From NiGHTS to Waking Dreams


Title Screen

Let’s say you hop on NiGHTS into Dreams… like I did on that Best Buy demo back in 1996–much like Sonic the Hedgehog, it was the kind of game that could catch my eye across the store–just the screen moved unlike any other game on display. Though, at a glance (and honestly, even after completing it), it’s easy to not fully realize the game’s deeply resonant underlying narrative, an experiential story–you feel it, and while playing the HD re-release, I’m beginning to realize that’s what has created such an intense fan following over these years.

The very first time you play the game, it’ll be pretty disorienting. The camera swoops down on a mirror-flipped fantasy landscape. A tiny arrow points your child towards a jeweled, gazebo-looking thing.

 

Well, it's not like I have anything else I can do...
If someone sees this and does not get naturally curious, they must not be human…

You follow the arrow, but get assaulted by colorful, flying, Cirque-du-Soleil-inspired creatures who steal what look like gems from you. After your sudden, awkward loss, you continue to follow the arrow until you reach your destination. Upon entering it, you take on the form of some sort of airborne jester held within it,  and couldn’t possibly anything but curious at this point.

This all happens so quickly that it might not even register consciously. Subconsciously, though, this is an incredible hook: internally, you have to ask: ‘Where am I?” “I did what I was supposed to do, clearly, but I was interrupted–something was taken from me. That was mine…” “They were jewels, so they must be precious…” “Creatures flew away with my precious something… and now I can fly. I must be able to get them back. . .”

The following is never explained in detail in-game, but it is “felt”: these creatures, these nightmarens, actually stole four of your five Ideya’s: Purity, Wisdom, Hope, and Intelligence, but they could not steal your Courage. And you navigate your Dreams as NiGHTS, the Nightmaren you become when you enter the Ideya Palace, to recover these fragments of your scattered psyche. You endeavor in your understanding of the Dreams/levels, and grow alongside your character’s courage as you grow in your wisdom that will allow you to defeat Wizeman, your ultimate villain, together.

Even the levels
Even the level subtitles detail your growth: the IDEAL, the POSSIBILITY, the CONFUSION, the GROWTH: seeing what you could be, and journeying your troubled mind to achieve it.

After endeavoring through three levels, you reach the final Dream, and you’re unable to reach the Ideya Palace this time; you attempt to enter, but you are thrown away and find that NiGHTS itself is, in fact, trapped in that palace. Now you, stranded on a platform on your lonesome, without that which you’ve always relied on, see that same little arrow pointing you to the open sky. If you don’t take this leap of faith, you’ll be trapped within this Dream. If you do take the leap, you fly. You’ve reached the climax of your journey: you no longer need NiGHTS to go into your into Dreams; you can do this as your waking yourself. Your ability to conquer your struggles is, in fact, something you’ve had all along.

 

You actually get the help of the other playable child for your rescue of NiGHTS... That ties into a Twin Seeds, duality, Jungian male-female theme that would really merit its own article.
You actually get the help of the other playable child for your rescue of NiGHTS, which opens up a whole new can of themes… that currently elude my skill to explain. I need to read more Jung…

You free NiGHTS. You enter the final confrontation, and now you, fused again as NiGHTS, but with the knowledge that you are one-in-the-same, deliver the final blow to Wizeman. You have grown in your wisdom and are, in fact, now wise enough/experienced enough to overcome that which tormented you.

 

With six hands I could read three books at a time! Surely I'd be wize!
He must’ve used his many hands to read many books…

 

Then, even with that out of the way, the continued score attack portion of the game still plays into the metaphor. The course-based level design and linking combo system unravel layers of depth in repeat plays to create a sensation that other media can’t: “I’m still not sure I’ve actually discovered everything here”.  It makes the game something that you never truly feel finished with, something you can’t stop thinking about–that combination of exploration, discovery, achievement, and metaphorical wholeness makes it impossible to mentally let go. Even score being determined by letter grades and points may seem to fall outside of the compelling metaphor, but the cutscenes of the children’s personal struggles (that depict them being judged in an audition and achieving the higher score in basketball) successfully tie even the game’s ranking system into the metaphor.

This game forever remains in the back of your mind, because it effectively is the human mind, what triggers dreams and creativity, what they’re for. It’s a fantastic emulation of our world, our lives, the concept of endeavoring through struggle and growing into wisdom as a human being. Resonant, engaging, and lingering, just like any good art should be–you can pen metaphors, and clearly, you can code them as well.

We do good work. Well worth a bow.
We do good work, sir/ma’am. Well worth a bow.

The Dostoyevsky Genre

Dostoevsky

The best Dostoyevsky novels are hardly labyrinthine. Sure, the psychoanalysis-before-textbook-psychoanalysis existed is fantastic, deep, and complex—they’re high-concept books, but Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov seem to resonate with people for far simpler reasons. Those two books have his simplest core plots (despite the grand size of Karamazov), and the way the narratives plays out is really a great deal of “fun”. Everything else is simply crafted on top of this quality foundation. That’s the difference between a term paper on desperation versus a novel about it.

The core, the spine, the “focal-center” of both aforementioned stories is that they’re murder mysteries, whodunnits before whodunnits existed. Now, while I haven’t managed to reach a sufficient understanding of why Brothers Karamazov is so affecting (it’s truly just a 1,000+ page “the butler did it” story), I’m feeling somewhat confident in my assessment of Crime and Punishment, which kinda has the same model flipped on its head; C&P succeeds due to its excellent handling of a whodunnit where we know whodunnit.

 

In third-person omniscient (which I believe was a brand new idea at the time), we watch C&P’s hero, our murderer Raskolnikov, toil. We watch him deliberate. We watch him narrowly escape the desire to turn himself in over and over again.

Dosty doesn’t just craft the book well, but has selected an entire scenario and situation that lends itself to absolutely nothing but suspense beginning to end. Regardless of whatever insightful conversation may be going on, Raskolnikov’s hidden guilt can only bring us to our ending in a handful of ways: escape or admission.

 

While we do know whodunnit, we begin to realize we don’t fully know who he is, and during this time, we learn a lot more about our murderer by watching him struggle beneath pressure (as it’s hard to be anyone but your honest self when under so much stress—one of the reasons why conflict is integral in storytelling). His virtue in light of his guilt, his desperation bundled with his confusion: meaty storytelling delivered with a side of veggies.

This got skipped over in a lot of my lessons: The Conceptual McGuffin, the similarities between the cursed “genre fiction” and prestigious “literature”; we’re chasing the conceptual carrot of Raskolnikov’s release from his guilt.

The natural empathy of the novel is what’s used to create the push. Rasky’s misery is our dangling carrot, and Rasky’s misery is what Crime and Punishment “is”. A simple, effective, and still unique core.

 

I’ll always remember my experience with Crime and Punishment for the grand insight it gave me into the human mind, and for the things Dosty gets me to think about. I’ll also always see it like this: “I picked up this novel called Crime and Punishment. It was pretty cool. It gripped me beginning to end—a page-turning and fatiguing sort of gripping, but a page-turning one nonetheless. It was fun, which is often forgotten when attempting to craft something of ‘great worth and merit’.” This goes for all media, and all things I or anybody else creates. Art is best when it’s entertaining and engaging, but when pulling from the proper channels, it ends up that way by default.

Saving Every Green Hill You Possibly Can

This screen used to mean I was going to do nothing else for at least two straight hours.

I think Sonic the Hedgehog is fantastic—still.

And I’m surprised I can still say that despite all these years of suffering as Sonic stumbled his way into the world of 3D gaming (I played Sonic Heroes for an unfortunate 60 hours… and so many other things I shouldn’t have done…). I watched him struggle to find his footing in transition between a momentum-based platformer, where your character was more like a pinball, to one where he is essentially a race car.

Anyhow, I’ve finally came to realize something that, I suppose, was very obvious to some other people: Sonic the Hedgehog was never really about saving the world. Continue reading “Saving Every Green Hill You Possibly Can”