Taking Time OFF (Pt.1)

     So, ever since I've decided to take an indefinite break from playing League of Legends, I've had a lot of spare time freed up in my days. Fortunately, this has allowed me to spend more time being productive, more time writing/doodling, and more time outside with my friends. However, I am still a college-aged guy who's admittedly sort of a nerd... so there is still an itch to play some videogames. However, since I don't want to fall into the same negative feedback loop that happened with League, where I'd repeatedly cycle feeling good and bad about games, I wanted to shake things up a little bit.

    I had recently had a lengthy conversation with my buddy Blake about videogames in general, and how we can categorize them into a few different groups. Amidst a few other categories, the two groups we discussed most were "round-based" games against "art" games. Round-based games are more competitive, high-action, and revolve around playing "rounds" of games that last anywhere between 10-35 minutes each. While these games have a lot of replayable value, and usually involve cooperation with friends and teammates, these are typically the most addicting games, which eventually end up draining a lot of your free time, one example being League of Legends. Art games are a little vaguer in definition, where it's usually a single-player game with a larger emphasis on creation within the game, or a singleplayer game with a larger emphasis on the art style, story, or philosophy of the game. An example of an "art game" would be one of my favorite games, DELTARUNE, with its emphasis on storytelling and deterministic philosophy.

    After this conversation and my recent revelation about League, I decided I needed to try out a new "art" game, so I could play a more relaxing, but inspiring game that wouldn't take up too much free time or get me agitated. To find one, I went through an interview with Toby Fox, creator of DELTARUNE, to see if there were any games he cites as an inspiration for his work. Immediately, I kept seeing one title in particular pop up: OFF. I had the vaguest idea about what OFF was about, and some images of a white batter figure, but otherwise I was completely blind, so I figured it would be worth checking out.

    To give a brief summary of OFF, you control a serious black-and-white figure called the Batter, who has the appearance of a traditional American baseball player, armed with, you guessed it, a baseball bat. An important distinction to make is that You, the player, are explicitly a separate entity from the Batter. In the world of this game, You are a controlling presence that the characters are aware of, and you use the Batter as your medium of interacting with the world (this is important later). Regardless, the Batter says that he is on a "sacred mission", which is to purify the world. As the player, you must guide the Batter through the four zones of the OFF world as he purifies the zones on his quest, and throughout the game you meet the Judge, who is a cat character that teaches you how to play the game, and Zacharie, who sells you items and weapons throughout each zone.

    Again, I went in knowing absolutely nothing about this game, but I was captivated by the strange world and its characters pretty quickly. The gameplay is divided into two parts: puzzles and fights. If I'm being honest, the puzzles were by far my favorite part of the actual game experience, because the fight system itself is pretty boring, involving old-school RPG mechanics like turn-based combat and using a menu to select attacks/abilities instead of taking a more active approach in fighting. I did like how unique it felt visually, though, with its interesting artstyle giving each new enemy a eerie, twisted look and the striking contrasting colors used in its design. The sprite (image) work in this game is really cool, since every character and enemy in the game was sketched on paper in real life first, and then the sketch was pixelated directly (instead of being used as reference for pixel artists, like most games), which gave every image a creepy, rough feeling. Even for people who aren't fans of videogame spriting, I hope that this subversion of the image process is as cool to them as it was to me, since it felt really creative!

    But then there's the music. By far, the music of OFF was one of the parts of the game that enraptured me completely and immediately- specifically one song: Pepper Steak. For every game I've played, there's always an "Aha!" moment, where I can pinpoint the exact moment I started to like playing it. With Minecraft, it was building my first house, with League, it was the first game my teammates were yelling about how great I played, and with OFF, it was the first time I heard Pepper Steak, which is the regular battle theme song that plays throughout the game. As a song on its own, it's abnormally catchy, repeating the same melody over and over, almost hypnotically, with strange instruments and chopped up swing samples played awkwardly, almost like pieces of a puzzle that were forced together. The song feels off (hehe, get it?) and creepy- you feel like there's something wrong with it, but you can't really identify what or why. In terms of the song making me feel things alone, it does a phenomenal job.

    In the context of the game, however, this song skyrockets from being a solid battle theme to being an incredibly immersive aspect of the game, something that isn't just a part of the game, but something that ropes You into being a part of the game with it, making you feel the things the in-game character does too. As mentioned earlier, the game focuses on the Batter's quest to purify the world, which manifests in him walking from location to location fighting the spirits and ghosts that infest the world, over and over. The game's repetitive play loop can get boring, yes, but it's meant to be. Monotonous, endless, mechanical purifying of the ghosts- while you may be engaged the first dozen fights, over time your excitement dulls, and it turns each new fight into a let's get this over with mentality, divorcing your empathy and feeling from the fight as you go through the motions yet another time, without question. It turns fighting/purification/slaughter into a chore that you complete without even thinking about why you do it, and the song that plays throughout the entire transformation? Pepper Steak, with its hypnotic melodies wearing you down as you hear the bass beating you down, the melody worming its way into your ear, focused on finishing the fight as soon as you can so you get a moment of rest from this song, only to run into the same cycle a few minutes later.

    If this sounds tiring and depressing, don't worry! I promise I had fun! But it's fun in the same way watching a tragic play is- you get so invested in the feeling the art piece evokes within you, by design, that you end up walking out of the theater feeling emotionally impacted. OFF, similarly, locks the player into the monotonous cycle of purification that, instead of getting the player more invested/engaged, only makes them less invested in the act they carry out. The entire point of the game is designed to make you bored, miserable, and mindlessly carry out violence, because that is what the Batter is feeling as he continues on his nigh-endless quest to purify the world. Who said that clearing the world of spirits would be easy?

    This was all just a space to talk about how much I enjoyed the design of the game, and its effectiveness as an art piece. I really want to talk about the story of the game, specifically its ending, but that'll be a pretty long ramble, so I'm saving it for another blog post. Beyond that, however, I really hope that by reading this part of my OFF experience, you can understand and appreciate the thought and effort that goes into making some videogames. I am of the opinion that games can absolutely be considered works of art with genuine thought put into it, not just colorful digital time-wasters. If there's any takeaway you have from this blog post, I hope it is to be open to art in any medium it comes to you in. And beyond medium, remember that art can evoke feelings beyond simply happy/sad. Search for projects that evoke complicated feelings, uncomfortable feelings, and through that, maybe you learn more about your own thought-process. See you in the next OFF post!