Leviathan

The majesty of colours Review.

For the Ethical choices within Leviathan I have been looking at other successful games that have tried the same thing, one in particular that struck me was The Majesty of colours by Gregory Weir.

The majesty of colours has the player act out a large Lovecraftian beast which can interact with changing elements within the game, these interactions trigger different events leading to different endings. A very similar premise to my own game. Colours has proved very popular in its reception especially regarding its simple aesthetic style (a usual of Weirs) and its multiple choice ending but its the Ethical values at play that I'm really after.

The game sees you the player given simple choices, you can help the little island people or you can destroy them, you can also do a bit of both, all of these choices create the multiple endings. My problem With Colours is deep within the ethical web it creates. When the player makes a decision there is a block of text that appears telling the player what he has done and hints towards what choices can be made. This system of the game itself interacting with the player doesn't allow the player time to reflect on their own actions as the game itself is telling them how their actions are perceived.

Planes bearing banners fly across the screen, these flags show either a heart or a skull respectively depending on the choices made, in this way the game itself instantly judges the player in the same way a good or evil meter would in other failed ethical games. Weir himself commented on the amount of narration within the game when he released a blog on how he made colours, weir said-

'I wrestled with a big bad design dilemma during production: how much narration should I include in the game? ''majesty'' would have been a cleaner, purer game without any text...'

The game ethically is not 'wrong' but it doesn't allow a free thinking reflective space for players to derive the outcomes of their own actions according to the theories of Sicart which my game uses as a theoretical starting point regarding its ethical choice system.

sam