[Indie Theorycraft Tuesday] Pick Up Angry Yeti? [Y/N]

Today's post is all about inventory items, and how misused they often are in games. My emphasis will be on indie adventure games, but this also applies to big-budget commercial games. In fact, I think I'll start with an example from Ninja Gaiden 2, which I was playing earlier.

At the second chapter of the game, while inside a fairly tall building with several floors, you encounter a locked door, with no key in sight. A fairly common puzzle so far, right? So you climb a couple more floors, dispatching a few enemies along the way, and personally I was thinking I'd face a mini-boss or somesuch who would be carrying the key. Nope, I had to look for it in a weird looking locked box hidden somewhere in a corner, which Ryu Hayabusa (the game's protagonist) opened with a kick.

Now Ninja Gaiden 2 is a game that's difficult to take seriously, given its dialogs and its obsession with leather and bondage, but that occurrence just baffled me. It's so utterly unrealistic, who hides a card key in a box, in the middle of a building? It reminds me of all those statue-and-gem puzzles in Resident Evil 2, which took place in a Police department. Who the hell designs buildings like that? To make things even better, the card key in question was cracked. I'm hardly an expert on these things, but I'm fairly certain that a cracked card can't be used for its intended purposes. That is, to unlock electronic doors.

However, truth be told, such things aren't a big deal in action games. They only make the player roll his/her eyes for a second and then carry on with the game. On the other hand, in adventure games, where storyline and charactes are the main focus, and the player usually has to pick up every single item on sight and then click it on everything else, poorly-thought out inventory items and related puzzles can really ruin the player's immersion.

An example is needed to better illustrate this point, and I'll pick another commercial game again, before I start discussing indie games. The offender in this case is The Longest Journey, perhaps my favorite game evaaar. During one point of the game, you meet a certain crow called uh... Crow, which later on accompanies you in your travels. How do you make him accompany you? By literally picking him up, that is, using the "Pick Up" function on him, after which we are lead to presume that the heroine of the game fits him in her pockets. A very (unintentionally) absurd moment in an otherwise brilliant game, but I always thought this was due to technological and/or budget-related restraints* anyway.

Sooo... moving on to indie games, then. I'll have to name some names, and before I do that I want to say that I deeply respect anyone and everyone who has ever dedicated a (usually big) part of his everyday time to create an independent game, especially considering that most of them charge nothing for their games. Moreover, there are some problems with design you seemingly can never avoid. That being said, the issue of nonsensical inventory items and their relation to the characters is very evident here.

My first example comes from the first chapter (and seemingly last, since the game appears to have been abandoned) of a game still in development called House of Whispers. The game starts with protagonist Jenni L'Amour visiting her friend Daffy in a local diner. Cue a convenient power shortage, and Jenni finds herself all alone in the darkness, as Daffy is missing. Jenni (and the player) decide it's best to investigate the place to find out what happened to her friend. All is fine so far.

Then, it happens. As you're exploring the near areas, you come across a human heart stored in a fridge. If you decide to interact with the heart, Jenni happily obliges with picking it up.

Wait, what?

It's bad enough that there's no obvious place that Jenni would put the heart while carrying it around (she is not carrying a bag or anything of that sort) the obvious question is why.

Why would anyone, let alone a frightened girl who has just seen her best friend disappear, pick up a human heart in such a nonchalant way**? And what would she ever hope to do with it? From a meta-gaming point of view, I as the player obviously realize that the heart is going to be used in some puzzle at some point in the game, having played so many games with crazy puzzles in the past. But that's exactly when good ol' suspension of disbelief gets thrown out of the window.

Another example comes from a highly acclaimed (and rightly so) game in the indie scene, Prodigal. The game's protagonist, Jacob, is contacted by his brother Mike, who had disappeared two years ago. Jacob decides to find and help him and this journey leads him in a spooky forest, with a very ominous cabin nearby. Once inside the cabin, he finds blood stains all over the place, in such patterns as to imply that something really nasty has happened there.

So what does Mr. Average Joe, all alone in a very unfriendly environment, searching for a brother who is apparently in deep shit, do? What is one of his (and the player's) first actions? To pick up a pair of blood-soaked boots.

Who in their right mind would do such a thing? Hell, who would even go near a pair of bloody boots in some unknown house in the middle of nowhere? I won't even touch the fact that such an object has no apparent use in the game's setting. I would understand picking up an axe for future use at that point, but a pair of boots dripping with blood? That scream you're hearing, that's the suspension of disbelief which just got thrown out of the window again. Poor thing.

Generally speaking, when interacting with my environment in a game, I don't want to think "Oh, apparently there's a puzzle later on that requires this dehydrated piranha! Maybe I'll combine it with this blowtorch and that chewing gum!***" What I want to think is that my character's actions make sense and are in accordance with everything we have seen or at least alluded to about him/her so far in the game.

Naturally, this depends on the context of the game, so while I would expect a former demolitions expert to use TNT to blow up a wall as part of a puzzle, I wouldn't expect a 12-year old to do the same. Unless the 12-year old was some kind of weird prodigee with explosives, called Arzt.

* Then again, maybe I'm grasping.

** Unless they are a doctor of some sort. Or a deranged psycho, I'm not here to judge.

*** Rubber ducky puzzle in TLJ, anyone?

TL;DR version:

Remember, not everything wants to be picked up. Some things are just fine where they are.

Another way of putting it is this rule of thumb: If you wouldn't pick something up in real life, your character had better have a really good reason for doing so. Otherwise, your character won't seem realistic, and your audience might have trouble relating to him/her.

Did you miss these blocks of text? Neither did I.