Friday, July 27, 2012

A videogame promoting moderation!?

The Act is a vidoegame about controlling your body language. It's experimental and accessible; short yet satisfying.

While so many other games promote extremes of being completely good or evil, killing everyone and finding everything, it's refreshing to see a game promote moderation. There's no correct dialogue option; you actually have to watch the faces of the NPCs to determine how you should act. Originally, the arcade game had a knob to twist your character from shy to gregarious, but the iOS port uses swipes.



A minute in and you can get a feel for the gameplay. The other amazing thing about this game is that it's all animated, old-school Disney-style. While there are some frustrating parts, overall, I was very impressed with the exploration of this new style of interaction. I'd love to see a body-language slider in an RPG, but given how intensive it is to animate, I might have to settle for tone brackets like (sarcastic) and (imploring).