Be Good

Well, this was...uh...interesting.

Be Good is an interactive story in the most basic sense of the word.  It's a point-and-click claymation game where you live the life of Donald Martin, an average ordinary everyday guy as he journeys from infancy to adulthood, having to make moral choices along the way.

Now, moral choice systems are a relatively debated topic in games today.  Some people think they overcomplicate things while others think they add a huge amount of depth that makes the narrative of a game that much more entertaining.  Still others think that moral choice systems have the potential to add that kind of depth, but modern implementation of the systems causes them to simply overcomplicate things.  I happen to be in this third category, and the reason for that is that moral choice systems are usually binary, meaning there are only two paths to go down.  This doesn't leave any room for experiementation or nuance.  I'm reminded of one point in Mass Effect 2, a game to which I took a mostly paragon approach, where I needed to choose whether to give a hungry Krogan a fish that he thinks was caught in the magical waters of the Praesidium (but actually was just bought from the store next door) or to keep the fish and tell the Krogan that there are actually no fish in the Praesidium.  I wanted to give him the fish for free and wish him a good day as he chowed down on childish delightful wonder, but when I chose the "give him the fish" option (which was the renegade choice) I ended up shaking him down for all the money he had on him, leaving him incapable of buying a gun that he needed to protect himself.

Wow, that was quite a tangent.  The reason I mentioned it is because this is the kind of system Be Good is built from.  You click around occasionally talking to people around you and having to pick between happy face and sad face.  It actually took me a while to realize that the happy/sad screen was a "choose your path" screen because the game never tells you that.  It just throws 2 faces in front of you and leaves it up to you to figure out that the faces are actually buttons.  See, you have to click in order to progress the dialogue, so the first couple of times this screen came up, I just kept clicking without knowledge of where my cursor was and ended up making choices I didn't necessarily want to.

Other times, it is very difficult to determine exactly which choice is the right one because the buttons don't always do what you'd think they do.  Once I was accused of drawing a nasty picture of a girl in my class and was ordered to apologize.  When the happy/sad screen came up, I picked happy, thinking that it represented the good feelings to come after I apologized.  Apparently, in this instance, happy meant "keep being a douchenugget" and just like that I had a mark on my discipline sheet.

I find the most engaging parts of the game come from environmental interaction.  For instance, as an infant I kept badgering my mom while she was trying to cook.  Her response changed a bit every time until suddenly the whole family was eating pizza for dinner.  See, in this instance, I had a clear idea of who I was annoying and why.  I had full control over my actions and I could predict the implications thereof. If the whole game was somehow like this, I think it would have been improved.

All in all, I enjoyed my time with Be Good.  I might even give it another go or two to see how many different experiences I can get from it.  If it had a little more time and manpower (surprisingly, the whole game was made by one guy) I think it could have been a really neat little interactive story.  As it stands, everyone's experience with the game may be a bit different, but everyone will be a little annoyed with the game's design. Still, I encourage you to try it out.  Who knows, you may even learn something about yourself.

Until next time, be good (that was too easy).

Links
happy face sad face: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25460

Battlepod

Yet another game that just straight up doesn't work.  I got as far as the loading screen before the game decided to crash.  Oh well.  I'm running out of witty things to say about nothing, so I'm just gonna end it here.

Links
nothing: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25902
#2LineReviews.