Review | No Place For Bravery - Hyper Light Grifter
Videogames love opening with little dropquotes, little setup phrases that evoke the world and it setting. They'll create a garden in terroir from a healthy, cultivated selection of seeds and sprouts. The idea is you're stepping over the fence into this lavish, meticulously crafted creation of a bunch of weirdo's who get really high on how good it feels to push a button, or brief elation that chimes right in with a memorable jingle. This is how they get you: participating in art of any kind is letting the artist close the gate behind you, you have to let yourself be trapped.
Here's the trap you step into when someone's writing a review: the garden is built on all of my distractions and memories of video games, just like the developers. We've got a favourite criteria we're sticking to, an end goal is the result - a beautiful lavish garden of paradise that someone can ideally get lost in just long enough to form an opinion. The trap is closed, and you can still leave whenever you want. That's the bargain and set-up: can I make a trap so devious the victim thinks there's no way out until it's through with them?
At one point in No Place For Bravery, and over the head action 'Zelda-like' with that crafty, four-direction viewpoint where the protagonist is never quite facing directly up or down and enemies come riddled with safe spots to stand in when you figure this out - I asked myself if they could have made a beat em up anyway, if, when a third of my moves are about hitting everything around me if I needed to be able to move north, south, and east most peninsula anyway.
I feel like I have been here before…
A really long time ago there was this style of writing on the internet, largely vanished, where the kids were having fun and might include a little nod to a videogame they played growing up in an article. Places like Flying Omelette and Seanbaby had more to say about video games than the magazines at the time, in their own way where the nostalgia was exact and if something didn't measure up to it it was summarily executed for the sake of comedy. Brilliantly, and in the face of everyone reading, we all learned together that The Krion Contest isn't a very good ripoff of Capcom's Megaman.
That type of writing has, relatively speaking, crept forward into every single form of media that exists now. Television, videogames, and particularly a certain type of very polished independently published videogame. A constant extension of the hand, full of references both big and small. Eager to let the player know that these strangers, these strangers are friends. They've all had the same experiences everyone else has, including me, the player. All is familiar and comfortable.
No Place For Bravery lead me down a hill sometime near the end of the first area - a direct route straightforward where the game teaches you all of the basics and throws a sub-weapon or two at you. I crest a hill on my way to the next area, the camera hovers to my right and an abrupt scare chord shows me that....there are some blocks I currently cannot break in my way. I howl in laughter to an audience of nobody, and two screens later I'm breaking the blocks with a hammer the game immediately gives up.
Telling tales of old.
I went across a country parish on a walk one day, coming up to a majestic and familiar-looking garden. Before I could ask the gardener a single question, the screen flushed black and I heard him say, in a familiar tone: "Wake up, sleepyhead!" and as if I had to tell him that trick won’t work on me, I shot him dead right then and there.
