Telling a story through a digital medium really opens up the range of possibility for what you can achieve in comparison to traditional media. There is only so much you can create with camera tricks and sets in terms of transporting the viewer, and that is part of the reason that I love animation and video games. One manner in which this is apparent is the way in which you can skewer the perspective of a viewer to have them be as small or a big as you want, making for some great storytelling potential.
Who remembers the Lego Movie? That film was shot with clever CG tricks in order to emulate stop-frame animation so perfectly that many are still convinced that was how the entire movie was made. (If you are still one of those people just think, how does the camera get so close without distorting the image?) When your viewer can be as small as a a flower or as tall as a mountain, perspective becomes another storytelling tool. To demonstrate this, I want to go over a few games that pull this off to great effect.
One of the more surreal and stylistic experience that utilize this technique is a little trip through weird called Little Nightmares. Now, usually I would go through the plot of the game in order to catch everyone up to speed, but part of this game's appeal is learning that story for yourself (Or, at least, trying to.) So I'll go over the premise instead. This game follows the player taking control of a child-sized raincoat wearing mute dubbed Six as she travels through a titanic-era ship called the Maw on a quest to survive. Or liberate. One of the two.
What makes Little Nightmares so memorable is it's beautiful grotesque enemy design and the way in which the game takes advantage of the protagonist's reduced stature (Which is just under that of a normal child's) and uses it heighten the scares. Area props will tower over you in an intimidating fashion as you are pursued by the ravenous flesh eaters aboard the Maw. The 3D platforming perspective allows for the player to clearly see how much bigger everyone is compared to Six and maybe even begin to sympathise with their tiny underdog even whilst she starts to do very morally questionable things. (Which I shall not detail here, they're much more effective when you aren't expecting them.)
Among the Sleep takes a frightfully simple, yet underutilized, premise that everyone can relate to in order to frame it's scares. Developer Krillbite decided to put the player in the walking mittens of a 2 year old and have you walk around your home whilst encountering all the scariness that an underdeveloped mind can concoct. This means a whole lot of forced perspective moments from the eyes of a baby as well as surreal moments of dream like childish wonder. Oh, and scares. A few of those too. environment
The thing that 'Among the Sleep' does so well is capture that feeling of being a little person in a big world. Rather than be a platformer, this game puts you right in the child's head, so you get to experience the warped perspective of everyday household objects up close. Later in the game this also extends to the way that you see familiar objects, like your Mother. If Krillbite's interpretation of childhood is accurate, then that is one house of horrors that I'm glad to be clear from.
Just last month there was a new release that played around with perspective a bit. From the makers of the inexplicably popular: Bendy and the Ink Machine, comes Showdown Bandit; a delightful tale about sentient puppets. Or, not so sentient puppets, as their stings do appear to go somewhere. Okay, once again Kindly Beast have put out a game that appears to be more style than substance, but I must say that this time around the visual direction does tickle me a little.
The game puts you in the shoes of the eponymous puppet as it attempts to defend it's stings from the scissors wielded by the 'stringless'. (Losing those strings means death.) Showdown Bandit is laid out as though it is an active puppet show, with the player moving through sets that are being actively constructed whilst a stage light shines down on them. Additionally, the camera is set at an almost isometric angle, mimicking the view of a puppeteer looking down at their work. (Now if only Kindly Beast would do something with that cool idea, we'd have an actual game on our hands.)
Going back to my own personal history with gaming, there is one classic that is a brilliant example of this type of design choice. I am, of course, talking about the Army Men franchise. The basic premise of Army Men is world in which those little plastic soldiers that you played with as a child were alive and carrying out their wars by themselves. This means that the plastic green army would fight against the plastic Tan army in a variety of different genres spanning everything from top down shooters, helicopter games, RTS' and first person shooters.
3DO went to the nth degree with this concept is every possible way. That means that there are levels in which you fight across a plastic world and ones in which you battle in the real world. Some of my favourite levels include battling over the dinner table, a perilous charge up a fridge's contents and a climatic final siege which tasks you with hiding from a weaponized poodle. Army Men has done it all and it is such a shame that the franchise hasn't been heard of for nearly 10 years now. Many other companies could learn how to take a novel concept and go beyond it to create great games.
Once before I have bought up this one obscure PS1 title I had, but I think it bears repeating. Micro Manics was a game in which you took control of hideous lab experiments and raced them across office spaces and workstations. The catch is two fold, firstly the characters are tiny (hence 'micro') and secondly, none of them have vehicles, so they all have to pump their tiny legs.
Micro Maniacs went for the Army Men route of setting levels across real world locales and having race obstacles be comically large pieces of stationary. Expect some pencils and erasers to get in your way. I remember being charmed out of my socks when I used to play this game as a kid, I just couldn't get enough of it. (Which is surprising when looking back and realizing that the characters are genuinely Quake-levels of horrific.)
It is funny how the simple act of shrinking things down can open up a world of opportunity from an adventure standpoint. Marvel even pulled it off with that final fight in Antman, and video games have been doing it for a while now. As long as developers continue to get new tools at their disposal we'll continue to see similarly fresh and innovative ideas that take something that we think we know well and turn it on it's head. I just can't wait to see how that goes.
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