now playing: "One and One Story"

Genre(s): Puzzle, art/abstract
Credits: Mattia "MaTX" Traverso, 2011

I confess I have a great fondness for games that feature relationships and romance, but there aren't that many of them that are actually respectable enough to earn my time. Despite the seriously dramatic role relationships play in real-world lives, it's too easy to trivialize them in casual games, much the same way that violence is trivialized in the click-and-point shooters—actually, just consider the fact that casual games are (very broadly speaking) the trivialization of everything. 

One and One Story deals with both the highs and lows of "twu wuv" by arranging them in a simple narrative that anyone can relate to, whether you're a happy newlywed or a cynic like me who falls into the "better-to-have-loved-and-lost" category of singles.

You control the actions of two anonymous lovers, a boy and a girl, whose sole purpose in the (game) world is to meet together at their secret special place, at what appears to be a secluded park that evolves over the course of the seasons. Between each chapter of the story (consisting of a few levels apiece), the boy narrates the high and low points of their relationship, usually giving away the premise of the changing gameplay in each chapter. "Without her, I felt heavy like a rock," he confesses, and the next set of levels requires you to rely on the girl's ability to jump, since it has been removed from the boy PC. Sometimes your keyboard controls both characters at once and sometimes separately, but the end goal is always the same—get them together. Once you finish the main story, bonus platforms become available, allowing you (or you and another person!) to control the characters WASD and arrow-key fashion at the same time.

Don't touch the spikes, and don't fall too far a distance—the game emphasizes its humanity by keeping physics realistic enough for PC mortality.

Even if you're not a fan of the whole romance genre yourself, play this game for the artwork and how it's splendidly incorporated into the level design. Because it's not just a platformer, but more importantly a puzzle, the creator's able to get away with a pretty minimalist setup, involving only moving rocks and a progressive top-to-bottom descent for the PCs, to create an array of uniquely-designed levels. Furthermore, some of the same levels can be reused multiple times with great effect, as the gameplay controls evolve over time. Some platforms that were initially easy to figure out completely stumped me later on when I had to control both PCs without killing either one.

I just realized the arrangement of snapshots on this page gives a very nice stained-glass artistic impression: fairy-tale fashion, the way "twu wuv" is stylized to look.

Although "MaTX" isn't the first guy to come up with an evolving gameplay style of gameplay (as you may recall from one of my earlier reviews for Armor Games's This is the Only Level, as well as other games I've stumbled upon that use this technique to turn an otherwise boring shooter/puzzle/etc. into a less boring shooter/puzzle/etc.), what got me here is how it's tied so distinctly to an overarching narrative. To separate the design from the story would be like asking the chicken-and-the-egg question: pointless, because neither one-sided argument will get you anywhere. Granted, it seems pretty obvious to you and me that naturally the gameplay would be part of the story, but I think sometimes that the sheer complexity of an issue like "relationships" can intimidate a lot of us into designing a game that treats it only at the surface level. If we were all given a challenge to come up with a game concept that revolves around something like divorce, high school boy-girl drama, or even sibling rivalry—you can't just come up with an answer off the top of your head (and actually expect it to be meaningful).

You may not think One and One Story is a stunning, innovative masterpiece, but that's not what, in my belief, it was intended to be. Most love stories aren't stunning or innovative anyway—they're all the same in the end, about one and one person who decide to merge their own stories together. What One and One Story gets right is its perfect transition of the love story formula to the interactive format. As evidenced in the dozens upon dozens of casual games (and even some "hardcore" titles) that speak of romance in some way, it's way too easy to trivialize this subject into an emotionless click of a stale dialogue or action button.

In contrast, One and One Story is a human game—about humans, for humans, by humans.

Next Friday: A game that revolves around the impressions from one simple question: are you male or female? Adding in some moral and political controversy next time...