At the end of October a special little game arrived that went unnoticed in almost all the forums. It’s about Caretakera creation of Double Fine (the studio behind the daring saga Psychonauts), whose premise is worth sitting down before reading: the game has no dialogue and in it the player plays a living lighthouse (the kind that warns sailors) who mysteriously wakes up on a dream island. Accompanied by an enormous green bird called Twig, the lighthouse, with his new four crab-like legs, must cross vast landscapes transformed by strange corruption as he climbs towards the map’s central mountain to discover the secret of it all.
Go ahead like this Caretaker It’s a good game. It’s not the magnificent Voyageit’s not the recent one Sword of the Seabut it’s a refreshing aesthetic experience worth investing four hours of your life. Four hours in which you remain absorbed by the proposal and fascinated by the courage of its premise. And yet, Caretaker It was a resounding failure.
It was a failure for several reasons. Firstly, the relevance of the format adds to the bizarre premise: wouldn’t a proposal so based on aesthetics and in which interaction is so limited, not have worked better as a film, and not as a game? A priorian adventure about a lighthouse with legs who travels the world accompanied by a giant bird and dispels the darkness with his light, would not be out of place as a premise of a silent film style flowor even (with these premises they have become a creative reference throughout the world) as a possible new Pixar film.
But returning to the interactive experience itself, Caretaker It’s a game that doesn’t make everyone want to play at first. The artistic value is commendable, but to put it badly and quickly is bite game, because the mechanics are minimal and sometimes complicated to sublimate. In the second half he steps on the accelerator, but in the early stages the game is slow, the lighthouse’s walk is awkward (bad idea in a game that involves watching a lighthouse walk) and in general he has little consideration for the new player.
On the corporate front, many have also highlighted Microsoft’s incompetence in making its titles relevant. Two of this year’s biggies arrived in October for Game Pass: Ninja Gaiden 4 AND The external worlds 2. And this November Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. Among those giants, hidden, Caretakerwhich as a metaphor for the game itself isn’t bad but as a commercial strategy it makes you reconsider a bit.
There are mitigating factors, because there is another factor to take into consideration: the recent price increase of Game Pass has led many people to unsubscribe from Microsoft’s on-demand service, so a certain rush when it comes to releasing titles is understandable. to compensate. But this has been done at the expense of the authentic airspace that every creative work deserves; those first days when the first reactions are seen and word of mouth can have an effect. It’s not something that just impacted Caretakerbut it is clear that this title has been baited. It’s possible that this sudden rush is the poison that is destroying the entire cultural ecosystem as we knew it, but it’s a shame that things like Caretaker and many other risky proposals which, in the frenetic world in which we live, risk stumbling. A risk that, logically, multiplies if the person walking is a silent beacon.
