Review: Uin

May 5, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

There was a point toward the end of Uin where I became stuck. I had navigated a water level and a forced-scrolling shooting segment, and was now faced with a sort of a boss battle. My character stood in a bubbling pool of water. To the right floated an enormous child, orbited by a handful of large five-pointed stars. Occasionally the stars would shoot out, then boomerang back, causing my character damage. For the life of me I couldn’t beat this boss, and I had started to despair of ever finishing the game.

To further my frustration, the last save point was several minutes earlier — before the water level, and before a sequence reminiscent of everyone’s least favorite part of Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game. You know, the bit with the coral. So each time I reached the boss, both my character’s energy and my own were fairly well drained. And each time I failed, I knew I would have to navigate that whole sequence again.

And then something happened. Well, two things happened. One, I realized that I had recently earned a new power — one that I had never used, as I had been underwater all this time. Two, I randomly hit on a new strategy that used, though did not rely on, this new power. The next time I faced the boss, the encounter was over within seconds — and I realized it wasn’t so much a boss as a random obstruction.

My fault had been in filtering the event too strictly through my own understanding of game structure. And that is the uncertain balance tread throughout this game. For all its waves to tradition, Uin is still a biggt production. It may have an inventory, and a persistent world structure, and sub-quests, and cutscenes, and a fully developed (if eccentric) control scheme, but those details are incidental to the dream logic at play.

Matt Aldridge rose to prominence as an indie game artist through the surreal and unsettling La La Land series. Each of those games uses the tools of game design to sketch out an ambiguous and unstable situation, to which the player — cast in the role of Matt Aldridge himself — may respond only in a typically bizarre and reactionary role. La La Land 5, for example, casts the player as an eager bible salesman. Over the course of five days, the player walks left to right, lobbing bibles at fish while the Amway jingle loops in the background. With each day, fewer and fewer fish are awake to receive the player’s bibles, leaving less money for the player’s food budget. As the situation becomes increasingly desperate, the music becomes distorted and the background fills with static, while the player remains trapped in a narrow range of behavior, helpless as the game’s environment descends into nightmare.

Uin hews closer to that template than it appears; its progression is decidedly eccentric, and it’s hard to find an element that exists just for the sake of tradition. Much as in outsider art, the game appropriates familiar design elements and uses them to wholly its own purposes. There is, for an extended sequence involving digging for treasure. The game grants the player the ability to dig, which calls to mind an odd mark on the ground a few screens back. Digging at that spot indeed uncovers a trinket that carries the game forward, so at this point it seems pretty clear what the game wants when it asks for more treasure. Yet it turns out the only further use for the digging ability is to scratch at the ground for coins — which the player can do anywhere. So when a man asks for several hundred coins, basically that amounts to several minutes of menial labor.

In a sense it’s all comparable to the fetch quests and RPG battles that other games like to use to pad out their run times and give a false sense of purpose and achievement. Instead, biggt tells the player he has a boring job to complete before he can continue, and the player just has to spend a few minutes getting on with it. Afterward, the player can continue to dig at leisure — though the game never asks for further investment.

In this example it’s tempting to feel that biggt is making a point about traditional reward structure, much as in La La Land 5. One of the more compelling aspects of Matt Aldridge’s work is that it’s never clear where the brilliance starts and the inanity ends. Aldridge himself likes to play up the apparent randomness of his designs, perhaps to head off criticism. If Uin serves any purpose in his body of work, it is to illustrate that Aldridge does in fact know what he’s doing as a designer. In a sense it’s a shame to lose that mystique, as it narrows interpretation of his work as a whole. And yet, it does put a bullet point by the expressive qualities in his earlier games.

Though it may not be as immediately refreshing as his earlier games, Uin is possibly Matt Aldridge’s breakout work. As of this game, Aldridge is pretty much the Kafka of indie game design. It’s a rich and thoughtful game, that questions gaming conventions while spinning its own neurotic web of ideas. Its only lingering problem is that its deceptively familiar setup may fail to signal its intent as well as Aldridge’s earlier works.

The question then becomes, what’s next for biggt? Is he going to return to the short concepts that defined his own personal style, or is he going to press further into long-form narrative, with all the architecture that implies? If he goes the latter route, I am concerned of irony creep. I feel he’s stronger when setting his own rules, rather than riffing off of established forms. Either way, biggt has now proved himself as an artist to watch.