CRASH AND FALLINGBRIGHT
The definitive videogame?
We open on an alien sky, burning with dancing bands of lights in gold
and green in darkness – clouds, nebulae, maybe an abstract
impression of neon signs covering a city, maybe stars under a strange
sky seen by eyes not like ours. A negative space moves into the light
as a muted electric guitar builds, like mounting excitement. A dark
shape not entirely unlike a human stands out against the sky. Close
up we do see a head, harsh and angular, with a handful of jagged
horns around the temples or forehead. It tilts forward, in deep
thought.
This all happens so slowly, gracefully. Then, very quickly, by some
subliminal cue the subconscious recognizes as "flashback",
we dissolve to a room bathed in gently pulsating yellow light and a
softly humming cello string. Our angular, pitch-black friend is here,
locked in an embrace with a similar creature, larger, wider, with
rounder corners, and that yellow light shining through a spiderweb
cracks in her carapace, and a pair of big round eyes in the middle of
her face. They have torsos and arms like us, but their joints aren't
like anything seen on earth, and they have only three pointed claws
on each hand.
Back in the night sky, head still hanging in introspective
melancholy, our hero jerks back as a spark lights in her face. She
opens her eyes for what is clearly the first time. These people
express so much with their eyes. They glow with a pale red light. The
electric guitar leaps higher. She jumps, the camera turns to follow
her and we see her falling along the side of a thin, white structure
disappearing into a grid of city lights far below. Cracks grow across
her dark skin and the red light spills out as blue lights rise from
below to meet her with siren sounds and growling engines; blocky
flying cars hover in a half-circle around her, pointing their
flashing blue lights menacingly.
This is where you gain control over Crash, as the stats screen calls
her – all the characters are described with feminine pronouns in
the game manual, though otherwise it'd be hard to guess – and the
exploding begins. Holding down Y, sorry, the “blue” button if
you're using an Xbox style controller, okay, let's go with Square,
slows the game to an almost complete stop and you hover in mid-air
while moving a targeting reticule around – the over-the-shoulder
perspective moves close enough for the camera to literally sit on
your shoulder for this – and build up for a Crash. The projected
range grows fast as you hold down the button, reaching a maximum
after about two seconds, and the build-up is more a formality to let
you control the range.
And then you let go of the button and it's glorious. The Crash
mechanic is the core of the game, and it would be terrible if it got
old after the five or six thousandth time you do it, and they know
this and make sure it doesn't. To “Crash” means to teleport,
violently, spectacularly, in a satisfying on a deep level rush of
absolute, instant destruction. Imagine the shotgun in Doom,
except you are the pellets. Or a railgun slug. Or Miracleman,
shooting through air and concrete with the same blinding speed, the
same unstoppable force.
You actually can't crash through the level walls, which the manual
justifies as Crash being unwilling to travel blindly, which I'm
willing to buy. But you really do get the sense that you could if you
wanted to. Nothing can stand in your way.
So how does the game challenge you other than putting level geometry
in your way? Boy am I glad you asked, imaginary reader. First of all,
the game gives you souls – sorry, “experience” - for fighting
fairly and for reaching some hard-to-get spots on foot. I'm pretty
sure there may even be some combo thing going where you get a few
more points the longer you keep doing things without stopping. But
crashing interrupts everything you're doing. So it's a balancing act
between the fun but skill-demanding activity of fluid graceful
movement and the fun but less long-term gainful crash. I admit I
couldn't decide on either doctrine but did as much as possible of
both.
Oh, and when you think you've got things figured out the game starts
throwing Bullet Hell fights on you where crashing between safe spots
alone becomes difficult. It is a demanding game, obviously heavily
inspired by the infamously difficult Dark Souls, though we
could say it's more flexible – I made it to the end in less than
six hours, struggling desperately and abandoning all dignity and
grace in service of just getting there (all to bring you this review,
dear reader), though the game can reward an even degree of skill and
patience than Dark Souls can through the ingenious way the different
story endings are determined.
Which, this is spoiling a great big twist that you may want to
discover for yourself to make your first playthrough “authentic”
and whatnot. So why don't you go ahead and play the game now and I'll
see you in six hours?
No? Don't say I didn't warn you.
Not to get too involved in the technicalities, but Crash uses
the aforementioned experience points you collect – correction, just
“experience” - to allow you to customize your player character to
suit your play style. Well, mostly your combat style. On the menu
screen you see those vital attributes Resistance, Poise, Sense, Self,
Strength, Mass, Will, Force, Skill and Speed. (And a little bit
further down, apart, “Fallingbright”.) Of those eleven, six are
related to the damage output and knockbackness of your three
different weapons and two your own defenses against those things, but
Sense and Self are a little more interesting: “Self”, the manual
tells us, “reinforces the integrity of your presence, making you
harder for others to sense”.
Let me just take a moment to gaze in bewilderment at this
deep-cutting slice of worldbuilding.
But, yeah, basically this is the stealth stat. “Sense”,
conversely increasing your ability to see other people, and also
points of interests for that sweet exploration XP, and enemy HP and
weak spots, and also hidden things inside walls which I think extra
ingeniously ties together with the aforementioned restriction against
crashing through level boundaries – when you can in fact sense an
empty space and/or absence of innocents buried under a layer of
stone, then and only then does it make sense for you to crash in
there. (And I usually deep-hate games that won't allow you to figure
out puzzle solutions until your character has the right information.)
But what was I talking about? In the nameless world you explore –
you get knocked out and transported into a more desolate low-fantasy
kind of place early on in the game, watching the lady with the yellow
lights be roughly taken away by some scary lady with murky
purplish-brown lights – you encounter what you might call trainers:
NPCs who let you buy stat points for experience. At first I was
pretty confused when I encountered in a dull cavern one of the black
carapace creatures, my people, with a deeper red light in her eyes
who prompted a menu to open when I interacted with her, one with
Crash's stat screen on the left and a blank one adorned only with Red
Eyes' portrait on the right, and the option to choose my Strength
stat and increase it at the cost of experience. This confusion was
not so much over what was happening, but why the level-up process
was presented in such a way. Choosing to increase my unarmed damage a
little bit, I was delivered a small cut scene of Lady Red Eyes moving
towards Crash in that deliberate, alien way the aliens move,
overflowing with her dark red light. Crash started shining too, their
lights merged, there was a musical cue with drums and electric
guitars, I think they were embracing as they disappeared in their
lights and at this point it occurred to me I was probably watching
some alien mating ritual.
After which I tried to speak to her again, opening the menu and only
now noticing it said “Strength” on the top of her half of the
screen, in the same space it says “Crash” on mine. Strength is
her name! This alien people define themselves in such ways.
And this mating/romance/psychic exchange/whatever intimate process I
just underwent is how they grow as individuals, by taking on traits
of each other. Sharing “experience” with each other through a
merging of bodies, minds, emotions, colors or whatever it is this
people without mouths do that we recognize as “communication”.
There are severe cultural barriers here. The manual does the bare
minimum to explain things and you'll note the game has said exactly
twelve words so far, and they're written on the menu screen. Okay,
thirteen if you count the “and” in the title. I feel like a
stranger in this world, afraid to make even the slightest assumptions
based on my own culture and straining, I mean working really hard
with a bucket of Snickers bars to fuel my brain, to conceptualize
what is happening.
I also run into three items I can pick up and equip, changing my jump
and dodge moves and in lieu of descriptions containing small stories,
just a sentence or two, relating (in the third person) how these
items remind Crash of Fallingbright in brief glimpses that don't tell
us much but seem fully focused on the physicality of their
relationship – the smell of Fallingbright, the weight of her arms,
etc. Maybe it is a purely physical relationship. Maybe it's how
things work on this planet. Maybe Crash doesn't know what it is. The
mystery pulls me deeper.
Until, and the interface did actually give it away when you stop and
think about it, you dodge or explode all the bad guys and reunite
with Fallingbright and level up your “Fallingbright” stat with
what experience you have left. This did not end well for this
reporter. The manual is decidedly unclear about how many different
endings there are, but implies it works on two or more axes – how
much experience you collect and how much of it you save to share with
Fallingbright, presumably, and maybe how much you rely on violence –
most enemies, even bosses, can be escaped by well-timed jumping,
dodging and crashing, but killing them is usually easier.
This reporter is in love with this game. The simple, striking art
direction, the flawless combat/exploration systems that make just
moving across the room such a profound joy, the utterly alien yet
perfectly believable world it presents, the confidence of that
presentation – without a single word beyond those to give the
interface names for things, without any recognizable humanity amongst
any of the characters – their gloriously expressive eyes and body
language I assume is universal, without at any point even suggesting
that you should be able to or even need to understand what is
happening or why, the game invests you entirely in the personality of
these people rather than their politics, and manages to tell a deeply
personal story about fear and love and struggle and peace and
hostility and intimacy and discovery and innocence and grace and
brutality, seamlessly integrating the player's own actions with the
narrative.
If Crash and Fallingbright has a weakness, it is perhaps just
that surety in itself. It doesn't go out of its way for the player,
but assumes you will dig deep and try hard before it yields its
treasures. It lacks what the marketing departments are calling “mass
appeal”. It will almost certainly not sell in large numbers. But
then, those of us who do play it will likely never forget it.
Final score: 13 shining rainbow-colored clouds out of 12.
