Art vs. Fun - Indie game "Passage"

So, my first journal entry is about a quirky game called Passage.

In the game, you just walk around and look at the strange pixel landscape, occasionally finding a box thing that'll explode with confetti when you reach it. Early on you can also find a girl character who will then walk around with you for the rest of the game.

As you play, the characters visibly age, and will eventually disappear leaving behind a grave marker. The woman usually goes first, leaving your old man to wander aimlessly a little longer before he too disappears.

Okay, while I found the experience interesting on an artistic level, to call this a good game would be lying. I'm not even sure it can be called a game, in the strictest sense. The rules are left intentionally vague. You know how to move around the landscape, and that the passage of time ages the characters, but that's about it. It's totally unclear what the confetti boxes or the numbers in the top right represent, and that leads me to the next point: there is no clear goal here.

In my opinion, with the lack of structure and goals, this is more of a toy than a game. Moreso than that, though, I'm sorry to say there's an even more damning problem with Passage: it simply isn't fun. I realize this is subjective, but let's look at how it plays out. You learn everything you need to know to play, which is moving the character around, from the very start. From there, everything else is unclear and never gets any clearer. The game ends in five minutes, and subsequent playthroughs only reveal more about the details of the landscape, so it doesn't have much replay value. To top it all off, it serves as a chilling reminder of our own mortality, and seemingly makes a statement about the fleetingness, and perhaps even pointlessness, of life. I think it would be difficult to find a person who can honestly say such an experience is fun.

The most potential for fun in this game seems to be tied to collecting the confetti boxes, and maybe increasing the numbers in top right as much as possible. The confetti boxes lack the fun of collecting though because there is no keeping track of how many you found, or how many remain. The numbers on the other hand seem mainly to increase the further you walk to the right, so the "high score" would ultimately just result from holding the Right key down for five minutes. This hardly says fun to me.

I think Passage can barely be called a game. It's more accurately an indie art toy, and not a fun one either. I believe there is often a place for artistic expression in games, but not if it's at the expense of enjoyable gameplay. The mechanics of the game are what ultimately make or break its fun value for me. If I can't enjoy the gameplay, the art and story are hard to appreciate. Thousand-year games like chess, go, etc. don't even have a story, and there's not much artistic value to their simple design. It's the fun and engaging game mechanics that make them successful games, and that is why Passage ultimately fails.