S3 Finale: The Navigator
You are a navigator of the Styx Shipping Line escorting the dead to eternity through rich scenes of a life.
"Misty morning on the Styx river" by colinhansen1967 is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.
Each season of Play Kaizen includes six posts. Five posts cover One Cool Thing from five different video games. The Finale pitches a new game that incorporates the One Cool Things from Season 3.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons: Non-Verbal Narrative
What Remains of Edith Finch: Recurring Emotion
Tales of Arise: Modernized Heartbeat
Olli Olli World: Vibes Evangelist
Wolfenstein: The New Colossus: Place for Respite
The Hook
You feel the satisfying controller feedback as your boat navigates the choppy waters along the Sicilian shoreline. The sun is rising over the Mediterranean Sea and the view is jaw-dropping. Your eyes shift from the sun’s rays to look at your passenger. They are not at peace, not yet.
You see a monument along the shore. You navigate your boat alongside it and look closely upon it. It is a disagreement between two people, one of whom is your passenger. You gesture: you cross your arms. Your passenger sees it, drops their head, and observes the scene. They turn to argue with you, then stop and listen. They nod and accept their past. They accept their mistake. They tell you about what happened after, then grin, as they remember a silver-lining. They point towards a horizon and indicate for you to navigate there. You agree.
You are a navigator, tasked and empowered in all time to escort the dead to eternity. But, before you deliver them to the dock, you move them through their lives, memories, triumphs, and failures, to help them find peace. Your task is to help them find acceptance.
The game spans many generations. While you may row one person in a small, rough boat in the Bronze Age, you may navigate a viking longship in the 9th century, a canoe in the Americas in the 15th century, a steamship in the 19th century, and an experimental submersible in the 23rd century. Each boat, each body of water, and each person, provides a new story, new challenges, and a new puzzle to solve.
Author’s Note: I’m aware of Spiritfarer! I haven’t played it, but know it’s a farming, crafting, management game about ferrying the dead. Similar themes, but I think these are different games. If anything, I’m stealing from Seasons: A Letter to the Future! I read a lot of history (recently Children of Ash and Elm). Burial traditions are quite revelatory for archaeological study and I think that was front of mind when I was brainstorming ideas.
How it Plays
As a slightly different take from previous versions of this post, I want to describe the experience at a high level and focus on the importance and prevalence of certain experiences. I think that’s more useful than the hypothetical minute-to-minute.
Levels follow the basic flow of being given a picture of the recently deceased while at the home of the navigators. You examine the picture. The camera focuses, moving inwards, until you look up and find that you’re on a boat, adrift in the water, in a surprising location and period in time.
The body of water will differ from rocky coastlines to twisting rivers rife with rapids, which will slightly vary your concerns as you navigate. Furthermore, you’ll be given a different boat, ranging from the silent, silky canoe where momentum and rhythm of paddling is key, to the speed boat that whipsaws past tropical jetties.
Driving the boat is a key focus. It should feel great as it’s the thing the player will be doing over and over.
You’ll explore the location to find the passenger. They will make an introduction that is a vignette of their life and cause of death. This will be your initial clue as to who they are and how to help them. Then, you listen to instructions as you navigate their memories, representations of their thoughts, and metaphors brought to life.
Each passenger’s level will be a small to large open space. This is not an open-world, but each level has a wide variety of areas, secrets, sights, and you can explore them in any order. Think about a game like Dishonored or Seasons: A Letter to the Future in terms of level structure.
Many of the moments will be easily found and directly in your path. Others will require a bit more exploration, a light puzzle, or following the clues set by your passenger. Imagine a ten point test in which six of the questions are straightforward, three require a little effort, and one is a bit of a challenge.
At each moment, you’ll survey the scene and will gesture to the passenger. You do not speak, so this is where you will need to select gestures based on how you feel about the situation as a player, as well as how you think the passenger will respond. For example, you may see a memory in which the passenger is arguing with a friend. You can gesture with scorn, condemning their action. You can inquire further to hear their side. You can say nothing and see if they fill the empty space. The idea is to learn more about your character and ultimately help them face their faults and approach the after-life peacefully.
The gesture is meant to be a hybrid of a narrative system and a light puzzle. There is no failure, per se, but you might not receive your preferred outcome. These segments are short and can be replayed. The intention is that all outcomes are satisfying, even if not fully desired.
After you complete a number of the memories, you will be able to take your passenger to the dock to go to the afterlife. You can do this before you find everything, though there will be narrative benefits to finding everything. You will be able to send them off in a better or worse state.
Once you send them off, the level ends, and you return to the home of the navigators. Here, you will interact with other navigators, learn about their passengers, and connect the pieces to a broader mystery exploring the secrets of life and the fabric of time.
The steady heartbeat of this game is its boat navigation and exploration. The slight twist are the puzzles that take advantage of the nautical situation and the different timelines and boats. The innovation is the gesture experience.
The One Cool Things
Now that we’ve covered the elevator pitch and back of the box details, we can explore how each of the One Cool Things are incorporated specifically.
Non-Verbal Narrative: I’m being a tad literal here with the gesture system, but it seems fun to limit interaction to a form of communication that does not involve speech. You, the player, must interpret exactly what a shrug at this moment means…and so must the passenger. Obviously they’ll be scripted to respond - this is not interpretive AI! But, the experience implies that.
I also like the notion of one-way communication. The passenger can and will speak. But you, the navigator, cannot. I suspect this can factor into puzzles and can make interactions in the navigator home rather interesting. Ultimately, I see value in pondering how this limitation can inspire creativity in the mechanisms.
Recurring Emotion: Like What Remains of Edith Finch I’m spinning around the notion of death. But, where Finch was more tragic (with some hope), the focus here will be on recognition that sometimes all you can do is your best, and that is good enough. Death is central, but not as much as the celebration of a life well lived.
Modernized Heartbeat: The Cool Things from this season really focused (unintentionally) on the emotional aspects of games. It became clear that a “walking simulator” narrative experience would be a major part of the pitch for the finale. I intentionally sought ways to get the player off their feet as they navigated a world. Instead of picking up notes to read or listening to a narration in their head, I sought to find other means to communicate the story.
Oddly, just before writing this I played Seasons: A Letter to the Future, and it does many of these things. You navigate the world on a bicycle. You take photographs and record sounds, which trigger commentary from the character. While there are notes to read, you also engage with a relatively large number of non-player characters, which is far more than the usual number of zero in many of these games.
To me, the core of a walking simulator is having the freedom to navigate a space - open or constrained - to interact with things relevant to the story. I do not think that should be adjusted (nor does this pitch). However, I think these games focus overwhelmingly on a first person view and navigating by foot.
Obviously, the navigator controls a boat, which can have unique rhythms and controls that consume the player’s focus in ways that walking never does. But, it can also experiment with dramatic camera angles exposing the scenes and memories. Unique twists exposing puzzles. Perspectives that elevate the emotion.
Finally, the walking simulator typically positions you as a passive entity moving through the narrative. The navigator posits a world in which your gestures affect the passengers and their perception of memory. Your solutions to the puzzles identify new paths that can alter how the passenger feels about stepping foot on the dock.
For the Navigator, I am excited to see how the boat, interpretive memories, and navigating a semi-open space shift the formula of the walking simulator while setting players up for exciting new seas. This is subtle, yes, but potent.
Vibes Evangelist: I did not dig into the art above, but I see the golden hour being a prevalent feeling as you enter a new body of water. Or, a gorgeous shoreline at night dotted with lights to perfectly expose the rocks. Water is inherently beautiful and peaceful. It has a rhythm and is forever. It continues long after we’re gone. I think there is a vibe of the continuation of life, the undulation of the tides, and how the ocean can carry a storm or be so still the water resembles glass. I think the vibe is one of reflection (literally on the water surface?), serenity, and peaceful, continuous motion.
Place for Respite: I did not dig into this for the sake of brevity, but I think this aspect of the experience is easily imagined. After each passenger is escorted to the dock, you return to the navigator’s home. Here, the meta story is fleshed out. But, perhaps you frame the images of the passengers you’ve escorted as well as a memory of your own from their life. Perhaps you take an aspect of the boat. Perhaps other navigators comment on your mission, what you saw as they observed your work. The editor suggested this ultimately be about discovering your own truths as a navigator. What you have seen, who you have helped, and coming to your own sense of peace. I love that suggestion..
Season 4 Preview
I incorporated several changes to Season 3 to improve the experience. Firstly, I tried to make each post far more concise. Secondly, I cut a lot of the content at the tail-end, which makes each post shorter, easier to read, and easier for me to write. Thirdly, I stuck to a template throughout the blog to make the content easier to follow. Finally, I wrote and edited the entire season in a block so that they could be released all at once.
I encourage you to share your thoughts in the comments so that I can continue to improve the reading experience.
I’m very excited about the five games for Season 4, which I’m sharing below in case you want to follow along.
Edited by Joshua Buergel
"the focus here will be on recognition that sometimes all you can do is your best, and that is good enough. Death is central, but not as much as the celebration of a life well lived."
I love this. What I love about art is that it can help us come to terms with what it means to be human. And to be human, by all accounts, is to be fleeting.
I have been greatly impacted by the book "Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker and it is for good or ill one of the philosophies that is foundational to how I understand the world. This concept resonates with me perhaps because it builds upon this philosophy
Quick description citation--
The premise of The Denial of Death is that all of human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism.
This game premise seeks to fight back against the "immortality projects" we create in our minds. And that perhaps just doing the best we can is enough.
I love this idea and the potential for beautiful visuals is off the charts. Different geographical regions can get their own distinct styles of watercraft and coastal topographies. Storms or at least small squalls/strong currents could provide an increased navigational challenge with the reward of unlocks or shortcuts.
I would be most interested to see how the meta narrative could develop. I think there's some really cool potential for reflection on the main character's own lack of closure while constantly helping others find theirs.