When you stare into the void of pandemic-riddled 2021, the Covid virus stares back at you. Or something.
Celebrating anti-escapism becoming a genre in- and of itself, welcome to the stage @Wiper...
The Hipster-Nietzsche Award 2021
A Whole Lot of Nothing
There is a person I know — let’s call her Jo, as that’s her name — who I love dearly. She is smart, and kind, and fun, and generally A Good Time. She also has a passionate hatred for a specific example of narrative media: the ‘nothing happens’ genre. Coming of age classic The Breakfast Club? Nothing happens, a waste of time. Studio Ghibli magnum opus Only Yesterday? Nothing happens, awful. If your story doesn’t Go Places, Jo has no interest in your work.
By Jo’s metric, 2021 has been a terrible year for games. Fortunate for me, then, that I love a bit of nothingness! Let’s celebrate in no particular order the five most delightful games in which nothing happens that came out last year:
Unpacking needs no introduction.
Its minimalist storytelling, off-beat high concept, incredible foley work have all drawn praise across the gaming spectrum. If Tetris turned arranging items into a tense puzzle, Unpacking converts the activity into a tactile act of meditation and method of storytelling. And best of all, you can get an achievement in the game within two minutes of starting it and then immediately write it off as worthless; ideal!
Seriously though, it’s good. A slice of life story set over the course of years, told in the tiniest of snippets, it's a delightfully off-beat approach to environmental storytelling that more than achieves its aims.
PS: if you don’t know what a thing is, it’s probably a vegetable peeler.
Also in the slice of life genre, though rather more in need of introduction, is No Longer Home.
No Longer Home applies magical realism and branching dialogue to the ever-enjoyable genre of 'People Graduate And It’s Kind Of Sad, Man'. Effectively a visual novel with an interesting camera angle, No Longer Home touched a nerve in me in a way few games have. And not just because I too Graduated Once* and it was Kind Of Sad!
The game is chock-full of interactions and discussions that rang unusually true: the overly-earnest interactions between friends; the social awkwardness of larger groups and less-known acquaintances; the deep dives into feelings of worthlessness and isolation; and the fun of unpicking one’s own experience and understanding of gender and sexuality. Over the course of the game, nothing happens, and everything happens.
Truly, the graduate experience. It's a coming of age story based on that later coming of age; not the rather oversaturated high-school setting beloved of comics and video games, but that awkward adult-to-more-adult period. I loved it.
*not-so-humblebrag: twice, actually
You know what a lot of people who are in the process of coming of age like to do? DJ and work retail, obviously. And lo, Life is Strange: True Colors — Wavelengths makes its appearance.
And yes, I specifically mean Wavelengths; the somewhat-maligned DLC to True Colors, not True Colors itself. Not that I don’t like True Colors (I do, a lot), but while it is a lot of things, a game in which nothing happens it is not. It even has deaths! Imagine that.
Wavelengths, by contrast, features no deaths. Except possibly that of sense, when your player character, having grumbled about the awful, out of date music selection their ‘Modern Rock Music’ radio station has been offering, immediately replaces it with the ultra-modern music of, um, Sigur Rós's Sæglopur. Hmm.
Chrono-blindness aside, Wavelengths is a delightful study of a solitary character, in a solitary location, over the course of a year.
Absolutely.
Nothing.
Happens.
I loved it. I loved playing as this dorky, broken character whose personality is utterly alien to me. I had a great time being The Worst DJ and The Worst Dating App User and an Actually Somewhat Competent Record Store Clerk. I played through the two-three hour experience in one sitting, and found the whole thing warm and affirming. The whole thing felt like an exercise in indulgence; the kind of small-scale, monofocussed storytelling usually restricted to tiny indie games with no budget; so to get to experience it with such niceties as Voice Acting and Licensed Music was quite the pleasure. More of this, please.
Okay, that’s quite enough games from ‘publishers’ with ‘money’; let’s go to a game too small too fail: Adios.
If anything, this is a game in which A Lot happens, as you enjoy spending a (last) day in the life of a pig farmer who doesn’t want to be a Convenient Body Disposal Service for the mob any more. Talk to your friend! Shovel manure! Phone your son! Milk a goat! Play horseshoes! Feed a horse! Make curry! Literally die! Gosh.
Adios proves you can make a slice of life story filled entirely with little ‘nothing’ tasks, and yet have the thing be filled with drama and meaning, it’s the best, most interesting gangster-adjacent story video games have yet managed. It also achieved the impossible and made me appreciate a narrative centred around a deadbeat dad, without making me at any point think “oh for fuck’s sake, not another fucking deadbeat dad sympathy-a-thon, can’t we just accept that most deadbeat dads are actually arseholes and we don’t need more stories trying to make us feel sorry for them”. So, you know, good job there.
I guess I should also mention that Adios has great voice acting, entirely disproving my earlier comment about zero-budget games lacking such things. So sue me.
In fact, sue me twice over, because here comes a sumptuous indie game elevated by its licensed soundtrack! I am, of course, talking about Sable.
“But Wiper!”, I hear you cry. “Sable can’t be a nothing game! It’s sci-fi! It has hoverbikes!”. Ah, you sweet summer child. You buffoon. Do you know what Jo said after watching the superlative Moon? Here’s a hint: it wasn’t “wow, that was a film in which so many things occurred!”. Similarly, she would be singularly unimpressed by the level of activity in Sable.
Sable, you see, aside from being the most flagrant lift of Jean Giraud’s world building and art style that one could imagine, is the ultimate Nothing game. It truly learned the lesson that Shadow of the Colossus taught; the same one that Breath of the Wild almost grasped: that barren spaces are a) hella evocative, and b) actually the best part of open world games.
Your game could be filled with Exciting Action Encounters, like [insert Rockstar open world game here]. It could ensure that no space is left unfilled like [insert Ubisoft open world game here]. Or, as it happens, it could not.
It could, in fact, allow you to delight in exploring a strange space. It could have the dominant experience of your exploration be that of (gorgeous) nothingness; a world as empty as it is mysterious. Have each moment of actual discovery — a rare puzzle here, an even rarer bit of exposition there — be a rare pleasure, a rush of endorphins after the laborious struggle of traversing the world. It could, that is to say, be Sable.
Sable is a game without threat, without urgency, and is all the more powerful for it. Exploring its dunes as the wind roars, only to give way as you begin to approach one of the rare hospitable spaces and Japanese Breakfast’s soundtrack rises to envelope you, is a feeling unmatched in any other game. This is a game which understands the drama of a sunrise, and it wants you to understand it too.
Also, I gave my hoverbike insect legs and an engine that sounds like one of those cards you’d stick on your bicycle spokes as a kid. What more could you want?
