The Friday Game: Depict1

Warning: This week's Friday Game discusses some in-game mechanics that you may wish to discover for yourself. Click here to play the game before reading the article.

Depict1 has been around for quite a while now. I only found it this week though, while I was busy looking for something else. That was fortuitous, because Kyle Pulver’s platformer is elegant and witty. It’s also appropriate, because the game has a distinctly contrarian bent, too.

At heart, the whole thing revolves around the idea of the unreliable narrator, a concept that has been knocking around in other media for centuries, but which games are still getting extremely excited about. The reason it works so well here is because games, unlike books or films, tend to kick off with tutorials – and it’s surprisingly disturbing when a tutorial starts lying to you.

From the game’s splash screen, it’s clear something’s up. The first button available to you says, “Click nothing to begin”. Once you’ve clicked that – which you will, of course - you’re then warned not to press X and C. Do that and you’re taken to the first level, where you’re informed that the arrow keys are your means of moving left and right.

They aren’t. X and C are your means of moving left and right, an idea that’s already been implanted in your brain with the knowing craftsmanship of a stage magician. From this point on, the game’s systems start to make sense: everything the narrator tells you to do is wrong. The opposite of everything it tells you to do is therefore probably right. That anti-tutorial turned out to be a pretty good tutorial after all.

Depict1 quickly builds into a fiercely clever puzzle game, throwing in enemies, mines – you’re told they’re collectables, of course – and deadly spike pits, which are actually not deadly and not spike pits. It’s pacy and devious, but – hidden passages and multiple endings notwithstanding – it isn’t particularly original in terms of its mechanics alone. Actually, perhaps a better way to put it is to say that its originality – the thing that lifts it above a dozen similarly ingenious platformers – lies in the way it turns text into a mechanic rather than relying on it as a prop or a prompt. Its narrator isn’t just reeling off a series of boring explicatory paragraphs for you to scroll through while you learn to play the game, it’s giving you genuine puzzles, and you’re already learning to play by solving them.

That’s the final contrarian touch, of course. With games being such a visual medium, we’re used to writing off the role that language can play in them, just as reviews tend to consign the story to a single paragraph near the start, mirroring the way that multiplayer – often another botched and unloved obligation - gets a single paragraph near the end. Depict1 suggests language and game mechanics can be far more harmoniously integrated. It’s fascinating to see the principle in action.

I urge you not to play it.