Our Passage

Recently I heard of this artistic game called Passage. If you haven't played passage you'll be in for a surprise. Its not a graphically impressive game. It's more like NES style sprites. There are no monsters to defeat and no princess to save. Its you going through your "passage" through life. The game itself is only about a few minuetes long. So you won't have to invest too much of your time into it.

When you first start out in the game you have the choice to gain a mate or just past her by. As the game progresses your little character(s) age and eventually die. Then it's game over. On the way you can find treasure chests. Quite a few of them are only accessible when you don't have a wife.

Most "hard core" gamers won't appreciate the slightness and the simplistic message the game is portraying. Its sad though. We try to show the rest of the world that games are art but when something that is "artsy" rolls around and most of the gaming community calls it crap. I'm sorry, I didn't know zombie space solder prostitute was a work of art.

I played through this game a couple of times. I was impressed on how profound the message was but I didn't like the message itself. Playing the devil advocate, this got me thinking. As I was said before, there are treasure can only reached when your "single". Does this mean as a woman I am only a burden to my mate? Is the artist saying that I have little to no worth as a person if I don't pick up a mate? When I first saw this being played in my Game Critique and Analysis class I was thinking WTF in the back of my mind. Still, that's a whole different rant.

Recently, I got my dad to play this game and see what he thought of it. My parents have been divorced for almost 11 years now. So they don't have that rose colored glasses about the whole "life mate" thing. It took me a while to get him to actually sit down and play. Finally, I reached success. My father decided to amuse me and play the game. My dad is by no means a gamer. Even though it the control scheme was simplistic it took him a wile to figure out how to move around. He played through twice. Once with the wife and the second without. her. He thought it was cute. I asked him what was the message the game was trying to portray. He got the answer correct more or less. Later on I'm going to get my mom to play and see what she thinks of it.