Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Killer 7: Art? Hard to Say

After my initial post about Killer 7 and its relation to art, I've actually played the game. Or rather, tried to play the game. If Killer 7 is art then it is analogous to a painting with a curtain over it.

In short, the control scheme was so torturously difficult that I couldn't get through more than 15 or 20 minutes of the game. I gave it the old college try more than once. I kept thinking "maybe this time, the art of the game will overwhelm my urge to give up." But no, I couldn't hack it, and as a result, I have no way of experiencing what sounds like a wonderful and disturbing surrealist vision of gaming.

I suppose that one could argue that the difficulty of the controls is an artistic statement in and of itself. However, it seems that the true artistic intent is located in the visuals and narrative. If this is the case than the developers have made their art largely inaccessible to me. Like I said, Killer 7 is a painting with a curtain in front of it, obscuring its beauty behind a prohibitive control scheme.

There must be a lesson here...

[see also Robin Hunicke's thoughts: "Detail wise, there are a ton of great little flourishes - but in the end, you have to wonder. Why didn’t they spend more time on the interface and level design?"]