(0.5 / 4)
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THE HAND THAT MOCKS THE PLAYER
Imagine playing a tech demo for a peripheral you do not own, and there you have it - my experience with the roughly one hour long 3D-adventure Datura. It was crafted through the efforts of Polish demo group Plastic, who were in cahoots with Sony's Santa Monica Studio who, I assume, wished to showcase the power of Sony's Playstation Move-controller.To be fair, the game is playable without Sony's response to the Wiimote (otherwise I couldn't have played it, d'uh). If you do not own one, the right analogue stick of an ordinary controller replaces the Move. The game is played through the first person perspective. Problem is, you have no customisation options, and the controls don't follow standard protocol. You cannot invert the y-axis, and pushing the left stick to any side rotates the character, instead of having him or her strafe, which is today's standard.
Would owning a Move-controller have improved my view of the game? I don't know, would holding a magic wand improve on the feeling of waving your empty hand for an hour straight? I guess that depends on your ability to perceive the illusion behind the magic. In that way, I suppose I'm an agnostic.
The Move is supposed to control the nameless protagonist's floating hand and interact with objects in the world. A second Move can apparently be utilised to control the head. This seems utterly pointless, seeing as there are very few objects to interact with, and the interaction poses no challenge. Amnesia: The Dark Descent did this much better, two years earlier, adding the nightmarish stress of having to perform similar tasks under the pressure of a threat. In Datura, trying to control that hand with the right analogue stick is not stressful, it is a mockery.
It's a very short mess, and I'll treat it accordingly. To me, it felt very much like an experience on rails. The game begins in an ambulance and ends in a hospital. In between you get to explore a couple of tiny areas of an oneiric, misty forest in the autumn, with a few easy puzzles to solve, a few buildings to enter, and a string of hallucinatory life-or-death scenarios that tell a wordless, fragmented story. These snippets can have dark or light outcomes depending on your choices, although I didn't realise there were choices to be made until the game was almost done. Butterflies abound, pointing out a few areas of interest. We also see loads of datura flowers in the forest, and they are known to induce hallucinations. But what's real and what's fantasy is anybody's guess.
I think I was supposed to have a PS Eye-camera installed for the ending. The fact that I didn't resulted in a moment of comedy (I won't spoil it). Also, you can get two different endings. I saw only one, and downright refuse to see the other. I guess, from an artistic standpoint, the game could exist to question our behavior within the framwork of an interactive experience. But if there is a cohesive narrative to be found, it eludes me. We're free to make of it what we will.
Personally, I had a miserable time. This might make me come across as an unpoetic brute, but I don't care. Missing any sort of production values, story, gameplay, all I could've hoped for out of Datura was some atmosphere, but I was bereft even that. I felt like I was wrestling a fever dream. If you want me to engage in your hidden meaning, you have to prove there even is a meaning through your artistic endeavor. Come on, Plastic, meet me halfway at least.
Instead, this is what happened halfway through: I went online to check the average completion time and found that I had already reached the halfway point. I wept with joy. And the meaning of the tears of another is in the eye of the beholder. Plastic would have been proud to see me: "He's weeping! He caught the meaning!"
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