It’s easy to lose perspective when you talk and write about videogames with any regularity. You start to lose sight of the way people who don’t eat, sleep, and breathe games see and understand games. You forget how many times you’ve said the word “Zelda” in the span of a month. You also tend to stop noticing the peculiar language you use. I’m not even talking about genre delineation, I mean just the words we use to describe and discuss videogames. Hands-on is an especially peculiar phrase. You don’t use it anywhere else. When I tell a friend what I had for lunch, I don’t tell them that I went hands-on with some sushi. (Well, except for that one time. That was different.) It just starts to lose meaning after awhile. That is, until you remember, that you don’t really know anything about a game until you actually have the controller in your hands and you’re playing it. All the screenshots, trailers, and press releases in the world won’t tell you what just a few minutes of hands-on time will.
Namco’s Fragile is what set me off on this train of thought. I’ve been a fairly vocal supporter of the game since the very first screen shots were shown off. Yes, it’s a Wii exclusive game that appears to be decidedly more traditional, but it’s Fragile’s visuals and trailer music that have really grabbed me. I’m an absolute sucker for both post-apocalyptic loneliness and spooky, desolate exploration. Just the idea of exploring abandoned cities by using the Wii remote as a flashlight has been enough to sell me on the game wholesale. But the truth is that I have absolutely no idea what you do in Fragile outside of guide a character around in third-person and point a flashlight at the corners of rooms. How does it feel to do these things? What else do you do? What’s the point, the goal?
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