Playing through The Silver Case with only the knowledge that it is a Visual Novel and one of Suda's early works, one doesnt expect to find MGS2 conceived years before the MGS2 we actually know today. It's hard to adjust to The Silver Case if you never have played Visual Novels before. You will spend hours reading lines of text and dialogue, occasionally moving around a bit to find the next set of text and dialogue, watching static portraits of the characters with the rare still showing you what is indeed happening, and a puzzle once in a blue moon to solve, all while you repeatedly mash the spacebar to move the story along.
Playing TSC, questions of what constitutes a videogame and if VNs can even fit that role inevitably arise, and sometimes the lack of interactivity or choice makes one wonder why you arent simply just reading a book. But like Kojima, Suda understands that when the player controls a character in an interactive medium, a symbiotic relationship is created between both, constantly shifting from one to the other and to what's inbetween, and he takes advantage of that knowledge to play with complex postmodern ideas of identity, your place in the world, the search for truth, the age of information, purpose, freedom of choice, and so much more.
Suda's writting style is wholly unique, something fans of Killer7 and NMH can testify to, filling TSC with a lot of dense questions and mysteries delivered in very obtuse and uncoventional ways, most of which you will never find the answers to, and a vast and diverse cast of characters with their own quirks and weirdness, and seemingly incomplete and questionable arcs. And he delivers these with just enough interactive input from the player, while at the same examining said player's role and what that implies, that by the end of the game, the existence of TSC as a videogame is totally justified. What starts as a cynical and edgy conspiracy about an elusive worshiped mass murderer, slowly leads into a surreal abstract canvas where the existence of a main villain is no longer as certain as it was at the beginning, becoming instead a heartfelt and empathetic mirror held to the videogame players of the modern age. A game truly ahead of it's time.
Playing TSC, questions of what constitutes a videogame and if VNs can even fit that role inevitably arise, and sometimes the lack of interactivity or choice makes one wonder why you arent simply just reading a book. But like Kojima, Suda understands that when the player controls a character in an interactive medium, a symbiotic relationship is created between both, constantly shifting from one to the other and to what's inbetween, and he takes advantage of that knowledge to play with complex postmodern ideas of identity, your place in the world, the search for truth, the age of information, purpose, freedom of choice, and so much more.
Suda's writting style is wholly unique, something fans of Killer7 and NMH can testify to, filling TSC with a lot of dense questions and mysteries delivered in very obtuse and uncoventional ways, most of which you will never find the answers to, and a vast and diverse cast of characters with their own quirks and weirdness, and seemingly incomplete and questionable arcs. And he delivers these with just enough interactive input from the player, while at the same examining said player's role and what that implies, that by the end of the game, the existence of TSC as a videogame is totally justified. What starts as a cynical and edgy conspiracy about an elusive worshiped mass murderer, slowly leads into a surreal abstract canvas where the existence of a main villain is no longer as certain as it was at the beginning, becoming instead a heartfelt and empathetic mirror held to the videogame players of the modern age. A game truly ahead of it's time.
2 Comments
Thanks, much appreciated :)
Edin
3 years ago