now playing: "Trauma"

Genre(s): Art/abstract, simulation

Credits: Krystian Majewski, 2009 (2010 IndieCade finalist, 2010 Independent Games Festival finalist, EIGA 2010 finalist)

Disasters and personal tragedies are common subjects in video games, but they're more often than not glossed over either as the inciting incident ("Woah! Where am I? What am I doing here!?") or as the climactic event ("Let's get married after the world is destroyed"). Rarely does the designer, or more importantly the player, get to explore the psychological outcomes of these terrible events, and when it does occur, it's usually in FMV mode.

In contrast, Trauma's entire plot is about a woman's recovery from a personal disaster inside a hospital. Whether it was a car accident or a terminal illness is never clearly established, and we don't learn even so much as her name, age, or job. What we do know about her comes from four recurring dreams she experiences—each somehow connected to her past before the incident or to the future she anticipates for herself. Definitive full-motion-video clips at the end of each chapter detailing the woman's psychological progress keep it mostly linear, but with multiple alternate endings unlockable per chapter, plus the fact that these "endings" are mostly "explorations" without a definitive resolution, increase Trauma's replay value such that I really had to justify the number of awards filling up its website.

You'd be surprised at how much activity still-life photographs can convey for a game.

Draw different "light-shapes" on the screen with your cursor to navigate and interact with objects. The fading caption reads "I paint this symbol to move back."

Trauma's art style is the game's strongest selling point, and it also wowed me the most. Its snapshot approach to visuals perfectly fits with concepts like amnesia, depression, and sense of identity, as well as the way we tend to recall our dreams while we're awake—focused on the absurdity at the center, blurry at the edges that border towards reality. Each photo is shot either under artificial street light at night, or the faint natural lights at dawn and dusk. Contrasting the dimness, magical cursor-drawn "light-shapes" shimmer onto the screen and create not only a neat symbolic navigation system, but also an interesting metaphor for the game's surrealism (her life's confused, she's in a daze—glowing yellow fibers, salvation is at hand!) Since these still, albeit interactive, images constitute the entire game world, I was initially a bit skeptical as to how little of an atmosphere Trauma could create without turning off the player. Two facts, however, dispelled my concerns: a) there are a LOT of photographs, and b) their inherent static natures put the player on the patient's bed, limited by her disconnected memory and trapped by her loneliness. This gameplay scheme requires a lot of thematically-appropriate justification. Trauma pulls it off handily.

Although thanks to neat treats like browser cookies you can play Trauma online for free, an official download with perks like zip loading times is available for a few euros that'll go a long way toward supporting yet another spectacular indie title. The part of your brain that's used to putting up with cliche amnesia and stereotypical good-guy-wins outcomes will be traumatized (aren't I a clever one) by the lovely atmospheric design and beautiful mystery.

Still waiting to find out from Majewski if the blue elephant is indeed a tribute to Armor Games' iconic mascot. UPDATE: Confirmed, indeed a nod to its creator John (http://www.jmtb02.com/).

Friday preview: If you're experiencing trauma before anything bad has happened, is it idiocy or intuition?