It has an extra e at the end. Naissance-ee? Dunno. At the beginning of the game you fall down a hole after being chased by a floating space thing. You find yourself trapped in a series of giant empty megastructures. NaissanceE, the game is called NaissanceE. I'm talking about NaissanceE. It's kind-a bug and kind-a snack.
Naissance is the French word for born. I suppose if you're born you are a naissance-ee. Is it a French pun on borne? We may never know.
Today we're going to have a look at NaissanceE, an indie art game from 2014. It was developed by a chap called Mavros Sedeño. As with Gris it's a one-off. The developer hasn't made anything since. It began as a mod for Far Cry, using that game's engine, but it was polished up and released as a full product with the Unreal engine instead. Is it any good?
It's so-so. It starts off well, collapses, then gets better. Sedeño is a professional level designer, and NaissanceE feels like a disjointed bag of ideas that he couldn't use during his day job strung together one after the other. It's intermittently clever, but also very frustrating. There's a bit near the end where some objects dance a waltz around you that made me forgive some of its flaws. I wish more of the game had been like that.
NaissanceE reminds me a bit of The Unfinished Swan, in the sense that they both begin with a clever gameplay idea that isn't complicated enough to support a complete game, and then they turn into a grab-bag of minigames. Swan starts off with the player navigating through a featureless void by firing a paint gun at the walls; NaissanceE has starkly-lit black and white platforming sequences that ask the player to navigate through a three-dimensional world that looks like a two-dimensional silhouette. It's a clever idea but not enough for a whole game.
I'll write about Swan separately. NaissancE essentially has four different components. There are the shadowy platform parts; there are lengthy sequences where you have to explore a huge environment; there are some simple puzzle sequences that involve sliding blocks or manipulating lights to clear a path; and there are platforming sequences that involve altered gravity or fans or rhythmic jumping.
The game has a mechanic where you have to periodically take a breath while running, so there are a couple of rhythmic sequences where you run, breathe, jump, run, breathe, jump etc. The breathing-running-jumping parts and the shadows feel the most developed, the rest of the game feels like filler, although ironically the exploration sequences are the thing that the reviewers noticed most. They're the bits I will remember.
The shot above isn't just a skybox, it's an actual environment. You can only explore the suspended walkways in the distance, but the game doesn't cheat with its depiction of vast scale.
On the positive side the game is very stylish. A chap on Discogs.com once described the music of Thomas Koner as sounding like "mechanical insects trapped in an air ventilator on the surface of a giant metal moon", and NaissanceE captures that kind of atmosphere really well. It even has giant cooling vents spewing steam into the sterile air. NaissanceE is one of the few games I have played that has a smell - a giant train station, a mixture of dust and soot.
It reminded me of some ancient 8-bit and 16-bit 3D games, such as Driller or Damocles, in which you were entirely alone in a giant space made up of untextured polygons. The draw distance was usually very short, but they had a sense of scale. They felt like a complete world inside your computer. Several worlds in the case of Damocles.
Unfortunately NaissanceE's technology is starting to show its age. The shadows are flickery and the use of ambient occlusion is unsubtle. It would benefit greatly from a remaster. I was struck by the relative conservatism of the level design. The maps are huge, but unlike for example Antichamber - which was released a year earlier - the geometry is mostly conventional. There are a couple of tricky bits with portals but the game was less mindbending than I expected. I wonder if it's because the developer was still getting to grips with the engine?
The game was never ported for any platform other than the PC. If you want to play it on the PlayStation you're out of luck. The nearest console equivalent I can think of is Bound, which is a lot more colourful. Or Manifold Garden, which I wrote about a few months ago.
The game also does the whole grunge quiet/loud thing where you walk from a small corridor into a gigantic space and it's like "no" and "whoah" and "no". As with the distant mountains of Battlezone the actual play area is much smaller than the environments, but it's still a fascinating place to get lost in.
Bad stuff? Well, the big problem is the game side of things. The platforming starts off well enough, with a sequence where you have to descend a giant wall by riding the backs of polygonal slugs. It's clunky but imaginative. Some of the running-breathing-jumping-running-breathing sequences are also solid, but the player character's motion is awkward at the best of times, and I found myself falling and dying because the controls felt stiff. Neither realistic nor stylised, just stiff.
The platforming reaches a nadir with the sequence pictured above, in which you have to negotiate a bunch of turbines in a series of ventilation tunnels. The rotating axles throw you off; the air blows you back; you have to avoid the fan blades, and eventually leap from one universal joint to another, and to cap it all you only have one chance to do it, because the air pressure gradually increases, throwing you back to your doom. It's needlessly sadistic and feels like part of a completely different game.
And it doesn't work, because the wind continually pinned me against the ceiling so that I had to restart the run. Apparently the game goes wobbly unless it runs at exactly 60fps. I also kept getting stuck on things, or bouncing off things, but perhaps that's just me being clumsy.
One complaint levelled at Journey and Abzu etc is that they're not much fun to play, because you can't lose and the action sequences are there to keep you entertained rather than challenge you. For most of its length NaissanceE is like that, but the fans suddenly appeared and brought me to a crashing halt. Bear in mind that I've completed Manic Miner. I've completed Map24 of Hell Revealed. I finished about three-quarters of Ori and the Blind Forest before something distracted me. I once had breakfast and dinner in two different McDonalds eighty miles apart and was order #000 in both of them. I wish had kept the receipts. That actually happened. I was order #000 in both of them.
Just being order #000 was impressive enough. But to be order #000 twice in consecutive meals in two completely different restaurants eight miles apart was incredible. I suppose the odds depend on the footfall in each restaurant, which is probably linked to the time of day. There would be more orders in the morning and at lunchtime, but does that make getting double-zeroes more likely, or less likely? Do the restaurants reset to #000 when they open, or do they roll over from the day before? There is so much in this world that I don't know.
I was talking about NaissanceE. The fan section almost made me give up because it felt like a cruel joke at my expense. Elsewhere the game has a gag where you are warned you not to go down a certain path, and if you carry on the game throws you back to the desktop. These two ideas might have worked well together, if perhaps the fan section was also an elaborate dead-end, and you were supposed to find a clever way around it.
But, no, they're just two disconnected ideas that don't mean anything individually and don't link together.
The second problem is that the next section, "Deeper Into Madness", really makes it obvious that the developer didn't have a central theme for the game. NaissanceE is is just a set of level ideas glued together, without a story or characterisation.
It's a problem because it feels unsatisfying, as if it was an interactive 64kb demo. NaissanceE is often described as an art game, but it's essentially posh street graffiti. It has the form of art, the surface appearance of art, but it's just pretty visuals. FAR: Lone Sails had pretty visuals, but underneath the looks there was a bittersweet meditation on mortality. NaissanceE in contrast has nothing.
I mean, yes, the universe is an arbitrary series of events with no inherent meaning, and in that respect NaissanceE is more honest than Journey, but the game has enough wisps of a storyline that I suspect it wasn't intended to be completely abstract. There is an implication that the environment of NaissanceE is a little bit like the alien hotel at the end of 2001 - a construction intended to mimic human habitation - and that you eventually outstay your welcome, but it's very vague.
