Games For Reel: Folklore
This time around I would like to go over a game for Playstation 3 that has been overlooked by many. The game is Folklore. It was released on October 9th 2007. It’s 2009 now, and I haven’t heard very much talk about it.
You can find reviews here and there, but no one really talks about it today. Is it not good enough to withstand the test of time? I say no, it is good enough. It’s a pretty fantastic game.
So why isn’t it more popular? People like the game, you could agree its definitely a good game, but most people aren’t wowed by it. People don’t love it. Well the things about this game that keep people from loving it are the same things that would make Folklore blossom into a fantastic movie.
Throughout the whole game, Folklore is treated as more of a movie than a video game. The gameplay was never deep and involved, mostly because less than half the game was actual combat. The other half consisted of hunting down information and solving the mystery of the town of Doolin. Stories that revolve around a mystery are better left for the movies. People just get bored with mystery-based video games that don’t include enough action.
This is exactly where Folklore should have been a movie rather than a game. Folklore revolves around the mysterious nature of two characters, Ellen and Keats. Ellen is a young university student who received a letter from her mother several weeks after her death, asking Ellen to come to Doolin. Keats is a writer for an occult magazine who recieves a phone call from a distressed women, asking Keats to come to Doolin as well. Characters who are called to a town by supernatural means huh…this is starting to sound like Silent Hill. Well they made a movie about that.
Without spoiling anything about the game, and boring you with an extensive summary, each character is connected to one another in a fashion i’ve only seen perfected by the TV series Lost. Outside of Ellen and Keats, every member of the town of Doolin has a developed history and characterisation. In the Netherworld, this is the same case. Ellen and Keats, through the help of their supernatural guides, find a path to the netherworld in Doolin. They learn that people’s memories are manifested here, so they use this information to unlock the mysteries of the last 17 years of Ellen’s life. Ellen can’t remember these last 17 years, and vital information from those years will prove her innocence in a murder mystery. More characters unveil themselves as the story progresses and the mystery evolves to a level Sherlock Holmes could never Decipher.
The plot of this game is so rich with detail that it’s practically dripping. That and good writing is key to developing a good movie. Another important aspect of film development is the way it looks. From theme to mise en scene to tone to lighting to camera angles, you have to make the movie look perfect. In order to make Folklore look right, let’s take a look at other films that have perfected what Folklore needs to mimic.
Hellboy 2 and Pans Labyrinth are perfect examples of the style you will want to use. In fact, because both popular films were directed by the same person, why not just grab the director, Guillermo del Toro Gómez, and have him work on the film. Folklore uses Faeries, yes Faeries not Fairy’s they’re different, in an obscure sense. The indescribable creativity of these characters look very similar to ones you have seen in Pans Labyrinth. In order for you to fully understand what i mean, I’ll show you what some of the creatures look like from Folklore in the image below and you can see the similarities.
Aside from these creatures, the setting has to be perfect too. Folklore has a very natural feel to it. There were very few times where you would see anything that resembled a man made building. There were even fewer geometric shaped anything throughout the game. The environment consisted of mostly what looked like fantasy landscape paintings. Even the darker, dismal worlds you visited had a flair of un-blending colors that caught your attention.
Finally, in order to make this movie right, there must be a good amount of well thought out camera angles. In folklore, there is a lot of dialogue and deep emotion. I believe using shots that focus on the speakers faces will emphasize those emotions. Also using overhead camera angels while the characters are talking about the worlds would show that even though these characters are deep and well developed, they are still relatively insignificant in between all these worlds.
To wrap everything up, Folklore is a beautiful game and should be observed rather than played. While the pokemon-esque gameplay style made the game worth playing, the deep story is something i would rather have seen on the big screen.
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