Games Aren't Numbers

I recently posted a review of Cursed Mountain so I'll spare this blog all of those details about my opinion on it. Basically though, Cursed Mountain is a game that tried so hard to make me like it but constantly stuttered and tripped over itself in the process. To me it represents what could have been a great game, but for whatever reasons failed. Its story had some great exposition, but sadly none of its more interesting themes ever developed. A competent combat system was designed but was never integrated into the gameplay in a meaningful way. The game lives now in my mind as something that was both fantastically good and deplorably bad. Even though the game is about Buddhism it is more like the yin and yang, equally good and bad, every good part has a flaw, and every bad part has a good touch to it.

Ironically, if I had to sum up most of my dislikes about Cursed Mountain in a word I would say “videogamey.” Cursed Mountain is something that dares to be different from what we as gamers expect. As much as I like conventions and tropes, I also like games that do put and honest effort into breaking free of them. Cursed Mountain's originality is great while it lasts, and when the creativity runs out the game falls back onto clichés.

An ancient fish once grew legs instead of fins and crawled onto land, but didn't have the instincts to survive so it waded back into the ocean where it found that it couldn't swim with the rest of the fish either. Cursed Mountain is forging a new genre of interactive entertainment, but it flails around going nowhere and eventually retreats back to simpler mechanics. Maybe one day it will be seen as a species of game that evolved ever so slightly in the wrong direction and quickly went extinct.

I'm fascinated by the tragedy that is Cursed Mountain. Like a true tragic hero it had everything going for it until it fell to its doom. Now that its act is over, my hope is that Deep Silver recognizes the mistakes it made and learns from them in any future games. Or, looking beyond Deep Silver, I hope that all designers interested in this type of game will play it and use it as an example.

In 1975 Alejandro Jodorowsky was the first to attempt to film Dune. He employed only the greatest talents available for the project. He envisioned an epic ten hour cinematic masterpiece, incomparable to any science fiction movie so far. Ultimately however his project was doomed to collapse. Thus the venture failed in the sense that he never created a finished product, but Jodorowsky doesn't necessarily see it as a failure. The journey is the destination, as the saying goes, and he describes how his unseen Dune was more of a success than we may percieve:

Later, the visual aspect of Star Wars resembled our style. To make Alien, they invited Moebius, Foss, Giger, O'Bannon, etc. The project announced to American the possibility of carrying out science fiction films to large spectacle and out of the scientific rigour of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Dune project changed our life. When it was over, O'Bannon entered a psychiatric hospital. Afterwards, he returned to the fight with rage and wrote twelve scripts which were refused. The thirteenth one was Alien.

Like him, all those who took part in the rise and fall of the Dune project learned how to fall one and one thousand times with savage obstinacy until learning how to stand. I remember my old father who, while dying happy, said to me: "My son, in my life, I triumphed because I learned how to fail".

The developers at Deep Silver worked hard on Cursed Mountain, and their talent is immensely visible. Unfortunately Cursed Mountain's has to many weaknesses to hold up the weight of its strengths. It's obviously more of a success than Jodorowsky's Dune was, after all it was completed. But for every moment the game's design succeeds it fails at another moment. Hope however lies in the possibility that those failures may someday lead to a success. What happens at Deep Silver, and the industry as an entirety, may depend on what we learn from them. Is Cursed Mountain a stepping stone to eventual masterpieces? As the yin and yang symbolizes, good can always come from the bad.