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A Love Letter to Games I Never Finished

Fallout 4, Doom (2013), The Wolf Among Us, Alan Wake, The Legend of Zelda, Pillars of Eternity. These are just a few of the games I never finished. I love them all for their own reasons. Fallout 4, I grew tired of after grinding away to improve my pistol made of trash for a few hours more than I liked. Doom, I liked killing Demons but I lost track of the story and ran out of Ammo on my preferred weapon. Maybe I was bad at the game. The Wolf Among Us, a great game that I played in between big games. I got distracted by some other game maybe something on Switch. I never got past episode two. Alan Wake, I watched a friend play the first half and never really could push myself to play through that half again. The Legend of Zelda, a game which I could have beaten but lost my portable emulator. I was not about to start it over. Pillars of Eternity, a game I enjoyed when I got around to it, but one that never quite grabbed me. Maybe something about the combat.

These are all games which taught me something valuable. You don’t have to like everything. You don’t have to finish something to like it. Some of these games were solid games that I’m sure a large number of people would tear me apart for saying anything negative about. And don’t have much to say about them anyway. It’s just a piece of gaming that all of us understand and feel some sense of shame or guilt about. I don’t think there’s any shame in not following through on a game. I for some reason will finish games I don’t like as often as ones I do. It feels good to conquer a particularly frustrating (Hello Dark Souls) or lousy game (Hello Duke Nukem Forever). I almost want to play them just to see if the game has anything else to offer.

I search for something that made the whole experience worth it. Mostly the answer is no. But here and there a moment of brilliance really ties things together. I wasn’t particularly enamored with Spec Ops: The Line, I thought it was pretty generic, but after hearing that it gets good, I soldiered through (pun). And wouldn’t you know it, that game really had something. I won’t spoil it, but it was a good flip of the theme and critique of the genre and it’s tropes.

And that’s what’s nice about about gaming now. If a game is truly shit, people will tell you. The trouble is that it’s still hard to know if you’ll like a game even with reviews and impressions. RIP demos. So I give things little tries and see if they are for me. I might like something enough to play half or a quarter. Maybe I’d come back to it if I was itching for the gameplay, or story. Or I would say I would and never did. Mostly that.

What’s the sense in it? It’s like a good dessert or burger or something. You savor it. I’ve ravenously devoured certain games because they were that good, but most, I find myself chipping away at over the course of months or even years. Well mostly years. It’s not that I don’t enjoy myself, I just have my fill.

The joy of not finishing games is that after it all, they are still there for you to finish. You may have to do some catching up, but they’ll be there waiting. Even if you never come back.

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Red Dead Redmeption 2: Big, But Why?

Red Dead Redemption 2 marks one of the most detailed and massive open world games to date. It’s also incredibly divisive. Its deliberate pace, dated controls, and dense menus hold many players back from truly enjoying the game. I would posit that the game suffers from a disparity between its form versus its function. Generally speaking in storytelling, the saying goes, “Form form follows function.” That’s to say whatever the purpose of your story is should be supported by the form your story takes. I first learned this from a film instructor in college. The concept boils down to figuring out what best fits your story and what will best magnify it. I learned it about film, but it works for any storytelling media.

When playing Red Dead Redemption 2 or RDR2 for brevity, I often found myself feeling like what I was doing wasn’t fun. Nothing about the situations spelled out that they wouldn’t or couldn’t be fun. Yet, here I was halfway bored a lot of time. The Function of RDR2 is to tell the story of Arthur Morgan, illuminate the pitfalls of being a career criminal, and the cycle of bandit-tude and critiquing the idea of an honorable thief, among other things. I think largely it was successful in terms of its story. However the form that the story took held it back from affecting its audience as much as it could. Being an open world, the game had to allow for huge breaks in the story, traveling through the world and finding a way to continue the story outside of the main missions. RDR 2 isn’t particularly good at any of those things. The story of the game doesn’t really benefit from being an open world game.

I will qualify that with the fact that Arthur’s character is explored in the open world pretty well. You see how he interacts with strangers, animals, etc. The world itself feels alive and massive. Yet somehow stilted by your lack of choices. Arthur always says what he does, save for a few choices. Your options in combat are limited. You follow the objectives of the missions to a tee. The game feels very funneled most of the time. It forces you into things which is a detriment to its story. For a game about the west’s dying freedom it actually makes quite a bit of sense.

Yet the issue with the story is that The Dutch Vanderlinde gang isn’t always in the shit. They start out in a rough spot, but you never get a feeling that they’re being closed in on. There’s a constant sense of the gang always seconds away from being caught almost all the time. Every big crime the game commits to starts out okay then goes wrong. That can describe almost every mission. The game has a big problem with letting the player have agency. Stealth missions always turn into shootouts. Arthur is always forced to fight. And that’s part of the strange part of this game. Inside Arthur’s journal you see a man who is deeply conflicted about his actions. An element of his character that doesn’t come to a head nearly as fast as you may expect.

He puts up with so much of Dutch basically shit talking him because the story demands it. And another issue with the game is the fact that the gang always needs money for this and that yet if you explore the game a bit and find some treasure, you’re carrying around thousands of dollars at any given time. It’s completely ignored. And that’s essentially what all the problems in this game boil down to. The game ignores the world and sometimes even the player.

The issue with this in terms of form vs function is that there are hidden functions of the story which are unclear to the player. A lot of people will say that a big aspect of the game and the story is that the world doesn’t care about you. The world doesn’t care about your morals or motives or desire to have snappy controls. It’s about what the world is. It’s a slow cruel world. The player is constantly belabored by the desired of the creators to have the world be “authentic” and deliberate. The story of the game suffers so much because of this. All of the characters of the game are fascinating and well-written. The world is exceptionally detailed. The story is impactful and intriguing, not to mention a great companion piece to the original Red Dead Redemption. Yet something along the way was lost in translation.

Compared to other open world games of recent times, RDR2 feels like a game made as an open world out of obligation, not to serve the story. Whereas games like the Witcher 3 take the world and make it packed to the gills with impactful and thoughtful content that informs Geralt’s character and story, Red Dead Redemption 2 fills its vast world with fairly samey tasks to complete for minor aesthetic changes or stat buffs and a few missions where Arthur helps someone. (Which are pretty interesting honestly.) Whereas a game like Metal Gear Solid V dialed in its controls and options in combat to really make you feel like Snake and pushed the series to a new territory (minus the missing third act train wreck), RDR2 decides instead to give the player few options and force them into gunfights and chases over and over because that’s a commentary on the cyclic nature of violence and crime. Maybe?

I think that the story of this game would have been more effective as a short-form, tight game with small open areas. The whole story felt like it was dragging because it constantly made us see how big the world was. You ride from on end of the map to the other and back a lot. And those horse rides, house only a small amount of interesting dialogue or gameplay. In general the game loves to make you do things the long way. It’s strange that this game is so clearly inspired by films and filmmaking, yet it lacks a clear understanding of editing and in particular cutting. So much of this game takes away from the story because it's too long or unimportant, yet still present. The job of an editor is to find the story and try to form everything around it, and RDR2 often loses the story because it just has too much fat left untrimmed.

There’s a certain magic in this game that comes through the cracks every once in a while. The epilogue of the game feels better than the main game because it isn’t afraid to condense time for example. However, these moments are surrounded by a sense of duty to a function of story that weighs down the whole game as a result. Yet despite all this, in technical achievement, and in story overall, Red Dead Redemption 2 is a good game. I just wish it was better.