Thirty Flights of Loving, seventh release of the "Citizen Abel" series, launched on August 20 of 2012 by Brendon Chung's indie studio Blendo Games, is a walking simulator or game-film that tells a story in 30 minutes or less.
In the time that will take you to experience this narrative you will not find a deep plot, no sub-text, no message behind, the gameplay is above all lineal and basic, the graphics are quite obnoxious. The aesthetic is coherent between objects and people, and so forth, but they are not elaborately real and rather gleamingly simplistic, there is a lack of voice-acting which is replaced by a quirky and bizarre mumble à la Banjo-Kazooie, and first and foremost a large quantity of disorganized and chaotic sequences with only a small amount of sense. Until you start tying up the loose ends.
So, how could it be so relevant to the foundation of vidya as a serious platform in which art, like an edifice of audiovisual interaction, will arise to entomb the capitalistic desire of entertainment as a tool for profitable alienation?
In cinema, just like it could happen in video games, there are some tools of which you can take advantage to create a more poetic, fast, vivid, sad, etcetera, ambient to the spectator. Geometry, composition, silence or music, and the length of a scene can create different emotions, interpretations and/or meanings of what the author is trying to tell by means of what is showed in the frames. Here Chung does not apply all of the previously said, but he does use of something really important: Montage.
In Dziga Vertov's experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film "Man with a Movie Camera" the entire plot is told by montage, without dialogues and yet having a thread that connects the sequences providing a notable consistence.
This mixture of Wong Kar-wai and Tarantino is a totally rich adventure in the way of how things should be told, grabbing a flat event recreated throughout history on countless occasions and giving it a fresh twist (although maybe if the story was longer it wouldn't have worked) from were a lot of devs could grab a tip or two.
In the time that will take you to experience this narrative you will not find a deep plot, no sub-text, no message behind, the gameplay is above all lineal and basic, the graphics are quite obnoxious. The aesthetic is coherent between objects and people, and so forth, but they are not elaborately real and rather gleamingly simplistic, there is a lack of voice-acting which is replaced by a quirky and bizarre mumble à la Banjo-Kazooie, and first and foremost a large quantity of disorganized and chaotic sequences with only a small amount of sense. Until you start tying up the loose ends.
So, how could it be so relevant to the foundation of vidya as a serious platform in which art, like an edifice of audiovisual interaction, will arise to entomb the capitalistic desire of entertainment as a tool for profitable alienation?
In cinema, just like it could happen in video games, there are some tools of which you can take advantage to create a more poetic, fast, vivid, sad, etcetera, ambient to the spectator. Geometry, composition, silence or music, and the length of a scene can create different emotions, interpretations and/or meanings of what the author is trying to tell by means of what is showed in the frames. Here Chung does not apply all of the previously said, but he does use of something really important: Montage.
In Dziga Vertov's experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film "Man with a Movie Camera" the entire plot is told by montage, without dialogues and yet having a thread that connects the sequences providing a notable consistence.
This mixture of Wong Kar-wai and Tarantino is a totally rich adventure in the way of how things should be told, grabbing a flat event recreated throughout history on countless occasions and giving it a fresh twist (although maybe if the story was longer it wouldn't have worked) from were a lot of devs could grab a tip or two.
2 Comments
Glad you liked it, I wrote this quite a few years ago and I'd like to re work it a bit, to be honest, but it more or less gets to the point of why this video game is great.
minusforever
11 months ago