Saturation, Entry 2.

Taking a break from 'professional' works and AAA video game's for this entry, I want to focus on a free, independently made game by a internet user known only as 'Mortis Ghost'. The game, originally released only in French, has garnered much acclaim for its atmospheric style and intriguing art direction.

The game's name is 'Off'.

Here we can see a screenshot of the battle screen. The player controls a mysterious character called 'the batter', and is accompanied by an even more enigmatic, apparently somewhat sentient object known as 'Alpha' (the spherical ring, also pictured right.)

Across from the players team, on the left we see some randomly encountered enemies. What is interesting in this screen, and in the game overall, is the use of saturation for the purpose of representation. The batter is dropped into this world with the task of 'purifying' it. Of particular note is that the player character is completely desaturated and monochromatic. As he succeeds in purifying each zone of the games world, the zones lose their colour entirely, and become white too.

With this in mind, it is curious to see that the enemies in this world are also monochromatic. This brings up contradictions and questions in the viewer as they play. Is your character somehow affiliated with the strange monsters he battles?

Colour is treated as the overarching enemy of the batter, He seeks to purify the world and remove that colour, however the enemies he faces are not colourful themselves. this draws questions on the Batters real motivations.

As the game draws towards the end, it is revealed that the batter is somehow connected to the controlling inhabitant of the world. 'The Queen' of all he has fought is his wife, after defeating her, he ventures to the core of the world, where he finds what is implied to be his infant son. the player is then forced into a combat screen and must fight the child, it offers no resistance and is killed. The official ending has the batter heading to the back of the room, and despite his guides insistence that what is happening is wrong, the batter flips a switch, turning off the light. The game then ends.

It becomes apparent that the batter chose to eliminate everything in the world, the people in it, the colour, even the light, and shut everything down. The story seems to indicate the breakdown of a marriage through its diologues, but that is largely unimportant in this post.

The use of colour is interesting in 'Off' because the symbolism of saturate colour changes as you play, 'purification' initially sounding to be a noble goal, is in fact the annihiliation of all, good or bad. Saturation starts to seem less of a bad thing or something to defeat.

Another interesting theme in terms of the desaturation of the purification process, is that purified zones are not free from enemies. if anything, the enemies that inhabit areas the batter has already purified are even more grotesque than those in the regions of colour.

Enemies encountered in a 'purified zone'.

I find it interesting that different saturation values become 'characters' themselves in 'Off', and are symbolic of a powerful emotional journey that often takes reams of dialogue to tell.