All species of life are defined by roteness: repetition and mundanity are the forces by which the cogs of human society and the natural world exist both separately and together. NieR: Automata’s understanding of this unbearable truth is palpable. In director Yoko Taro’s unlikely pairing with Platinum Games, combat encounters and fourth-wall breaking exposition dumps are married to a series of connected spaces which individually echo Platinum’s past works, but are melded, interconnected. Here is a melting pot of Skyrim’s usage of large open spaces as a means of encouraging exploration mixed with Shadow of the Colossus’ disquieting sense of afterness, shot through with Metroid Prime’s divine tapestry of bespoke level nodes.
Initially, Automata appears substandard. This world is sliced up by seams, revealing core staples of Platinum’s past games: there is a liberal use of invisible walls and ceilings, both of which stifle exploration; sparse (to be generous) or outright empty boxes of space which suggest little of what might have came before; muddy texture work and prevalent pop-in of objects, and static environmental conditions and foliage. Platinum’s interpretation of the open world action RPG presents a tableaux of crumbled buildings inhabited by machines convinced of their humanity, and yet neglects to fill these spaces with very much in the way of visual ephemera to suggest anything in the way of past inhabitance.
The ambient terrains and architectural compositions of Automata conjoin to form a new kind of experience
Attempting to engage more deeply with Automata’s spaces than is usual for a typical action game makes bare realities of certain qualities it contains. There’s not much in the way of humanity to this post-apocalypse. Sure, you’ll find the debris of concrete walls and roads, or steel beams and rebar poking out from holes of stucco, and it’s clear that Automata wants to imply to the player that these buildings were once inhabited by urban city-dwellers. But it very rarely confronts the simple reality that people need more than just a roof over their heads to survive, to exist. A mailbox is useless if no mail ever goes in it. These days, a highway doesn’t appear ready for usage if there isn’t a billboard jutting out of the grass in the side of the road every few meters. A dining room table of the apocalypse has no character, no personality if it doesn’t show signs of wear and tear from years of people physically engaging with it as an object of appliance. There are no crumbs and stains from spillage here. Automata is more than content with an overgrowth of flora and a few elk and boars occupying its abandoned apartment buildings and shopping malls in lieu of the junk food wrappers, plastic bags or used condoms one might expect to find in the broken down endings of public infrastructure and suburbia.
There’s no detritus, and this barren emptiness is somewhat galling. Absent are the memories of broken families struggling to survive nightmarish monsters whilst navigating the interpersonal relationships which go hand-in-hand with any typical tale of cataclysm. It forgets (or ignores) that it wasn’t just the fact that no more people lived in The Last of Us’ houses which made prowling its suburbs so poignant and memorable. It’s that it was so clear that people used to. They had stories and lives. In Automata, you might see a few broken-down cars in city streets and a playground for children between adjacent apartment complexes. But it’s all window-dressing, a framework with which to lead the player from one action sequence to the next. The space here is brazenly utilitarian in its emptiness, and sometimes it’s as if the old castle in the forest or the stoplights and ponds sprinkled throughout the main cityscape might as well not even be there.
Resigned to the reality of Automata’s sheepish apocalyptic simulacra, I looked then to these negative spaces for something else than pure world-building. Here was a world built not to tell stories of its own demise, but to undermine it. Intentional or not, Automata’s embrace of the uncanny and strange is no more present in its dialogue or narrative than in its empty world, and it’s all the better for it. Separated from systems of play, the ambient terrains and architectural compositions of Automata conjoin to form a new kind of experience, one only made possible by the absolute lack of expected sheen to the constituent nuts and bolts which make up these spaces. The visual emptiness which Automata champions joins with its oppositely pristine and constantly expanding original score by Keiichi Okabe and Keigo Hoashi in a gorgeous bout of symbiosis. When taken with the game’s expressively fluid and graceful movement mechanics and the frantic fragmentation of its combat, the result here is a potent if intangible patchwork. In fact, Automata’s uncanny sense of the empty, its embrace of anti-historicity and its sullen, repetitive combat loop combine and awaken anew in sentience. In a lesser game – like, say, some of Platinum’s less inspired work in Transformers: Devastation, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan, or Star Fox Zero – these disparate elements might separate like oil and water, but here it’s a pleasing if perplexing concoction.
We’ll always come back to what it is we already know
Nowhere is this emptiness, this clash of stillness against the common trappings of the “action game” more apparent than in the game’s hacking segments. These are frequent during the game’s second route, in which the player assumes the role of a triangle shooting laser beams at cuboids, spheres and cylinders out of its focal point. Rectangular prisms resembling typical game engine prototype prefab tools make for makeshift battlefields and pathways surrounded by voids of negative space. Many of these encounters are quick and dirty, an additional layer added to the game’s combat system when the player occupies 9S, the scanner hacker android central to Automata’s second route. Within these sections, existential internal monologues and comic back-and-forths with 9S’ pod friend work as background texture. Pre-determined paths take us from one narrative delivery moment to the next, sprinkling in rudimentary combat scenarios and the occasional background lore dump.
I found it difficult to dismiss the rat-in-a-maze-like aspect of these scenes, as inevitable as they may seem. These hacking portions, where the possibility space for player agency becomes less a gradient and more a binary switch, are not at all dissimilar to exploring the drama-devoid remnants of Automata’s Earth. But the distinction here is that they also seem to make even more transparent the fleeting ephemera of the macro-artifice of not just this one video game, but all of them. And in this foregrounding of artifice, there is an echo of the deterministic nature of life itself: we’ll always come back to what it is we already know. What is it then to stray from the path forged if our end destination remains the same?
Automata‘s open, empty world, bizarrely, or perhaps appropriately enough, seems to suggest this point of crisis. Insulated from the rest of the work, it is a world that takes shape as an object to be scrutinized in futility: Taro and Platinum’s intentions remain shadowed in the recesses of their empty rooms. And yet, even if inhabiting Automata’s world as an outsider android from a settlement in outer space isn’t specifically meant to evoke something of a wrongful serenity or a calming freneticism or a misplaced dreamscape, it still does. Evading any pretense of heady thematic machinations, whether they be intentional on Taro and Platinum’s part or not, somehow it all just works, even when maybe some parts shouldn’t. I find what’s most comforting about that strangeness is both that I don’t understand it and that, in the end, I don’t have to.
All species of life are defined by roteness: repetition and mundanity are the forces by which the cogs of human society and the natural world exist both separately and together. NieR: Automata’s understanding of this unbearable truth is palpable. In director Yoko Taro’s unlikely pairing with Platinum Games, combat encounters and fourth-wall breaking exposition dumps are married to a series of connected spaces which individually echo Platinum’s past works, but are melded, interconnected. Here is a melting pot of Skyrim’s usage of large open spaces as a means of encouraging exploration mixed with Shadow of the Colossus’ disquieting sense of afterness, shot through with Metroid Prime’s divine tapestry of bespoke level nodes.
Initially, Automata appears substandard. This world is sliced up by seams, revealing core staples of Platinum’s past games: there is a liberal use of invisible walls and ceilings, both of which stifle exploration; sparse (to be generous) or outright empty boxes of space which suggest little of what might have came before; muddy texture work and prevalent pop-in of objects, and static environmental conditions and foliage. Platinum’s interpretation of the open world action RPG presents a tableaux of crumbled buildings inhabited by machines convinced of their humanity, and yet neglects to fill these spaces with very much in the way of visual ephemera to suggest anything in the way of past inhabitance.
Attempting to engage more deeply with Automata’s spaces than is usual for a typical action game makes bare realities of certain qualities it contains. There’s not much in the way of humanity to this post-apocalypse. Sure, you’ll find the debris of concrete walls and roads, or steel beams and rebar poking out from holes of stucco, and it’s clear that Automata wants to imply to the player that these buildings were once inhabited by urban city-dwellers. But it very rarely confronts the simple reality that people need more than just a roof over their heads to survive, to exist. A mailbox is useless if no mail ever goes in it. These days, a highway doesn’t appear ready for usage if there isn’t a billboard jutting out of the grass in the side of the road every few meters. A dining room table of the apocalypse has no character, no personality if it doesn’t show signs of wear and tear from years of people physically engaging with it as an object of appliance. There are no crumbs and stains from spillage here. Automata is more than content with an overgrowth of flora and a few elk and boars occupying its abandoned apartment buildings and shopping malls in lieu of the junk food wrappers, plastic bags or used condoms one might expect to find in the broken down endings of public infrastructure and suburbia.
There’s no detritus, and this barren emptiness is somewhat galling. Absent are the memories of broken families struggling to survive nightmarish monsters whilst navigating the interpersonal relationships which go hand-in-hand with any typical tale of cataclysm. It forgets (or ignores) that it wasn’t just the fact that no more people lived in The Last of Us’ houses which made prowling its suburbs so poignant and memorable. It’s that it was so clear that people used to. They had stories and lives. In Automata, you might see a few broken-down cars in city streets and a playground for children between adjacent apartment complexes. But it’s all window-dressing, a framework with which to lead the player from one action sequence to the next. The space here is brazenly utilitarian in its emptiness, and sometimes it’s as if the old castle in the forest or the stoplights and ponds sprinkled throughout the main cityscape might as well not even be there.
Resigned to the reality of Automata’s sheepish apocalyptic simulacra, I looked then to these negative spaces for something else than pure world-building. Here was a world built not to tell stories of its own demise, but to undermine it. Intentional or not, Automata’s embrace of the uncanny and strange is no more present in its dialogue or narrative than in its empty world, and it’s all the better for it. Separated from systems of play, the ambient terrains and architectural compositions of Automata conjoin to form a new kind of experience, one only made possible by the absolute lack of expected sheen to the constituent nuts and bolts which make up these spaces. The visual emptiness which Automata champions joins with its oppositely pristine and constantly expanding original score by Keiichi Okabe and Keigo Hoashi in a gorgeous bout of symbiosis. When taken with the game’s expressively fluid and graceful movement mechanics and the frantic fragmentation of its combat, the result here is a potent if intangible patchwork. In fact, Automata’s uncanny sense of the empty, its embrace of anti-historicity and its sullen, repetitive combat loop combine and awaken anew in sentience. In a lesser game – like, say, some of Platinum’s less inspired work in Transformers: Devastation, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan, or Star Fox Zero – these disparate elements might separate like oil and water, but here it’s a pleasing if perplexing concoction.
Nowhere is this emptiness, this clash of stillness against the common trappings of the “action game” more apparent than in the game’s hacking segments. These are frequent during the game’s second route, in which the player assumes the role of a triangle shooting laser beams at cuboids, spheres and cylinders out of its focal point. Rectangular prisms resembling typical game engine prototype prefab tools make for makeshift battlefields and pathways surrounded by voids of negative space. Many of these encounters are quick and dirty, an additional layer added to the game’s combat system when the player occupies 9S, the scanner hacker android central to Automata’s second route. Within these sections, existential internal monologues and comic back-and-forths with 9S’ pod friend work as background texture. Pre-determined paths take us from one narrative delivery moment to the next, sprinkling in rudimentary combat scenarios and the occasional background lore dump.
I found it difficult to dismiss the rat-in-a-maze-like aspect of these scenes, as inevitable as they may seem. These hacking portions, where the possibility space for player agency becomes less a gradient and more a binary switch, are not at all dissimilar to exploring the drama-devoid remnants of Automata’s Earth. But the distinction here is that they also seem to make even more transparent the fleeting ephemera of the macro-artifice of not just this one video game, but all of them. And in this foregrounding of artifice, there is an echo of the deterministic nature of life itself: we’ll always come back to what it is we already know. What is it then to stray from the path forged if our end destination remains the same?
Automata‘s open, empty world, bizarrely, or perhaps appropriately enough, seems to suggest this point of crisis. Insulated from the rest of the work, it is a world that takes shape as an object to be scrutinized in futility: Taro and Platinum’s intentions remain shadowed in the recesses of their empty rooms. And yet, even if inhabiting Automata’s world as an outsider android from a settlement in outer space isn’t specifically meant to evoke something of a wrongful serenity or a calming freneticism or a misplaced dreamscape, it still does. Evading any pretense of heady thematic machinations, whether they be intentional on Taro and Platinum’s part or not, somehow it all just works, even when maybe some parts shouldn’t. I find what’s most comforting about that strangeness is both that I don’t understand it and that, in the end, I don’t have to.
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