Life Made Out of Ashes

2017/11/15

Musings on the audio-visual of NieR Automata, a video game.

I’m not a fan of games with high-quality graphic. Playing Assassin’s Creed, for example, is exhausting even for a short while. Took me a while to realise that the feelings I get when I play AAA games is similar to how I feel when I’m outside, walking in a busy city with too many noises coming from all direction, too many people about, too many things to see. I can’t take in all these little things, yet my brain just kind of force myself to take them in anyway? It’s tiring. And the same things happens when I play modern games.

So avoided AAA games on principle, and any game that boasts a huge world or detailed graphic. Games that populate their worlds with little intricate details might well make them more lively for some people, but they only drives me mad. I can appreciate them in a good screenshot, but I know I can’t play them in motion.

A week ago, on a ridiculous whim, I started playing NieR Automata.

Automata is an odd game, aesthetically. If you only look at its screenshots, it’s not very pleasing to look at. Washed out colours. Dull atmosphere. It’s set in an earth that’s long destroyed and abandoned. The environment is basically ash, dust, and rust. Even the plant life looks greyed out.

I love it.

Unlike other games in the genre, NieR Automata isn’t about what you see. The attention most other games give to their graphics, Automata gives to its music. The sound adjusts itself according to where you are in the world, sounding grander as you approach a wide open place, quieting itself in small spaces, gradually opening up as you enter a new area. The music itself is beautiful and clean, telling more about the world than what you can see. The washed out visual ends up becoming the background to its music, not the other way around as most other games do.

It’s a nice feeling to just walk around aimlessly, much nicer than I usually feel playing games that are meant to be walked around aimlessly in. I don’t have to force myself to focus on seeing one thing. The game doesn’t try to attract my attention with too many colours and shapes in its environment. Automata doesn’t try to impress your eyes, and it’s very firm about it. There’s not a lot to see, but there’s quite a lot else to experience.

And it surprised me how much life there can be in its dead world.

In NieR Automata, the world as we know it ended a long time ago. What you see is usually just remnants of the old. Crumbling buildings being reclaimed by plants, rusted machineries, makeshift platforms made out of abandoned steel. With its greyed out colours, it’s easy to dismiss it as depressing, and yet, it’s not.

The characters in Automata are all automatons. Man-made androids. Living machines. They’ve never had a life like the humans did. They’ve never experienced the world before it was destroyed. They don’t feel loss at seeing remnants of the old. For them, life has always been like this. A crumbling building being overtaken by ivies doesn’t signify abandonment. A fallen electric pole doesn’t signify death. The lack of vibrant colours doesn’t mean a lack of life. It’s all just life as usual.

It’s an odd feeling to play as one of those androids. On one hand, you’re you, and you know the world is dead. But on the other hand, you’re also the android 2B, and the world is as alive as it can be. Life is ashes, dust, and rust. Life is just machines talking with each other, while the living has left long ago. Once you’ve understood that, the world of NieR Automata is beautiful beyond what you can see with your eyes.