I’ve just completed Someday You’ll Return. While I apparently enjoyed it a little more than Jason Coles did( read his three-star NME review now)- it’s one of the strangest, yet making, competitions I’ve picked up this year- there’s one thing he and I are in complete agreement about: the protagonist, Daniel, is a total prick.
It’s the small things at first, of course. The lane Daniel talks to his ex-wife. The direction he mutters to himself about his missing daughter, seemingly more inconvenienced than he is concerned. He’s condescending and petty with a persecution complex a mile wide. At no quality does he wonder what his missing daughter might be going through. He’s incapable of empathy or sorrow, yet wildly lenient of his own smug and selfish motives. Each era his ex-wife calls for an update- a utterly tolerable thing to do, given the circumstances- he’s curt to the point of contempt.
Halfway through my day as Daniel, I begin to realise how unusual this is. I can’t recall the last time I was so engrossed in a game’s story while simultaneously abhorring the person I was forced to play as. This isn’t a ordinary video game staple, is it? In fact, the more I thought about it, the more odd Someday You’ll Return’s storytelling is.
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Someday You’ll Return. Credit: CBE Software
We play as soldiers. Loveable rogues. Stoic soldiers. Mourning revengers. Mute but malleable heroes. Even anti-heroes and everymen. There are plenty of inaccurate narrators, too- guys we think are righteous, at least to begin with. But it’s rare indeed to play as a thoroughly unlikeable shithead who’s an unlikeable shithead from the off.
It’s strange, then, that given the infinite possibilities games offer to expand the scope and scale of the types of parties we can inhabit, so many recreations frequently shed us as the same kind of protagonist. Yes, the industry is getting better at deviating from the grey, straight, male gaze, but as much as we desire a rogue, we so rarely get to play as one.
The chief outlier that springs to thoughts is Joel from The Last Of Us. We all know what he did at the end of the original sport- those were not the actions of a humanity who cared for the greater good- but even he had a devastating backstory that realized us affectionate to his quandary. Joel was shortcoming, yes, but understandably so. Daniel? Not so much.
Mass Effect 3. Credit: BioWare
Role-playing games, of course, present the chance to flex our moral compass. BioWare’s Mass Effect sequence is a supreme instance of this. It lets us choose from a number of options that bestow us with Paragon pitches for good behaviour or Renegade spots for – you predicted it- being a prick. Many of us, myself included, may frisk through by taking the high road and clocking up those Paragon spots, at least first, but it’s in the second or third playthrough that we’d choose to revel in savory immorality.
Someday You’ll Return doesn’t give you this select. Like The Last Of Us, there’s no way to come good in the end, just as there’s no way to change the outcome of this story by a final, binary decision. That’s why representing, and living, as Daniel is so refreshing. Much like the true-crime films I’ve been binge-watching on Netflix, it offers a view into a psyche that’s otherwise alien to me. It’s fascinating, fairly that I’m wondering now why we’re not given the opportunity more often.
Far Cry 5. Credit: Ubisoft
Far Cry 5, for instance, was a flawed but merriment knowledge- not least because we were forced to traipse through Hope County as the soften and most forgettable Dep- but my divinity, how different might it have been to have experienced some of that competition as Joseph Seed or one of his siblings? How might we have felt about the Seeds’ unyielding grip on Hope County if we’d played from their personal, warped attitudes?
It extends deeper. Listening to Daniel’s feeble self-justifications and justifies enabled me to empathise with his daughter’s persistent abscond. We simply ever realize flashbacks from his perspective- the fights in the family kitchen, the rewards exempted to their own children- but despite Daniel’s unwavering self-preservation, they make it easier to sympathise with the plights of the unfortunate few closest to him. Rooting us in a shortcoming, biased perspective paradoxically determines it easier to understand the views of others.
That said, I couldn’t imagine Uncharted without Drake’s immense appeal, or Metal Gear Solid without Snake’s preternatural calmness. But held games are unfettered by real-world settles, surely it’s time to push past the male dominance imaginations so entrenched in gaming and explore what other points of view these narratives could be told from?
I, for one, am ready for a brand-new undertaking that springs me firmly in the shoes of another unlikeable shithead.
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