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Zero Punctuation Transcript
Viewfinder really impressed me when I saw it at GDC, and at the time my back really hurt from running between hotel rooms like an amnesiac wifeswapper and I was in the early stages of complementary muesli bar overdose, so it was starting from the back foot. It was a sort of Superliminal situation where the first time you see the game do its thing you react like a very credulous person watching David Blaine standing on one foot. “OH MY GOD HOW DID YOU DO THAT. HOW DID YOU BE SLIGHTLY OFF BALANCE FOR THREE SECONDS.” In Viewfinder’s case, you pick up a 2D picture, you hold it in front of your face, and then the world becomes the picture. It’s hard to do it justice in text, but trust me, it’s like being smacked across the eyes with a very interesting book. And then you get a polaroid camera and take your own pictures with which to solve lateral thinking puzzles – oh, forget those stupid graphics card demos showing off how accurately they can depict some blank-eyed hoojimatwat’s split ends and acne scarring, this is what makes ME say “Now that’s impressive tech.” But my fear was that, again like a Superliminal situation, that once we had the full game in our hands we’d play through it once and then go “Right, what’s for tea?” and never think about it again once we’re eating our evening sausage roll.
‘Cos of course the high water mark for this sort of thing is Portal, once you’ve gotten over the groundbreaking physics and game mechanics there’s a sense of humour and interesting plot twist to catch you on the follow-through, and sadly Viewfinder doesn’t have that kind of hook to keep our eyes from wandering sausage rollwards. The plot, or rather, flimsy framework through which to present several lateral thinking puzzles, is that we are exploring a virtual world created by a genius nerd’s best friend treehouse club in order to find a solution for climate change, proving that even advanced future society has failed to learn the lesson of expecting much from overly moneyed tech bros who’ve read too many Neal Stephensen books. And frankly it just wasn’t interesting. There’s a bit early on where you briefly leave the simulation and glimpse a dying world with a sky like a seriously neglected aquarium with a bucket of Cheeto dust thrown in it, and that was intriguing, but we never follow up on it and just spend the rest of the game listening to audio logs of smug people comparing their Settlers of Catan skills.
All the characters are just kinda irritating, especially your main support NPC who keeps talking with oblivious chattiness like a Blue Peter presenter interviewing the senior elephant poo cleaner at London zoo. The story has no humour and no drama, it’s just twats being really impressed by each other, hoping to avert an unclear disaster that they all talk about like it’s a slightly annoyingly long queue at the Starbucks. Still, there are puzzles and they are fun to figure out, but even after doing all the optional ones I couldn’t help feeling like the game hadn’t fully drawn out the potential of the mechanic. There’s only so many times you can take a picture of a wall and turn it sideways to make a bridge, or turn a picture of a battery upside down to make the battery fall out of it like you’re shaking down a child for sweets and dinner money. So while I do recommend Viewfinder for the unique mechanics alone, it is a bit insipid and, like a 100 meter runner collapsing before the finish line, a dash too short. But what’s that tweet that’s been going around? I’m absolutely still calling them “tweets” and not “X-crements” or whatever they’re supposed to be now. “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people paid more to work less.” Yes. I am 100% behind that.
Gaming is in dire need of a Steven Spielberg right now, someone who showed up while everyone in Hollywood was fretting about how to squeeze another elephant into their next hugely expensive interminable bloody historical epic and just made a silly film about a naughty shark which did gangbusters and revolutionised the industry. So in the spirit of wanting shorter games, here’s a second one. My Friendly Neighborhood. A defunct public access kid’s puppet show all but named “Jessame Treat” mysteriously starts broadcasting again and we play a curmudgeonly repairman who comes to the abandoned studio to investigate. And I’m sure you all think you know where this is leading, more of that low-effort mascot horror mingery that Five Nights at Freddy’s defecated into the world, no doubt we’ll discover that Cookie Monster is managing his addiction with heroin and human eyeballs and Oscar the Grouch has started collecting fingers after a particularly harrowing Vietnam flashback. But don’t write My Friendly Neighbourhood off so easily, it is many things but it’s certainly not low-effort. It’s a full on survival horror game – that is, explore the open-ended map, find the locked doors and then find whatever passes for keys around these parts, and there’s gun combat and health and ammo management complete with Resident Evil 4-style Tetris inventory system that’s like trying to squeeze all your boxes of girl scout cookies into the one drawer the kids can’t reach.
It also must have taken quite a lot of effort to make a horror game that isn’t the slightest bit scary or horrific. Almost impressive, really. The quote unquote “enemies” can only attack by aggressively hugging you, and I assume the only reason you’re dying from it is because you’re a stubborn elderly git who refuses to go to the doctor about his weird heart murmurs ‘cos he’s afraid they’ll stick a finger up his bum. The enemies are also incapable of taking you by surprise, because they spend all of their time loudly vocalising every thought that crosses their minds like a nervous socially awkward person in a sex dungeon. There are also several boss puppets that the protagonist is able to neutralize by sitting down with them and having a nice friendly chat. See at first you think it’s going to do the usual mascot horror subversion oh the nice fluffy puppet mouth opens and a set of whirring metal jaws bites your leg off to a slightly mangled rendition of pop goes the weasel, but then it double subverts it and comes back around to being a nice wholesome story about kindness and friendship. Barring one brief interlude where you get stuck in the basement and have to fight some puppets gone wrong.
But by that point the game had given me a gatling gun with a thousand bullets so the final boss monster was a total chump who couldn’t do much more than jiggle violently under my barrage of gunfire like the chandelier in the room directly below the honeymoon suite. So there’s more to My Friendly Neighbourhood than you might think. As for whether or not it’s a good game, ehhh… it’ll kill an afternoon. Animation and voice acting’s good, I enjoyed the dynamic of the happy smiley puppets bouncing right off the surly demeanour of our protagonist who just wants to get his bloody job done so he can go home, microwave a Pot Noodle and very emphatically not phone his estranged children. But it’s unchallenging, combat’s more of an irritant than a threat, and much like Viewfinder it felt like it was building up to something that never quite happened. There’s a sinister undercurrent running through it that I don’t think got any proper payoff. Unless that final boss fight in the basement that didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the plot was supposed to be it, in which case, sorry for killing it so fast. Always dampens a surprise party when the honoree walks straight past it to grab his car keys. And then machine guns everyone to death.
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Yahtzee is the Escapist’s longest standing talent, having been writing and producing its award winning flagship series, Zero Punctuation, since 2007. Before that he had a smattering of writing credits on various sites and print magazines, and has almost two decades of experience in game journalism as well as a lifelong interest in video games as an artistic medium, especially narrative-focused.
He also has a foot in solo game development - he was a big figure in the indie adventure game scene in the early 2000s - and writes novels. He has six novels published at time of writing with a seventh on the way, all in the genres of comedic sci-fi and urban fantasy.
He was born in the UK, emigrated to Australia in 2003, and emigrated again to California in 2016, where he lives with his wife and daughters. His hobbies include walking the dog and emigrating to places.
