This morning we lost connection with the servers at Disney, so I used the time to play Proteus. Wow! What a lovely little game. I only managed to play it for 20 minutes but it wasn’t what I was expecting. You wonder around a little island filled with ambient, abstract sound and then you find a story unfolding around you. There is a lot more atmosphere here than in many AAA titles - a testament to the rejection of industry standards that the indie movement represents.
This is also very much the kind of game I’m interested in building at the moment. Or one of the types at least; Small sandbox worlds that have a very limited population of things in them, but those things are fully realised, and the worlds although small, are also perfect because of this. Too many games are packed with many things that aren’t particularly interesting. I find the idea of worlds with a few well developed elements in much more appealing. Telling the story of a changing world, or simply telling a story around the player is something games are really brilliant at doing. Experiencing this story is also something that simply can’t be done in any other art-form.
EDIT - I have now finished it, and although visually striking I was disappointed to find that there is in fact no emergent storyline, and no real point to the thing at all. There is no hint to any kind of meaning however abstractly sign-posted. Shame.
