Frozen Synapse
developed by Mode 7 Games (Oxford, UK)
pre-order/public beta first available April 19, 2010
self-published May 26, 2011 for Windows/Mac, $24.99
[trailer]
[website]
~230 MB
At time of posting: have played for 12 hours and completed 30 of 55 levels, 2/6/15–2/11/15. Will probably continue.
[7-minute video that gives a sense of what gameplay looks like]
The next event in my game purchasing history is the expenditure of $5.00 USD at 3:40 PM on September 30, 2011, for the “Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle,” which at the time of purchase consisted of: Frozen Synapse, TRAUMA, and for those who beat the average price (which my $5 did) the complete contents of a prior bundle, the “Humble Frozenbyte Bundle,” which had originally been offered in April 2011, containing: three full games, one “pre-order” for an upcoming game, and a playable prototype from an abandoned project. So depending on how you count that stuff, I got somewhere between five and seven games for my money. (And a few days later another game would be added retroactively.)
As I recall, I bought it mostly because I was interested in TRAUMA, which looked like my kind of thing. I played through it in a single sitting a little while later. It was more of an art piece than a game, kind of like a student short film. I was fine with that. Then secondarily, Frozen Synapse, which I hadn’t heard of before, looked pretty interesting. The rest seemed harmless; most of it has remained untouched.
I was tempted to write this the obsessive false-audience way, where I “tell you” about the game and “explain” what’s significant about it, but I’ve just cut and pasted that draft out into an .rtf file of oblivion that I keep around to make oblivion seem less cold and lonely. (“Oh hey, guys!” says the abandoned draft, finding itself with a lot of other abandoned drafts that I will never reread.)
The idea is supposed to be: if you wanna know about Frozen Synapse, go look it up. That should come easy to me, if I can just relax enough to go with the actual thoughts I have.
I watch a lot of YouTube videos where people represent themselves in various assumed authority voices. “Hello, and welcome to this video where I’ll be discussing…” There’s generally a cadence and even a timbre that goes with the phrasing, all imitative. “Well hello everybody!” In my ears, the sound is always of a kid playing at being the teacher or the TV announcer. I get sad when actual teachers and actual TV announcers sound like that.
Well, I used to get sad, anyway, but now I’m trying not to, because it turns out there’s way too much of it going on. I can’t afford to be sad about stuff like that; I’m surrounded.
The point is, “blog journalism” runs a distinct risk of being the same, a lot of make-believe (“Deet deet deet di-deet, we come to you now with a breaking report!”) that has come to believe it is an actual point of view. The part of me that wants to “explain Frozen Synapse and what’s so distinctive about it” to you (to “you”) is a compulsive phony part of me that thinks it has to save me from the lonely, soggy, weirdo subjectivity of my actual thoughts. Not so, not so.
Now here’s a game that isn’t soothing at all. I like it in a way that has nothing to do with the escapism of fantasy. I respect it. But it is exceedingly stressful. At least if you fear getting shot, like I do.
The constant pausing for computer-calculated moments of truth (“The shapeforms are deliberating” … “Scenario data is being assimilated” …) is what grinds one’s nerves. Ten seconds is a very rough interval to wait for a moment of truth: not long enough to recover one’s sense of equanimity; not short enough to remain in the flow of thought. “And the winner is… … …” Look at the faces of the nominees while the presenters are joking about how hard it is to open the envelope, oh I can’t do this you do it you have nails, oh but then who will say it? should I say it? am I supposed to say it? Should we say it together… Ha ha ha.
Now multiply that by hours upon hours of gameplay. That’s my Frozen Synapse experience!
Is this game too hard?
(I mean the single-player campaign; the multi-player is only as hard as your opponent is good. OCD Archivist, the part of my personality that assembles the data for the tops of these entries, here inserts his long nose to clarify my activities: “I actually played a fair amount of this game when I first got it, but head-to-head against a friend. I started the single-player campaign but found it comparatively unrewarding and unappealing, and didn’t get very far. These past few days I have played no multiplayer.” Thanks, OCD Archivist. Fare thee well, poor devil.)
There are a few levels that I played for nearly 2 hours apiece, failing over and over and over in scenarios that seemed designed to put me at a considerable disadvantage, gradually becoming ashamed: surely it’s not supposed to be this hard; I’m just impatient and inattentive and not very good at the game. Then when I finally succeeded, a sense of great accomplishment. But at what cost? Or rather: in what context?
The bubble wrap analogy. One wants a puzzle to pose a challenge that puts up a little resistance and then gives way. One wants to pop bubble wrap because it resists, then pops. If a bubble is so tough that it takes two and a half hours and an axe to pop it, is that more rewarding than an ordinary bubble, or is that a category error?
How much resistance creates satisfaction? It varies person to person. (Perhaps any affection for resistance is unenlightened. I put this in parentheses because it’s purely theoretical; fact is, I like games and puzzles.) I want my games to offer a certain choice amount of resistance, then relent. If something offers more than expected, that creates a certain kind of story, which can itself be satisfying. But it’s not inherently a more worthwhile story than if it offered less than expected. They’re both just stories, and as they get more extreme, they become unrewarding stories.
What I’m saying is that hard is not the boss of easy. Hard does not dress in ermine while easy wears rags. They’re identical cousins.
This game sure is hard!
A lot of computer games over the decades have wanted to be Millenium Falcon chess, a worldwide fantasy since at least 1977. Obviously, any stupid animated chess meets the basic requirements, but I like to think that Frozen Synapse, despite not having monsters or much in the way of animation, actually comes closer to the underlying fantasy: the players apply chess-like tactical turn-based play to a living animated world.
Or at least that was my understanding as a kid, since the claymation is unbroken, and manifests in all the monsters at once. Looking at it now, though, I see that they probably just meant most of the motion to be the breath of life in otherwise idle pieces, while single pieces alternate making chess-like grid moves. But you know how kids see what they see. I saw a continuous cartoon world that somehow was also a board game. How could that work? Frozen Synapse, finally, shows a way.
There is a cyberpunk story being sprayed all over your face while you play the single-player missions, where characters like “Nix” and “Belacqua” and “Soulsby” and “Shand” are constantly saying the names of fake stuff like “Enyo: Nomad” and “Markov Geist” and “Petrov’s Shard” and “Charon’s Palm.” At least one of those per line, truly. This is characteristic of unconfident or unpracticed writers: they think that by repeating the fake thing they give it body and reinforce it, make it less fake. Effectively the opposite is true.
A resident of The United States of America only very rarely has occasion to say “The United States of America.” Even a politician probably goes days without saying it. The residents of Markov Geist, on the other hand.
Just now watching that Star Wars clip I thought about the embarrassment that Harrison Ford must have had to overcome to say “Wookiee.”
This just goes to show how much more embarrassment there is left to drain from my system. So that I don’t end up like Harrison Ford.
I had played Frozen Synapse (which the UK developers pronounce “sigh-naps,” good lord) for about 7 hours when I decided it was probably time to crack open the next game. It’s not that I wanted to stop playing Frozen Synapse; I just wanted something less nail-biting and frustrating, something a little more welcoming, to be going at the same time.
A few days later and now I’ve already reached the end that next game, and Frozen Synapse still yawns on, with 25 more levels left in the campaign. If the 30 so far have taken me 12 hours, that’s gonna be 10 more hours of play. (Putting me, incidentally, right on par with howlongtobeat.com‘s estimate of 21.5 hours.) Meanwhile, naturally, I want to post about this other game and move on to the next one still. And, just as naturally, I could never simply post about them in the order I finish them, because dammit that’s not how a checklist works. You check them in the order they’re listed!
Oh. Wait a minute. That is how a checklist works — you don’t have to check them in order.
But I AM DOING THIS IN ORDER!!!!!!!
Hence this entry. If I have more I simply have to say when I’ve reached the end, whenever that happens, I guess I’ll stick it in here somewhere. Maybe between these next two horizontals.
[reserved]
It’s a very good game, and, I think, an important one. If I had written the version of this entry where I explained why (“Hi-ho, Kermit the Frog here”), you’d know why.
The single-player campaign isn’t really the point, but it’s okay too. The AI is a worthy opponent.
Music sounds just like you’d expect for British cyberpunk thinking music. A little silly but gets the job done. Of course, given all the angst this game puts me through, I might prefer something a little more spacious and confident. The electronica sounds are all anxious sounds.
Colors are officially divided into warm and cold, and then less officially everything else is too. I feel like this is just a way of talking about the two zones of the mind: R is warm, L is cold. (A warm way of talking about it.) I know the game is Frozen Synapse and the composer probably had the word “cold” in mind while he was writing the music, but I feel like it’s cold in a further and more consequential sense, which is to say uptight, anxious. It’s not impossible to write warm music with cold sounds, warm music about cold problems.
Three people this time.
Ian Hardingham — concept/design/programming
Paul Taylor — production/art/writing/music/sound
Robin Cox — level design/testing
If you’re looking for it, the game does feel very British.
Computer games are a splendidly international form of culture, much moreso than books, TV, or movies. Of the twelve Humble Bundle 3 games that I ran down at the end of the last entry, we had USA x 5, UK x 2, Finland, Russia, Austria, Czech Republic, Canada. It’s like the Olympics out here. Or, perhaps more to the point, it’s like the internet. The question then becomes: why aren’t books, TV, and movies more like the internet in their internationality? I think we’re headed in that direction, just slowly. American movies are already very likely to farm their special effects to foreign countries; somewhat less likely to co-produce with foreign countries; still less likely to simply be imported movies that were fully produced in foreign countries. But it’s gradually trickling up, I think.
Good show, old boy.
“Hard is not the boss of easy” is something I’m going to remember.