The alchemy that turns the video game into a unique experience

A couple of years ago, Marc Bassets interviewed the stupendous writer Marie-Hélène Lafon in this newspaper, who, when asked about her references, gave an extremely concise answer: “

, Flaubert's 30-page story, Enough for me.

Why add more?

For the French writer, that little story contained the universe.

Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa shares a creative ascendant: he does not miss the opportunity to repeat that reading Flaubert is how he discovered the type of writer he wanted to be.

Art is a complex miasma, which affects creators unequally.

Certain works deeply mark certain artists, who carry out their work following a specific path.

Vargas Llosa found his way trying to write

in the same way that Quentin Tarantino found his drinking from

cinema and

or Antonio López surrendering his brushes to hyperrealism.

In the same way, there are musicians specialized in electronics or dodecaphonism, comic book authors specialized in autofiction, and photographers focused on working only with black and white.

So the question is clear.

Why would it be any different in a video game?

When we say that we are witnessing the crystallization of the video game as art, we mean precisely this.

Because there are artists behind them, people with a will to transcend and with the self-imposed mission of transmitting a concrete feeling or a concrete vision of the world.

And that they have, of course, their own creative ancestry and their own references that have marked them.

A 'Chained Echoes' match.

Chained Echoes

hit the market last December.

It is a two-dimensional RPG that recovers the essence of the classic role-playing game of the nineties.

It has received an extraordinary 92 in the Metacritic ratings aggregator, which culminates the work of its developer, Matthias Linda, who has dedicated 7 years of his life to take the project forward and was able to conclude it after completing a Kickstarter in 2019. When talking about the game, a phrase from Linda is always brought up, which, not because it is repeated, fails to explain the heart of the matter: the game, she says, does not want to revive the experience of playing a classic J-RPG, but to recreate the sensations that he remembers those games made him feel when he was young and played them.

That is to say, he did not want to make a new

, a new

or a new

, but to encapsulate the best taste in the mouth that those games left in those who enjoyed them in their day.

And he gets it.

Go if you get it.

refines each and every one of the mechanics of those games and strips them of unnecessary straw that, over the years, has been seen not to enrich but to hinder the gaming experience.

What he has achieved is a distillate of that;

an alchemical refinement that captures all those essences of what a video game meant in those years.

And he has achieved it alone.

Because in addition to belonging to the already exclusive category of good games,

(which lasts about 40 hours) belongs to another special category that deserves its own column: that of games that have been made by a single person, a group at the same time. to which magnificent works such as

,

,

,

,

,

or

.

Some of these games have required specific help for a specific aspect, for example, the musical, or have grown (like

) on a cosmic scale that requires a huge team behind it, but in origin they are projects built with the blood, sweat and tears of a single designer.

It can also be said: with the blood, sweat and tears of a single artist.

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