Kuon: a terrible game. I know that I can be pretty harsh when it comes to bad games. I mean, this is a research blog and I am interested in why bad games are bad, but I'm also a gamer, and being frustrated by a bad game that I'm playing for research is just as annoying as when it's just for fun. Sometimes I really dislike a game that a lot of other people enjoyed: recent posts about Rule of Rose and Cold Fear have garnered more responses from you guys than almost any other topic in the five year history of this site. So I want to talk a little about why playing and critiquing bad games is so important. My goal is not to take the development teams to task; in my career as a game developer, I've worked on some pretty poor games myself, and I know first hand that bad games are almost always the result of factors outside of the development team's immediate control rather than incompetence. So while I may bitch about how certain games are badly balanced, or too tricky for their own good, or fatally flawed, I am blasting the game experience, not the people who made it. In fact, I think that my experience working on games that turned out to be less than stellar has a lot to do with my rationale for running this site. You can't help but wonder what the hell happened when you play something like The Ring for the first time; everything is so amazingly broken that it's almost hard to pin down which of the game's failures is the most glaring. I think that one of the big reasons that bad games get made is that people experiment with ideas but do not have time to change or refine them if they don't work out; the Ring might have sounded good on paper, but the development cycle was probably so short that even if the development team realized that they had just created the worst thing ever in the history of things, they probably didn't have any time to go back and make fixes. I've been there, and it's a sucky situation to be in. So one of the reasons for me to run this site is to find out what ideas really don't work so well so that maybe other developers can avoid them in the future. Given that game development time is limited and a lot of things have already been tried, I'd like to provide a resource for game designers (or anybody interested in design, even if they are not a professional) to examine what has been done in the past within the horror genre, and which of those ideas have failed. To that end, playing bad games is much more enlightening than playing good games. So often a game works very well because many aspects of the game design work together to produce an excellent experience. It's hard to tell, then, which of those aspects might work outside of its original context; it's hard to divine which parts of a good game are intrinsically good, and which parts are good because they've been combined with other design ideas. But by playing bad games, you can quickly and easily get a feel for ideas that do not work. If these are ideas that have been successfully employed elsewhere, that tells you that the idea isn't robust enough to stand up on its own, but it can work when combined with something else. Playing bad games also helps me appreciate the quality with which good games are developed; after playing Kuon, I have new respect for the highly superior (and somewhat thematically similar) Fatal Frame series. So I love bad games. I started this site to learn about why good horror games are good, and that means I also need to understand why bad horror games are terrible. Even though it can be a chore to play them, and any enjoyment I get may be in spite of the game rather than because of it, bad games are an invaluable resource.

One thing about having a kid is that you don't sleep very much. But for me, that means that I've had some time to play some video games in between cuddling my daughter, feeding her, and generally trying to let her Mom get some sleep in the wee hours of the morning. For some reason I've been on a FPS tangent recently (actually, I know the reason: I bought a 360)--I've played through Halo, Half-Life 2 Episode 2, Portal (all kinds of awesome, by the way), and I've put a little bit of time into a couple of horror games: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth and Condemned. Call of Cthulhu is a game that I really want to like because the narrative is so well told. We've got a by-the-books Lovecraftian tale here, and it's executed within the game systems quite well. Flashbacks, insanity effects, and generally hot level design make the game play (which involves a lot of exploration, puzzle solving, and sneaking) pretty fun. That is, unfortunately, until they introduce the firearms. Once the guns show up, the game mechanics seem to fall apart. The story is still very well told, but the game play takes an immediate and dramatic nosedive. There are a couple of issues that together cause Call of Cthulhu to be way less fun than it should be. First of all, the shooting mechanics are terrible. There's no aiming reticle, and the angle of the protagonists arm on the screen makes it really difficult to judge exactly where the gun is pointing. Furthermore, weapons that should have a significant target area (like the shotgun) sometimes miss at point blank range. The switching of weapons and reloading is also incredibly arduous--on the 360 pad, switching weapons while moving isn't really possible because the D-Pad is used to select weapons, requiring you to take your thumb off the analog stick. Maybe it was easier under the original Xbox controller. None of this is helped by the fact that the enemies seem to be able to withstand much, much more damage than your character. But even worse than the aiming mechanics is the damage system used in the Call of Cthulhu. The idea is that you can get hurt in different ways and need to bandage yourself up rather than just magically healing. Applying bandages and splints takes times, and leaves you vulnerable in the world. If you don't bandage wounds, you can become further hurt by loss of blood. The problem with this system is that different types of wounds require different types of health items, and I perpetually seem to be out of the one that I need. And since you can just die by walking around with an unbandaged wound, it's important to patch all of your wounds up all the time. Even then, an enemy with a shotgun can kill you in one hit, or his friend with the pistol can shoot you in the foot and laugh as you limp five feet away before dying of blood loss. I understand that the developers wanted to use resource management as a way to make healing more realistic and to make the player more vulnerable, but this implementation just makes playing the game unfun. It strikes me as similar to Illbleed--too many resources that interact in ways that are not totally clear. I'm still trying to like Cthulhu, because like I said, everything else about the game is pretty phenomenal. It's just that first person mechanics are really well defined at this point, and the shooting mechanics in Dark Corners of the Earth feel like a regression to 1996. I shall complete this game for the story alone, but I'm disappointed that the weak shooting mechanics replaced the much more interesting sneaking and puzzle solving aspects that dominated the first part of the game. Condemed, on the other hand, appears to be freaking fantastic! I need to qualify that statement: I've only played the first hour or so of Condemned. But goddamn, what an awesome introduction. I'm really impressed with the art style, especially the use of lighting in the levels; the developers were able to get away with bright spaces without detracting from the feelings of claustrophobia and oppression that the dank environments are intended to invoke. The pressure upon the player is immediate and constant from the first moment of the game. I really hope it stays this good throughout its entire length.

I finished Illbleed last night. It's an interesting game for sure: the content is weird, the premise is unique, and its approach to horror is straight out of campy 1980s classics like Creepshow. It's also a pretty good example of bad game design: it's too complicated, the rules keep changing, and there are some points that rate very high on the frustration meter. You should check this review out, because I even went to the trouble of making a graph to describe one of the principle design failures of this game.

Lately I've been trying my hand at Illbleed. It's an exceedingly strange game, both in terms of its premise and its game mechanics. I don't really like it so far--the ideas seem good but I've found the execution to be very frustrating. There's a lot of interesting things here, like the trap disarming mechanic, but the possibility for failure is so high and the checkpoints are so few and far between that I hardly have time to appreciate the finer points of the design. I'm too busy trying to maintain all the different stats I have, and trying not to let any of them kill me.

The thing about Illbleed is that there is only one way to win but there are tons of ways to die. Your health can drop to zero. Your bleeding meter can go too high. You can run out of adrenaline and are then unable to avoid traps. Your heart rate can get too high, causing you to faint. There are too many values to manage and not enough ways to manage them. If you want to decrease your heart rate or bleeding speed you can stop moving, but then you'll be dinged for not completing the level in time. And often the game will put you in situations where you must take a hit (or increase your heart rate, or lose some adrenaline) no matter what.

Basically, Illbleed seems to give you zero margin for error. If you don't do everything perfectly (and knowing what to do is a problem in and of itself), you'll fall victim to one of the many ways you can fail. And since there are no checkpoints and only one or two save points per level, failure usually means losing a significant amount of work. It seems like there are a lot of cool things going on with the design, but the frustration level has been way too high so far.

I haven't finished the game yet, so maybe my opinion will change. At the moment, however, it's not looking all that hot.

Many thanks to David, who generiously donated his extra copy of Illbleed to the Quest! In exchange for the game, I've agreed to post David's message, which is below. Thanks again, David!