The Joy Of Motion: Coming To Grips With Pacing In Video Games pt. II

Last week, I spoke briefly about how poor pacing in an otherwise well-realized video game is enough for me to be put off from playing it through to completion. 

Luckily, I have no such qualms with this week’s centerfold: Guacamelee!. Developed by Drinkbox Studios (Tales from Space: About a Blob and its sequel Tales of Space: Mutant Blobs), Guacamelee! perfectly contrasts the choppy and disconnected pacing, which I felt while  playing Lone Survivor with a smoother, more visually polished and more immediate experience. Guacamelee! has players donning the skin of Juan as he fights waves of the undead in an attempt to save his love, the El Presidente’s daughter. Unfortunately, the plot itself is relatively barebones, with occasional bosses explaining to Juan where to go next before attempting to defeat him. Fortunately however, the lack of meaningful plot actually enables players to be more consistently  involved in playing the actual game.

Combat is similarly lacklustre: you attack enemies until you've wounded them sufficiently to grab them, at which point you can throw them into the environment or at other enemies. It pains me to even discuss this, largely because of how boring it is to experience.

In other words, is Guacamelee! a great game in spite of how insignificant it’s plot and combat are? Well sort of, and that brings me to the point of this post. You see, whereas these aforementioned aspects of the game feel anaemic, they also thankfully do not detract from the excellent visual style, the music and the platforming. Each of these three elements combines nicely and contributes to a lean and often forward-thinking Metroid-vania action-platformer.

For instance, much of the platforming elements feel satisfying thanks to the integration of environmental puzzles. In keeping with the undead theme of the story, Juan eventually gains the ability to hop between the world of the living and the world of the dead at will. This shift happens instantaneously, and acts mostly as window dressing by slightly changing the look of the environment. As an example, denizens in towns change from fleshy to skeletal, shrubbery occludes your vision in the living world and no longer exists in the dead world, and colour palettes are exchanged.

Shifting between worlds also makes parts of the environments appear or disappear, depending on their affinity: platforms or blockades in one world disappear when shifting into another. By cleverly mixing these obstacles, Drinkbox managed to consistently create engaging and often challenging puzzles out of the environment. Fortunately, none are overly taxing, and failure goes unpunished.

And that’s part of the quiet charm to Guacamelee!. It’s a game that does exploration right. The world feels carefully crafted, the music is infectious, the animations are lively and the visuals are vibrant (especially on the VITA’s OLED).

Perhaps it’s unfair to compare Lone Survivor—which is inherently more concerned with ambiance and tone over pacing—to Guacamelee!—which brilliantly re-captures the excellent pacing found in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, a game often heralded as creating the Metroid-vania subgenre and therefore contributing to the institutionalization of seemingly smooth and effortless pacing in action-platformers. But then, I feel both games contribute nicely to the discourse surrounding pacing in video games.