Wither

You can say a lot of things about a game.

“Oh that’s very kind of you to write,” you warble, “but actually I’m not one for words…”

Don’t be so coy. Remember in elementary school (and middle school) (and high school) (ok and college, too) when you used to get those useless fill-in-the-blanks worksheets and you’d grin smugly as you took one and passed them on because it had a wordbank at the top that took any semblance of challenge out of the exercises?

Well, here’s a sizable phrasebank (which unlike a wordbank is not FDIC sorry) for you to withdraw from in the event that you wake up 10 minutes prior to your Games Journalism 101 midterm in front of a Denny’s with two packets of salt in your breast pocket. Relax, you got this bro! Whenever you find yourself with holes in your review just plug in “On the other hand,” and one or more of the following strings of words…



…And who knows, maybe you will find yourself with many GameFAQs reviews to your username someday.

Yes, there are certainly a lot of things you can say about a game, and this is not even an exhaustive list of all the possible run-n-gun-on sentences to describe an interactive experience. In fact, in the event that “first person run n gun” is not a sufficient enough description, you may be provided with a very large blank space in which you can fit several of the above phrases.

Except you may as well stuff the game itself in there too for all I care because that’s all it is, a game, and I’m tired of games, I am done with games, I’m too old and too young for games anymore.



There is not much you can say about Wither as a game.

“Well that’s not true, you can say it was made in RPG Maker 2k3, it has custom and edited graphics with rips from Pokemon Red resulting in a consistent Gameboyesque look, it has good original “””8bit””” music, it uses some sound effects from Zelda, it’s quite short, and it’s a bit more like an adventure game than an RPG…On the other hand, it doesn’t have any battles or action gameplay, and that dick Gary Oak makes a cameo…”

Oh aren’t you cute, I see what you did there at the end. You know what I mean, though. As a game, all you can really say about Wither is that it’s basically one long battleless puzzless statless fetch-quest. And it has “good atmosphere” (whatever that means). But that was my bad for being vague again, let me rephrase my earlier statement.

I cannot find anything to withdraw from that phrasebank that I think best describes my feelings for Wither.

The best games are those for which there are no words, and too many words, all at once.



Most people would say that Wither does not have much in the way of “gameplay.”

But what is gameplay? Why do we care about it, and what makes it good or bad? Presumably, it’s stuff you do in a game that is supposed to be “fun,” i.e. pleasing and/or rewarding in some way. Good gameplay maximizes fun and minimizes unfun.

(Sid Meier, inscrutable genius that he is, called gameplay “a series of interesting choices.” Yes well so is what happens after you realize you have a boulder crushing your arm.)

Fun gameplay offers us “play” or leisure typically by letting us simulate anything we please without the consequences (or benefits, for that matter) that might befall us should we try to do the same things in real life.

Bad gameplay tends to be called such because it is, well, not fun; the words “tedious,” “boring,” and “frustrating” tend to be used the most to describe bad gameplay, and such words inevitably precede low scores of games in reviews. Thus, bad gameplay does not a good game make.

But what of games that deliberately provide little in the way of conventional “gameplay” in the first place? They present a prickly pickle to game reviewers. If there’s not much jumping over pits or shooting bad guys in the crotch or spending skill points on magic missiles, what does the game have to offer that’s fun? And how are you supposed to rate it with the same schema used for other, more “traditional” games?

Wither is basically one long fetch-quest. It has only a few areas, within which 12 times over you look for and obtain a flower. Then, joy of joys, you get to look around for two coins. Doesn’t that sound repetitive ad naseum? Doesn’t that sound tedious? Boring, even? And how exactly am I supposed to judge this kind of game against Balmung Cycle, anyway?



While the concept of “play” is pretty unique to “games” (video and otherwise), most mediums of storytelling provide a similar imaginary experience; in fact, we have come to expect from games the same convincing, dreamlike fantasy lands that we have always expected from literature or film.

This literary quality in games, however, cannot exist on its own; a game is an inherently interactive experience. And so storytelling in a game must coexist with gameplay, never mind how engaging it is on its own. Bad gameplay can ruin a game, even if the game tells a good story—even players who like a good story will simply opt to YouTube the cutscenes instead of playing it these days.

On the other hand (heh), when good gameplay is intertwined with a good story that we want to be a part of, the gameplay and the story benefit mutually from each other and the game is that much more enjoyable. The player becomes immersed—the illusion is complete. Thus a chain of repetitive or seemingly mundane tasks in a game has been rendered compelling.

There is not much variety or sensory excitement in Wither’s gameplay. But it suffices—or rather, it facilitates the player’s involvement and is made compelling by the narrative. Rather than a variety in gameplay there is variety in experiences (narrative and gameplay married in great moments), held together by a consistency of feeling in everything from its bleak green hue to its suitably ponderous music (yes ok that’s “good atmosphere”). With the help of your imagination, Wither can weave an illusion that makes its repetitive tasks fresh each time, with a different experience attached to the collection of each flower and the overarching quest itself.

Games are like dreams. Maybe most of them are useless and meaningless but every now and then one of them comes along without warning and makes us really think about our “life”. Such is art as human expression. Something that we want and seek to explore in life is in games like these; we are not just ticking off objectives on a quest checklist.

(I for one didn’t collect those 12 flowers for a Steam achievement.)



Probably the best moment in the game: there’s a car in front of the house of a certain character and, upon examination, its front crumples in with a crash. You shiver in mild surprise and recognition as the sound echoes in your mind, and you’re left to boggle your mind at the implications in the resulting silence, indeed for the rest of the game.

That one moment that took a less than a second to experience and probably just as much time to code is better than all the custom tactical Zelda-inspired ATB action card battle systems in the RPG Maker Vaporware Void put together.

(You’ll understand when you play it.)

(Or not.)

(Or maybe there is nothing to understand and it’s all in my mind.)

(That’s the beauty of Wither.)



Wither is deliberately primitive.

Retro—that’s the cool thing these days, right? Retro games, art, and music. Nostalgic. Simple. Generational cool. Sketch it in your Moleskine, develop it on your Macbook, stuff it in your Chrome bag, and move to San Francisco. Forget about what Jimmy Saunders said about your retainer in 4th grade, you’ll show him, you’ll show all of them. You’re a cool kid now.

Is that why Wither was made to be so “lo-fi”? I don’t think so.

I think games like Wither have a certain power. The most popular RPG Maker game ever created*, Yume Nikki, utilized a few more colors and gameplay gimmicks and 100% less dialogue, but achieved a similar feat: it grabbed a vulnerable player by his existentialine gland, squeezed really hard until he was neck-deep in a neurosis-inducing neverland, and refused to let go. It clicked with people who (somewhat masochistically) relished the experience it offered and saw in it a stimulating mystery, with countless possible answers to the riddles that were its denizens and imagery and themes. Meanwhile, Wither, too, with only a few colors and no intro or even cutscenes presents the curious player with a mysterious situation to investigate—though compared to YN its themes are a little more clear, and it has a somewhat more structured “goal” and a less opaque narrative mostly thanks to the dialogue (making Wither also a bit more accessible and less inscrutable).

(And while we have Rastek around to generously answer our questions about the significance of the hero’s shoe color or whatever in Wither, YN’s developer, Kikiyama, famously uploaded YN and promptly disappeared, in doing so (perhaps purposely) cementing the game’s darkly mysterious feel.)

These games, using dated technology and little in the way of gameplay, thus manage to captivate some of us. Given the perennial emphasis placed on polygon counts and advanced physics engines and achievement systems in games of late, it seems almost illogical. How is it possible that games as old as Frankie Muniz can possess enough to scare us, woo us? Shouldn’t a game’s potential to affect us increase and decrease proportionately with the processing power of its platform? Shouldn’t a PS3 horror game be scarier than a NES one? Shouldn’t I be moved more by FFXIII than FFVII? Are you trying to tell me that 7>13?? Does not compute!!!

Maybe the quality of a game is not necessary contingent on its platform, but how we connect with it. Maybe older games, with their severely limited colors and eerily primitive blips and bloops, were so decidedly detached from reality that we were intrigued by their surreal strangeness.

Or maybe Wither is primitive, and that lends to its power because when we are given only a few scraps of bits and bytes and hints surrounding an intriguing situation, our imaginations fill in the rest and it becomes our own.

*look if there’s another RM game with its own imageboard, fan animations, fansongs, fangames, and creepy cult following of NEETs, please let me know and I will correct this statement accordingly



Let me tell you about my favorite character in Wither, the Chief Detective. He basically comes into this hotel room with a body, checks it out, rules it a suicide, and with all the cavalier panache of a jaded chain-smoking CSI star invites his subordinates to join him for a brewski, their work is done here. He’s got an almost upbeat disposition considering there’s a decaying corpse hanging above a tub in the bathroom like 5 feet away from him. He’s probably seen corpses so many times he’s desensitized to human death in its physical form, would probably just light up a cigarette in his car after investigating a double homicide drive home and sit down to a home cooked meal, listening to his wife telling him what’s on Masterpiece Theater tonight.

He might be intense and relentless when on the tail of perpetrators of murders, but suicide? Eh no need for further investigation, case closed. Besides, why would someone want to kill themselves? He can’t sympathize with that much. In fact I don’t think the Chief “gets” the why part of it. He just does his job.

(Incidentally, when I first played Wither, I thought that the character in the above screen shot was the Chief because they share the same sprite. Guess they’re not the same person, guess I don’t care.)

*not to be confused with the National Japanese Literature Association. Or its Russian counterpart for that matter.



Life is nothing without companionship.

You can let school and work and and money and toys and accomplishments and pleasure and TF2 distract you for however long you want, and you can get caught up in that day-to-day for 99 years, but is there anything in life more valuable than true companionship?

The vast majority of us cling to life as long as we can, despite all the bad. Is it out of cowardice? Irrationality? Basal animal instinct? Might it be logical for some of us to off ourselves?

There are a lot of interesting characters in Wither, and while most of them don’t have much dialogue, most of them speak of their relationships with other people—or even ask you to keep them company. Generally, the strength and influence of human companionship seems to be an underlying theme in the game, seemingly unrelated to the “main” theme of death and dying.

In addition to the Chief, my other favorite character in Wither is the Mortician. You find her in the hospital’s mortuary, surrounded by corpses on their tables. Despite her profession and surroundings, she’s bursting full of life. In my head she is a sexy meganekko with a saucy voice and attitude, one hand on her hip and the other firmly grasping her scalpel. After some flirting on her part she asks you to keep her company for a while—it gets lonely cutting up dead bodies in the back room of a hospital all day I guess—and you smoke a cigarette with her in silence as she goes about her work. (Actually forget the car thing, this is my favorite scene in the game.) For keeping her company she gives you a flower, it was meant to liven up the place but you’d better get out of here, I’ll get in trouble if someone sees you in here.

There are few quests more compelling than those that help make another human’s on this planet better, few risks more worthy than those that make our lives on this planet better.



So in the tradition of humans blaming their woes on neutral outside forces, I’ve been on an “information detox” kick lately. Once a week or so I go without internet/computer/TV, just take a break from being overloaded with news of Wikileaks melting trade deficits in a roadside bomb attack by 54% according to Gallup (PS3/360). A day in the information age with no headlines, stats, facts, numbers, and opinions is a nice change of pace.

A mere day out of every seven might not seem like much of a respite, but regardless of its brevity a solid break like this can work wonders. It’s refreshing and makes you get back to the basics, really contemplate things, and step outside the everyday din and think critically about life on the other 6 days of the week.

Wither is a like a game detox. Devoid of gameplay gimmicks, brief yet complete, and lo-fi for the right reasons, it’s a breath of fresh air after breathing the stale gunk that has always filled a good part of the overcrowded indie and commercial games market. I want to play more games like this, not more games.



Somewhat ironically, you cannot “die” in Wither in the conventional video game sense. You don’t have “lives” or “HP” to represent mortality. In fact, your character indeed has no stats. You can’t even die a dramatic and nonsensical Sierra adventure game death.

On that note, dying is just about all you do in most games made before 1995 unless you actually enjoy playing video games and/or have some Mother Teresa patience. And most games have some sort of death or death-like condition that purposely impedes player progress. Why?

A game virtually always inflicts death to punish the player; excluding those rare cases in which the player’s avatar perishes for plot purposes, death is never the natural ending in videogames. In fact it is completely avoidable in all but the most esoteric (ie Demon’s Souls) and/or buggy games (ie Dark Souls). What then does dying in video games typically represent, if not death? For what would a game want to punish the player?

Failure. Failure is something that is hard to live with. Fortunately though, games are meant to be for fun, so in games death is almost never permanent—failures are never set in stone. Games never really end. If you want to try again, you just have to reload or start a new game or cheat or at worst buy a new copy, but anyway my point is that it is never impossible to redo exactly what you failed at doing.

That’s another reason why games are great.

Meanwhile, in Real Life we’re in continual autosave, and there is no restart button, there is no code to hack, there is no new copy to repurchase. The only other option to life—with all its failures, and the pain they entail—is death.



So what failure are you trying to avoid in Wither? What are you staving off with all your skill and wit and GameFAQs?

Without spoiling the experience for you, I would say that the failures in Wither have already been committed, and all that’s left for you to do is to try to mitigate them by fulfilling a promise. Wither’s not about avoiding death, it’s about making beautiful things happen ex post facto, nurturing the good that come out of bad. The only way you can fail is by not seizing that opportunity. (Like by not playing the game, hint hint.)

Remember that after one thing withers and dies something else will bloom in its place and you’ll be alright kid, you’ll be alright.



There is not much your can say about Wither, but you can absolutely say it is alive.