Today we're going to have a look at Naissancee, an indie art game from 2014. Naissance is the French word for born, so I suppose if you're born you are a naissance-ee. That might be why it has an extra E at the end. Is it a French pun on borne? We may never know.
The game 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 is a bit like 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.
NaissancE essentially has four different components. There are the shadowy platform parts; there are lengthy sequences where the player has 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 the player has to periodically take a breath while running, so there are a couple of rhythmic sequences with running, breathing, jumping, running, breathing, jumping etc. The breathing-running-jumping parts and the shadowy levels feel the most developed, the rest of the game - including the exploration parts - feels like filler, although ironically the exploration sequences are the thing the reviewers noticed most. They're the bits I will remember.
The image 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 a clutch of ancient 8-bit and 16-bit 3D games, such as Driller or Damocles, in which the player was entirely alone in a giant space made up of untextured polygons. They felt like a whole world inside the 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 also 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 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 the player walks 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 the player has 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 the player has to negotiate a bunch of turbines in a series of ventilation tunnels. It's no fun at all. The rotating axles throw the player off; the air blows the player back back; the blades themselves are lethal, and to cap it all the player only has one chance to do it, because the air pressure gradually increases until the tunnel is impassable. This section is needlessly sadistic and feels like part of a completely different game.
And it doesn't work very well, because the wind continually pinned me against the ceiling, and 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 the player can't lose and the action sequences are entertaining rather than challenging. For most of its length NaissanceE is like that, but the fan level 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 eighty 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. But the point is that I am a superior sort. I walk in eternity. The world is at most my equal, mostly my lesser. And yet even I had trouble with NaissanceE's fans.
Elsewhere the game has a gag where the player is warned not to go down a certain path, because it eventually crashes to the desktop (and it does). This should have been funny, but after the fan level I was in a bad mood, so it was just irritating.
The game's 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 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. The kind of council-approved graffiti that brings in tourists. The video game equivalent of a mural of a baby holding the planet Earth and crying. It has the form of art, the surface appearance of art, but it's just pretty visuals. FAR: Lone Sails also had pretty visuals, but underneath the looks there was a bittersweet meditation on mortality. NaissanceE 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 the player eventually outstays their welcome, but it's very vague.
