Hit Play with PixelVixen707: Brutal Legend And The Worlds of Tim Schafer

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We love the content of our games: the characters, the environments, a great lighting trick or a memorable score. But let's be honest. Gameplay trumps all. Without the Portal gun, you wouldn't have Portal. Left 4 Dead proves that you can get more mileage with less plot. And Tetris, arguably the king of games, comes with no content at all.

You could argue that the content is just frosting - except in a few cases. And one of those cases is the oeuvre of game designer Tim Schafer. Schafer's new title, Brütal Legend, due this fall, has stirred up raves and praise from the gaming press after favorable demos at GDC and E3. With Jack Black as roadie Eddie Riggs helming a saga set in a '70s metal fantasy world, Brütal Legend ticks off many boxes on the list of Things That Rawk. The game features the voices of legends such as Lemmy Kilmister, Ozzy Osbourne and Lita Ford, as well as celeb cameos from the likes of Tim Curry. But the main attraction is Scahfer. If he's behind it, the thinking goes, the game will be massive. It'll be hilarious, yet thoughtful. The characters will be larger than life but true to their hearts. You won't even want to skip the cut-scenes.

But will you actually have fun playing the game?

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I've never played Schafer's earliest works. He was a co-writer and co-designer on LucasArts' first two Monkey Island games and Day of the Tentacle, and he made his lead designer debut with 1995's Full Throttle. I first fell for him with 1998's Grim Fandango, a brilliantly executed and head-bashingly tough graphical adventure set in an afterlife that crosses Day of the Dead imagery with Art Deco architecture, Aztec motifs, and classic movies like Casablanca. This pastiche, which served as a background for the adventures of Manuel "Manny" Calavera, a travel agent for the Department of Death in the fictitious land of El Marrow, blended perfectly thanks to Schafer's direction and his sense of humor. Across four acts, clever puzzles stemmed not from abstract logic games, but naturally and believably from the sui generis environments and the masterfully-told story.

I mentioned humor, and his sense of it is Schafer's greatest strength. The humor that he and his team bring to their games is surprisingly broad and all-ages, without crossing the line to "corny." The jokes are witty but heartfelt, and they're free of geek-bait, fan service, or other short-lived references. They reflect a creator who's not in love with his jokes, but with his worlds.

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Grim Fandango roosts high on the list of all-time great games. But Schafer's next work, 2005's Psychnoauts, is better known as a great game that nobody played. On its first release it racked up critical praise but dismal sales. And while I liked it enough to finish it, I can see why it didn't "click."

Psychonauts takes place in a summer camp - except this is a summer camp for psychics. The students are Psychonauts-in-training, who jump into people's minds and dreams to battle their nightmares and cure their neuroses. This gave Schafer's team the chance to combine a folksy, familiar setting with a panolpy of surreal dreamscapes, where psychedelic discos and black spy helicopters rub against villas filled with black velvet paintings, and a circus full of fluffy little bunnies, all marching to the slaughter.

That's a broad palette - and unlike Grim Fandango, it doesn't gel. The protagonist is Raz, a stock precocious boy who overshadows a smarter heroine and whose whole quest is basically about himself. He doesn't catch the imagination like Fandango's Manny, and the game's maturity level swings from nostalgically youthful, to flat-out juvenile. On the other hand, the peripheral stuff - the environments, the dialogue, and the secondary characters - shine with love and care. Stroll around the campgrounds and you'll have dozens of opportunities to talk to other kids, and to watch cutscenes just because they're so damn entertaining.

But what really marred Psychonauts is the game. It's a 3-D platformer, which has a niche appeal. The platforming has nothing to do with the game's core themes of psychoanalysis-made-physical however. See, our hero is not only a psychic, he's also a circus performer - which explains why he can monkey his way up all these tightwires and pillars, but has nothing to do with all the cool stuff about breaking into people's imaginations. Many levels end with a feeling, not of triumph, but relief. And when the difficulty spikes in the finale, even the game's biggest boosters admit it starts to curdle.

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Which brings us to Brütal Legend. I won't try to judge Brütal before I've even laid my hands on a controller. But I've caught several minutes of gameplay footage, and I've already seen one reason to like it: it's an action-adventure, the burger-and-fries of the gaming world.

Enemies show up, and you mash a button and kill them. You upgrade your weapons and pick up new abilities, and you can mash buttons to use them. Your parents who conceived you to this heavy metal soundtrack will have a blast playing this with you. So far, we've seen no baroque puzzles, and no tricky four-story-high rope courses. You smack the buttons and the little guy on the screen kills people. And when you're done? You go back to a world of album cover skies and disfigured headbangers and leather-clad rock chicks and golden-throated pretty boys, and hours and hours of listening to people yap. It's the best reward of all: more content.


Images - Top: Jack Black in Brütal Legend / Second: Grim Fandango / Third: Psychonauts / Bottom: Ozzy in Brütal Legend.

Rachael Webster (a.ka.a SG member PixelVixen707) is SG's Hit Play games columnist. A game lover and game blogger living in New York City, she also writes at PixelVixen707.com and tweets as PixelVixen707.

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