Spoilers ahead.
Meta is an extremely powerful tool for constructing fiction. Self-awareness can be sad, insightful, funny- most mediums, games especially, employ the use meta mainly to be funny. Arguably games have been meta ever since actual text and writing became a thing that games used, with the self-aware quips of Lucas Arts adventure games being an excellent example of early games poking fun at themselves and the player. The likes of Metal Gear Solid is also another example of video games using meta to be both funny and dramatic in its use. And, in a sense, any time a game addresses the player in order to tell them what buttons they need to press, that, too, could be seen as a self-awareness. And that need to tutorialise and acknowledge the player is perhaps the reason why games seem like such a natural fit for metafiction.
It hasn’t been until recent years, however, that games have really started stretching the limits of metafiction, namely by taking player choice and examining it, asking us what choices in a virtual space really mean, if they mean anything at all. And if choices in a virtual space are meaningless, then, by extension, does that mean our choices in the real world are also meaningless? For me, the game that conjured up all of these questions was The Stanley Parable, the snarky game that examined choice, game developers, gamers, and games. It was a hilarious existential nightmare that didn’t hold back from tearing apart the 4th wall in as brutal and as honest a way as possible. In 2015, we then got Undertale, the game that asked us what choice-based morality systems really say about games and their players. The Beginners Guide, also made by the developer behind The Stanley Parable, then went a step further by creating a story that truly blurred the lines between reality and fiction, to the point that we can’t fully be sure if the real Davey Wreden hadn’t actually had a falling out with a friend followed by a real mental breakdown. Just last year, the long running series Dangan Ronpa decided to completely annihilate its seven year long cannon in an event that hasn’t been seen in a franchise since MGS2, all for the sake of using meta to emotionally affect players. There’s also the likes of Doki Doki Literature Club, which decided to apply metafictional elements to a very specific of game, rather than games in general.
To make my point clear, metafiction has been around in games for a long time. And even just in terms of our current recent trend this current decade, we’ve already reached a point where we’ve stretched the limits of what we can do with the concept to an absurd, almost unnecessary degree. In other words a game has to do a lot, or at least something different, in order for metafiction to feel new and fresh. Once the cat’s out of the bag, it’s hard to put it back in again, even if it’s the first time since you’ve released it from the bag. For indeed, ICEY was originally released in 2016, so the developers were likely unaware of Undertale during development, and The Stanley Parable was also quite new.
However, ICEY is no long running franchise. It’s not as charming, memetic, and emotionally diverse as Undertale, either. Instead, ICEY’s only real claim to fame is that it decided to add a cool anime aesthetic and action gameplay to a skeleton of the Stanley Parable’s plot. To be fair to ICEY, it was developed by a Chinese studio called Fantablade network, meaning it’s possible that they’re not fully up to snuff with the latest Indie games from the west. It’s possible, but highly unlikely, given the fact that ICEY’s narrator often feels like he’s reciting dialogue from the Stanely Parable almost verbatim.
If you’re unsure what the central conceit of the Stanley Parable or ICEY is, then let’s go over it, as it’s simple to explain. In both games, the plot is a thinly veiled construction of a narrator who instructs the player during gameplay what actions they should take, and where they should be going. In ICEY, the constant refrain is that you should follow the arrow, in the Stanely Parable, the choice might be between a right door and a left door, with the narrator urging you to go left. Following the narrator’s instruction to the letter in either game will result in a very cookie cutter plot that almost borders on self parody. In ICEY you’ll fight your way through an apocalyptic world killing any robotic enemies you find in your path, until defeating the final boss and being unceremoniously dumped onto the credits screen, with nothing learned about ICEY (your player character) Judas (the final boss) the narrator, or the world around you. To learn about those things you have to explore the world around you by going against the narrator’s instructions. A noteworthy example is when you travel to a dead end, and the narrator chastises you for remaining in a totally empty room. Eventually, he realised that you’re waiting to get a trophy, and he chastises the player’s achievement-driven mentality. The entire sequence is extremely reminiscent of the broom closet from the Stanley Parable, and it’s not the only, well, parable to be found here. It’s not just the ideas or the content, it’s also the presentation that feels remarkably similar. Some of the better, more unique moments happen towards the end of the game, involving letters left to the narrator from infuriated developers working on ICEY (the game) and various phone calls the narrator has with his wife and his investors, which result in some of the funniest and most unique and insightful scenes in the game. All these moments take place in the marionette theatre level, and they’re easily the game’s highlight.
However, for the most part ICEY generally feels like a shallow copycat of the Stanley Parable, with a lot of its endings and concepts feeling like less developed cliff-notes versions of the same concepts from the Stanley Parable. A lot of the game’s weaknesses besides this come from its conception, starting with the narrator. While the narrator in both ICEY and the Stanley Parable are borderline the exact same character with very similar personalities, Parable’s narrator, played by Kevan Brighting, alongside his buttery smooth voice and subtly mocking tone is just much more enjoyable to listen to than ICEY’s Narrator, who is a huge dork. I’m fairly sure the dorkiness of his performance was an intentional choice, to make the narrator seem less suave and sinister and more pathetic, but I just don’t think his acting chops were as up to snuff. He had to carry a lot of the game by himself which is no easy task, but he just barely falls short I feel.
The other issue would be ICEY herself. Her otherworldly sci-fi design, while nice, can’t really serve as a stand in for the player, which was an important part of the Stanely Parable’s commentary, meaning the ‘Parable’ in the Stanley Parable is just kinda conspicuously missing from ICEY’s commentary. The game’s ‘true ending’ which is reached by finding all the other endings, involves ICEY reaching self awareness, and she talks directly to the player in this sequence. However, other than thanking you for protecting her from danger, she really doesn’t have much to say about what she’s been through. She understands that the player exists in a separate world from her, but I’m not sure if she understands who the narrator is or whether she realises the fact that she’s living in a world that exists within layers upon layers of untangleable metafiction. As such the ending only really seems to exist for the sake of giving the game closure, as well as serving as an excuse for a cute waifu to talk to and thank the player. ICEY as a character is played extremely straight for a game that’s otherwise self aware.
To ICEY’s credit, There does seem to be a self-contained, non-meta story hidden underneath the crappy surface plot and barely-hidden metafictional plot. The only issue is that they’re all told to you through brief, cryptic text scrolls that leave a lot to the imagination, to the point that I’m not really sure whether there’s something really interesting going on under the hood that I don’t know anything about, or if it’s just there as a joke or as a way to create a sense of unease in the player. The potential existence of a real plot and an actual setting does give it a somewhat distinct entity from of the likes of the Stanley Parable, a game that wears its artificiality on its sleeve, but it wasn’t a plot I was able to derive any sense of meaning or enjoyment from.
As for ICEY’s gameplay, it’s fine. Just fine. It controls really well, and it’s very stylish and fun, but it’s also pretty mindless, bearing in mind that I played on hard difficulty. You can move around and attack quite fast and playing around with the combos are very fun, but all the levels are flat corridors with some secrets to find (secrets beyond just disobeying the narrator) and the enemies aren’t very varied or interesting when it comes to their attacks. Often it feels like enemies were given very generous hitboxes in their attack animations to compensate for how often ICEY is able to dash, and some of the bigger enemies can trap ICEY in a grab animation for a few seconds which completely kills the flow of combat, as you can’t do anything but watch as control is wrestled away from you during this time. And since their attacks are, again, quite generous with their hitboxes and come out extremely fast in a visually clustered environment, being hit by these attacks never feels like fair punishment the way it would in a more slower paced, deliberate action game. That’s only a minor gripe however in what is for sure a very fun game, but the gameplay taken by itself is basically just popcorn entertainment that prioritises player empowerment over real difficulty and depth, and the narrative and the story in ICEY are basically separated by an invisible yet distinct fence, where the gameplay never really affects the story or vice versa. This often leads to a feeling that the gameplay is just filler, something to justify the game as a ‘game’ rather than a walking simulator and give your hands something to do on your way to the next story segment. While I’m sure there will be a lot of people who will prefer the gameplay to the story here, it’s also not gameplay that you can’t find literally anywhere else. While The Stanley Parable and ICEY look like incredibly different games on the surface, it’s remarkable how when you really sit down and play them both and examine them, they’re basically identical games, the only difference being that ICEY asks you to mindlessly mash a few more buttons. In truth so-called ‘walking simulators’ can barely be any different to ‘real games’ in cases like these.
ICEY is certainly worth a play at its cheap price, it's been on Steam for a while and it’s more accessible than ever since it just came out on the Switch. It took me less than an evening to beat and there are certainly worse uses of your time. However, if you’ll indulge me, I think I know what happened with ICEY, and this is just speculation mind you. I think that the developers managed to develop a very cool aesthetic and artstyle for their game, as well as a fun combat system, but I think they may have eventually come to realise that they needed a unique angle to the story in order to give the gameplay any sort of connective tissue or purpose, and they needed to give the game a proper identity. Through this period of iteration and experimentation they were able to figure out that the structure of games such as the Stanely Parable could be applied to basically any gameplay and aesthetic shell. ICEY’s narrator is a character who is all too proud to show you how hard he was able to work on a game with excellent graphics and gameplay, how he was able to iterate upon previous designs and work hard on his craft. But when it came to designing the story, it was an absolute shambles, he had no idea what he wanted it to be. It’s played for a joke in the game, as if we’re supposed to innately realise that the real, unseen developers behind the game had a stronger vision behind ICEY than their fictional developer did.
But, perhaps there’s more truth to the Narrator’s struggles than we give it credit for. Maybe ICEY is meta because, well, when you have no talent for storytelling, what better way to sell your story than to admit that you have no idea how to tell a good one? Game developers are great designers, artists, musicians, animators, and coders. But writing can be deceptively harder than it looks. And maybe that is the reason why meta is so popular. But meta isn’t a bandaid that makes you immune from criticism, nor does it make an otherwise unremarkable game. Or at least, in a perfect world, that wouldn’t be the case, which is obviously not the world we live in. Meta is just a simple tool like with any other. Like with all things in life, perhaps the solution is to just practice, and try harder next time.
I don't think I've played any meta-driven games outside of Undertale, so that's really my only point of reference.
Personally, I didn't even find the meta stuff in Undertale all that compelling. I get that it was trying to make me feel like a bad person for my rpg-playing habits, but if the monsters are so nice, why are they all trying to kill me on sight? I think if there was some more grey area to its message, I would have taken it better.
Also, trying to get the bad end was a grueling, miserable experience. That's not how you make me feel bad for my actions. The evil run is supposed to be the easy one so that I can get hypnotised by the money and xp that I'm getting without taking a second to look at the corpses I'm leaving in my wake.
I thought the pacifist run of Undertale by itself was a strong game, and the psycho path was completely unnecessary and poorly-thoughtout.
I kinda disagree with a lot of that.
The fact that the monsters try to kill you on sight despite being goofballs is exactly where the grey area lies. They need the soul of a human in order to escape the underground and return to the surface, but they're all kindhearted enough that the thought of killing a human disgusts them, so they're happy to find any excuse they can to spare your life. This is especially the case with Asgore, who would rather stay in the underground and do nothing than use one of the human souls he already has to cross the barrier and proactively hunt humans on the surface- he's too kind to want to kill humans, even if he knows he has to do so for the good of his people. That's why talking things out with the monsters is important.
I think making the genocide route painful from a gameplay experience is an effective way of making the player feel bad for their actions- because it shows that despite the game content being there, the game is actively trying to resist your efforts every step of the way. It wants you to stop and question why you're trying to complete game content for the sake of completing game content- and by persisting along the genocide route, you're justifying what the game is talking about when it openly villainises you. That, in turn, makes Undertale and the characters who inhabit the game world feel more real, as opposed to video game characters trying to relay an anti-violence message. It's not that they want you to learn a lesson, (besides Sans and Papyrus) it's that they want to protect their own lives. On a genocide route, most of the major characters couldn't care less about you, they only know that you need to be stopped by any means necessary because they recognise you as a legitimate threat. The fact that the game even went so far as to reduce encounter rates until all the monsters in an area are dead shows a ton of thought and attention to detail by taking that game mechanic to a logical extreme, and the characters react very quickly and realistically to your change in attitude. Nothing in the Genocide route suggests that a lack of thought was put into it. You may not like that it frustrates you, and you're not supposed to. If making the player hate the game saves their lives, then they'll happily go through any means necessary. As such the game doesn't need to directly moralise in order to get its point across, even if the genocide route is otherwise incredibly blunt. It's the kind of storytelling via game mechanics that was sorely needed in ICEY.
I think it's important that frustration can be seen as something that can be a useful addition to the artistic value of a game. However, a lot of gamers judge games by conventional game design wisdom and their own raw first impressions. Undertale breaks some conventional wisdom when it comes to game design, but if you assume that everything is intentional while you play through it, then it really starts to click.
With ICEY, it's harder for me to say that the game's shortcomings were meant to add to the artistic value of the experience. My dislike of the narrator can be explained by them intentionally wanting to make him come across as dorky, but it's harder for me to rationalise the copycat meta elements and the obtuse hidden story as being anything other than being earnest failures of the game.
I mean, keep in mind that I did eventually just fold and watch the genocide run on youtube cuz I didn't want to play anymore.
But in some sense, I suppose I played the game as intended. I did a neutral run, understood the idea of the game, did a pacifist run, and was done. That is what flowey asked me to do after all.
With regards to story, I just feel like I have more respect for something like that new game "Detroit: Become Human". A game that offers absurd amounts of player agency without needing to directly address the player.
Sure, due to the scope of the project, not every bit coukd be as polished as something like The Stanley Parable, but games like that and Long Live the Queen that have dynamic variable stories feel a lot more immersive and gripping.
Then again, I suppose immersion isn't usually the appeal of a game that acknowledges the player.
For sure, even this article addresses meta fatigue.
There's no one correct way to make a game, and I have a great deal of respect for games like the ones you mentioned for being able to present very choicey narratives. While those types of games have their own tradeoffs, they're still impressive in their own right.
I'm just very defensive of Undertale because it's one of my favourite games. Like, of all time. I don't think every game should replicate Undertale's approach, though. Games will be at their best when an artistic vision is pursued over copying trends.
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