jane Jensen a while ago. Gray Matter. I'm not gonna write a whole review, although if you want the short form: I liked it, it had decent puzzles, I liked the writing, everything except the character models was gorgeous looking, and the music was superlative.
The thing it did most though, I can't talk about without some spoilers. So I am cutting. Because spoilers.
(I've edited this a couple times. You might want to look again, if you read it before.)
You are, for most of the game, in control of a young woman named Sam Everett. She's a drifter, an orphan, roaming Europe doing street magic for money. One day her motorcycle breaks down outside an old house. Walking up to the house, she overhears another woman practicing her "Hello, I'm your new assistant" introduction speech and getting psyched to ring the doorbell. A crash of thunder and lightning scares the "new assistant" off. Sam is cold, wet, hungry, and tired. She rings the doorbell, she gives the speech. She's the new assistant.
This is what she does for most of the game. She lies.
She does so with the best of intentions. Her new employer, Doctor David Styles, is a neurobiologist who needs students to help him out. (He's also a recluse who is trying to contact the ghost of his dead wife. But he's a very -good- neurobiologist.)
Sam goes down to the local college and lies about being enrolled there. She does magic tricks to swipe other people's belongings, to aid in her lying. She lies to the house staff about where she's enrolled. She steals an ID card from the college. She lies to students, she lies to Dr. Styles, and as we find out in a flashback, at the age of seven her parents died and she sat in the dark and lied to herself that they'd be home soon.
This is -not- unusual in adventure game heroes and heroines! I've played plenty of adventure games where the hero is a straight-up casual sociopath. The game Nibiru, for example, where the main character promises an elderly gentleman that he'll handle his hotel room for him, then phones the hotel and cancels the old man's booking so he can make one himself. This is not uncommon in the adventure game world, and although I kept saying "Sam, geez, this is gonna catch up with you one day." I did not actually expect it to.
It did. In Chapter 7 out of 8, Dr. Styles finally discovers that no, there's no "Sam Everett" at the college, that none of her "fellow students" have ever seen her at a class, that the ID card she's been using has someone else's name on it and her photo pasted on yey. Then he goes and confronts her about it. He doesn't have all the facts, or all the truths. He blames her for doing several things she didn't do. But as he points out, he has no idea what's true and what isn't anymore and she's been manipulating not just a very emotionally brittle hermit, but a handful of people who call her friend to her face. He wants her the fuck out of his HOUSE and doesn't want to see her ever again.
To be honest, this was a scene I'd been waiting for for -years-. It was with the best of intentions, but this felt like not just Sam, but so many adventure game protags I've rolled with over the years were getting called out for being -jerks- to people who (according to the plot) were supposed to like them and trust them, not to mention random strangers. And while Sam was a much milder case, since she often did it with the best intentions... a calling-on-the-carpet was totally deserved and justified here.
So that was cathartic.
(Then chapter 8 takes place in a weird wacky magic funhouse, is 98% Puzzle Maze World while Sam tries to find her local magic mentor, they cutscene for a while, Sam works out the Big Mystery, there's a hasty confrontation with the bad guy that includes a semi-satisfying Chekov's Baptismal Font, a wrap-up cutscene, and an epilogue cutscene that shows Sam gets to keep her job, her friends, and her paycheck. There are some pacing issues, I think they must have expected ten chapters and got eight. I don't care, it was a pretty goddamn good game anyway.)
[Edit]: ...ha, god. Re-listening to Sam's Theme ("Never Going Back") on Youtube ... "You flickers of the light, my lovely bunch of lies I tell myself to help me sleep at night"... It's -all over- the game. Great music too. Scarlet Furies. Totally looking into them.
[Further Edit:] I particularly find it amusing how a lot of reviewers had their suspension of disbelief crack right there in the opening cutscene, where a cold, tired, hungry street magician orphan caught in a rainstorm with a broken motorcycle sees someone else drop a job offer (with boarding) right in front of them and spontaneously decides to pretend to be someone else to take it.
...shit, man, I'D jump at that and take consequence later. Do some people not know what it's like to be sleepy and rained on?
I am kind of sad there won't be a sequel to this game, since it sold roughly six copies and one of them was mine. This game showed that Jane Jensen can still write her -ass- off.
At least if there ever -is- a sequel, the two main characters will be noticeably different people. I'm... curious about where that would go.
The thing it did most though, I can't talk about without some spoilers. So I am cutting. Because spoilers.
(I've edited this a couple times. You might want to look again, if you read it before.)
You are, for most of the game, in control of a young woman named Sam Everett. She's a drifter, an orphan, roaming Europe doing street magic for money. One day her motorcycle breaks down outside an old house. Walking up to the house, she overhears another woman practicing her "Hello, I'm your new assistant" introduction speech and getting psyched to ring the doorbell. A crash of thunder and lightning scares the "new assistant" off. Sam is cold, wet, hungry, and tired. She rings the doorbell, she gives the speech. She's the new assistant.
This is what she does for most of the game. She lies.
She does so with the best of intentions. Her new employer, Doctor David Styles, is a neurobiologist who needs students to help him out. (He's also a recluse who is trying to contact the ghost of his dead wife. But he's a very -good- neurobiologist.)
Sam goes down to the local college and lies about being enrolled there. She does magic tricks to swipe other people's belongings, to aid in her lying. She lies to the house staff about where she's enrolled. She steals an ID card from the college. She lies to students, she lies to Dr. Styles, and as we find out in a flashback, at the age of seven her parents died and she sat in the dark and lied to herself that they'd be home soon.
This is -not- unusual in adventure game heroes and heroines! I've played plenty of adventure games where the hero is a straight-up casual sociopath. The game Nibiru, for example, where the main character promises an elderly gentleman that he'll handle his hotel room for him, then phones the hotel and cancels the old man's booking so he can make one himself. This is not uncommon in the adventure game world, and although I kept saying "Sam, geez, this is gonna catch up with you one day." I did not actually expect it to.
It did. In Chapter 7 out of 8, Dr. Styles finally discovers that no, there's no "Sam Everett" at the college, that none of her "fellow students" have ever seen her at a class, that the ID card she's been using has someone else's name on it and her photo pasted on yey. Then he goes and confronts her about it. He doesn't have all the facts, or all the truths. He blames her for doing several things she didn't do. But as he points out, he has no idea what's true and what isn't anymore and she's been manipulating not just a very emotionally brittle hermit, but a handful of people who call her friend to her face. He wants her the fuck out of his HOUSE and doesn't want to see her ever again.
To be honest, this was a scene I'd been waiting for for -years-. It was with the best of intentions, but this felt like not just Sam, but so many adventure game protags I've rolled with over the years were getting called out for being -jerks- to people who (according to the plot) were supposed to like them and trust them, not to mention random strangers. And while Sam was a much milder case, since she often did it with the best intentions... a calling-on-the-carpet was totally deserved and justified here.
So that was cathartic.
(Then chapter 8 takes place in a weird wacky magic funhouse, is 98% Puzzle Maze World while Sam tries to find her local magic mentor, they cutscene for a while, Sam works out the Big Mystery, there's a hasty confrontation with the bad guy that includes a semi-satisfying Chekov's Baptismal Font, a wrap-up cutscene, and an epilogue cutscene that shows Sam gets to keep her job, her friends, and her paycheck. There are some pacing issues, I think they must have expected ten chapters and got eight. I don't care, it was a pretty goddamn good game anyway.)
[Edit]: ...ha, god. Re-listening to Sam's Theme ("Never Going Back") on Youtube ... "You flickers of the light, my lovely bunch of lies I tell myself to help me sleep at night"... It's -all over- the game. Great music too. Scarlet Furies. Totally looking into them.
[Further Edit:] I particularly find it amusing how a lot of reviewers had their suspension of disbelief crack right there in the opening cutscene, where a cold, tired, hungry street magician orphan caught in a rainstorm with a broken motorcycle sees someone else drop a job offer (with boarding) right in front of them and spontaneously decides to pretend to be someone else to take it.
...shit, man, I'D jump at that and take consequence later. Do some people not know what it's like to be sleepy and rained on?
I am kind of sad there won't be a sequel to this game, since it sold roughly six copies and one of them was mine. This game showed that Jane Jensen can still write her -ass- off.
At least if there ever -is- a sequel, the two main characters will be noticeably different people. I'm... curious about where that would go.
