Proteus

What does it feel like to have your (virtual) body die? Of course our virtual bodies die in videogames all the time, positioned as they are as fleeting moments of play atop an enduring game-world. To die in most videogames is to experience death as an imagined possibility before the real, which is the unfolding of new environments or new possibilities within the same. The virtual body then is a catalogue of mistakes. When the virtual body dies but the game-world persists, it is calling for another body, and another. It is difficult to say whether the virtual body ever actually dies when the game-world is immortal, because the virtual body always comes back. The traditional virtual body is like Sisyphus, eternally enacting a task predetermined by the unchanging physical world. But Proteus is the god of rivers and oceans, of the water that appears always the same because it is always changing. Proteus is vitality; the spark that animates all life. It is for this reason he is connected to the anima mundi or 'world soul', the world as a living being containing all living things. In Protean reality both world and entity are inextricable, and always actively changing together. The player is the body and the island. In Proteus, the game-world dies when the virtual body dies.

Nights in Proteus' day/night cycles don't introduce new mechanical threats like Don't Starve or Minecraft, instead they leave us fighting against the dark itself. Accounts of Proteus that describe the game as calming do not do justice to its sense of always encroaching cold. Because new days bring new mutation within the protean island, each night serves as a reminder of that impermanence; that we belong to time as much as space, or that our experience of space is moored to the living moment, each receding quicker than any of us can ever grasp. In Proteus, as in material reality, procedural generation comes through procedural disintegration, the loss of everything known for the ever-advancing unknown. The strange thing about night in Proteus is that this loss gives meaning to the day that came before it. Night draws the world in closer, making for an intimacy only available in resistance to the coldness of night and deletion of time. It is unsettling the way that we are subject to the passage of the sun and moon, but then Proteus is about belonging. Experiencing the ungroundedness of the game-world is to experience the mortality of the virtual body: they exist together, and they die together. The ever-encroaching cold is necessary for the emergent warmth of belonging in time and space.

It might be strange but the dramatic colouring of Proteus' blocky forms took me right back to seeing the world as a child. I have always had family in the farmland to the north, which is where the country grows narrower and narrower, and the sun-bleached pine trees stand alone in the paddocks, haggard and contorted. In the day the smell of silage, dirt, and cow shit imbues the landscape with a stillness and proximity that at night recedes, the moon distorting the familiar as it dances through the branches to the grass and rocks by the shed. I remember playing tag with my cousins and seeing my breath condense into fog and thinking the one thing scarier than being found and chased is being left alone out here. My uncle would tell us about the boogeyman by the window and the woman in the fields, and I thought about how I prefer that to the alternative, which is that there is nothing. We always left to drive home in the afternoon, so that by sunset we were surrounded on either side by distant fields, macrocarpa lining the perimeters and pointing at us with their bony fingers. My favourite time was the brief window after sundown and before darkness, where everything is stained the purple of wet running ink, and the smell of mud and grass rises from the ground. The safeness of being inside of the car, driven by someone else, was only enhanced by the horror of nightfall on the other side of the window. What growing up makes you realise, however, is that no such barrier ever existed.

To move through this space is to age with it, to grow ugly with it, and not even your parents can save you from the passage of the moon and the sun. But then this is the divine contradiction of youth: the total safety promised by parental figures is predicated on a belief in total danger out there: mud and rain and stone bridges that run into black water with trolls waiting to grab your ankles, and boogeymen, and the woman in the fields you hear sometimes calling even though you never said it. Like many children I was raised on cartoons, and this meant the painterly rural landscapes of One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Aristocats augmenting the images of the nocturnal countryside gleaned from the window of my parents' car. A sense of total belonging that only increased the more grotesque the trees and farmhouses, the grimier the cobblestones and ruined fences, the greater the likelihood of being sucked into that cold black river and never seen again. Like a candle in the darkest room of the darkest house imaginable. What Proteus makes manifest with its imminent cold nights is the realisation that in order to be caught, one must first be falling. In order to find warmth, a moment of intimacy must first be carved out of uncertainty.

It makes sense that Proteus' development team were inspired by visits to Avebury. Every night the player is met by the island's stone circles which, as others have pointed out, seem anthromorphic, almost like watchers, as the game goes on. Your greatest friends in the climbing night are these monuments that somehow prefigure your arrival and even, *gasp*, remember you. What the stone circles of Avebury point to is that the ground beneath the feet is similarly enchanted, haunted by the monuments since removed, and that were always unknowable any way; traces left in traces of a forgotten people. The creepiness of enduring monuments to something lost but always there is at tension with Proteus the game which is about the becoming and disintegration of everything. Proteus the pagan god of sea-change, of life as current, is also important in alchemy where all matter is transmutation. In Proteus the body dies and the world dies too, never to be seen again. It ends in apocalypse, and its procedural generation ensures that every life-cycle is solitary as its death. Every world generated algorithmically is the sum of every possibility it is not. What the haunted monuments do is remind that what dies is never fully lost. That every world and every body generated by Proteus swims in an ocean of everything that ever was and will be. What does it feel like to die in Proteus? It feels as though I belonged somewhere.

In Proteus, you are presented with a randomly generated island and you explore and listen to the sounds which creates a surreal experience. You can move and take postcards which act as a save point as well as taking a screen-shot. It's probably best describing the 'game' in terms of the experiences I had....

I start off in the sea next to the island, so I move ashore. I see some frogs nearby so give them a chase as they make beeping sounds. I climb the nearby hill to find some freaky looking statues. I descend to find a group of chickens and as I chase them they exhibit flocking behaviour and produce sounds reminiscent of a child going wild on a glockenspiel.

As night-time comes, rain begins to fall. The overall sound of the game becomes minimal in contrast to the busy sounds during the day. There's not much to see, except an owl in the tree which catches my attention from the sound it makes.

Morning comes, it looks a bit more like autumn now. Leaves fall from the trees, wind rustles the trees, but soon stops.

I chase a rabbit/frog (it looks the same as a frog, but is brown), which eventually hops into the sea. I follow the nearby road and it leads to a shack, but no humans are found.

I chase a group of rabbits and night comes around again, the rain and wind is back, but soon passes. I see the moon clearly on the horizon. I notice a tree with a thick trunk surrounded by normal trees. Seems ominous and I begin to hear creaking sounds. Cricket sounds chirp in the background. Fireflies gather on the horizon, so that's my next destination.

As I get near, they begin circling and the visuals start to go a bit weird as the wind swirls. I step into the small circle they make and time seems to speed up.

When it stops, it is morning again. I see some bees landing on the nearby flowers. I move into their group and they begin to swarm. I move away and my character starts running! The bees stop chasing, but I keep moving the same direction to the beach. Crabs are on the beach although they aren't up to much, so I move on.

I begin to climb the mountain and see the sun in the sky. I stare into it for several seconds and the screen begins to fade. The screen goes white. I look away. My vision returns. Moral of the story? Don't stare into the sun kids!

At the top of the mountain I see sparkling below, so go to investigate. It's a sparkling white frog. Wow, these guys can really jump. I head back to where I was and see fireflies. I use them to speed up time once more.

Morning again. Definitely looks like Autumn now. Leaves on the trees are brown, but there are some funky pink/purple ones too.

I go in search of new creatures. Find cricket looking bugs. They leap up vertically, but never move from their position. I see some fireflies, so wait with them until night-time.

They form a weird ball shape, so I walk into it. Large buildings seem to form in the distance. Trees have no leaves now. Must be an hallucination, because everything goes back to normal once I begin moving.

I keep moving to find some more fireflies. These are the ones I want. Winter now comes, low clouds form just above the creepy looking trees which now have no leaves. It is dark and I hear bells jingle.

After aimlessly wandering round and seeing nothing interesting, I am bored as I'm approaching an hour of game-time. I decide to return to the sea. Snow falls from low flying clouds. Music changes to a more vocal sound-scape. I keep moving for a long time, surely something should happen. Then I notice that either: the clouds are in the sea, or I'm flying upwards. I can't tell. Soon the clouds disappear completely and it is just me, the stars and the moon. My character starts closing his eyes and it cuts to the main menu. Seems my journey is over.

Proteus is one of those “not-a-game” experiences. You are supposed to take in the sights, but the graphics are so basic, it's hard to appreciate it. You are also supposed to take in the music, and at times it seems like you are in some kids imagination with lots of plinky-plonky sounds with animals running around, or maybe in an hallucinogenic dream sequence. At other times, nothing is happening and night-time can really drag. In the game Dear Esther, the graphics were amazing to look at, and the music and dialog conjured up emotional responses which gave it a great experience. In Proteus, there's not much going for it other than the fact that it is randomised, but I don't think your experiences are actually going to differ. If there were more landmarks, more animals, in addition to some sort of exploration task to find them all, then I would have enjoyed it much more. As it stands, it just seems like a test demo.

When Proteus first came out back in 2013 it rightfully confused the living shit out of everyone. I mean, it's not hard to see why, anyone who would look at a gameplay video or hear someone talking about it would immediately be greeted with debates about weather or not it was even a video game. This is a game in which you explore a randomly generated island and that's about it really.

Rest assured though, Proteus is most certainly a piece of interactive entertainment that you can buy on Steam and that's enough for me to categorize it as a video game despite the fact that it can't be won and there's hardly any real gameplay, by all means under any other circumstance I would consider this to be a glorified screensaver, surely this game is a pretentious and lazy slog that was created to bubble up controversy in the gaming journalism world... right?

So why am I giving this a 5.0?

Proteus is one of those experiences that, for me, anyway, defines a certain point in ones life. The first time I played this I was kind of floored, this is an exploration game with no real goal or story of any kind and yet through the power of it's gorgeous visuals and borderline achingly beautiful soundtrack is enough to make someone well up a little on contact.

Some might call it pretentious, but I completely disagree. This game's only purpose, the only goal it has is to make you feel nice while you're playing it. no more and no less. Which is why arguments about this game being pretentious kind of baffle me, this game is practically anti-pretentious, it doesn't look down on people who don't get it because there isn't a message to understand, a literal toddler could play this and enjoy it.

Some might call it substanceless, but I disagree heavily on that front as well, Proteus is absolutely ridden with attention to detail as far as walking simulators go. The games music reacts to practically everything you do from approaching different objects to ascending and descending on the landscape of the randomly generated island. There are also a startlingly high amount of random events and triggers that reward revisiting the game.

Some might call it pointless and to those people I say take a look at basically any video game, entertainment is pointless. If something like this, even though it doesnt have a goal is enough to entertain someone, its doing it's job correctly.

Exploring Proteus's little world is wide-eyed, adorable child-like glee. Weather or not that is worth 10 bucks is entirely up to you, but it's been 4 years and I still don't regret my purchase of this audio-visual masterpiece.

Procedural generated walking simulator. There is no objective in the game except to look at your surroundings, all you need to do to reach the "end" is to step into a light ring during the night to advance the seasons.

It has a pixelated art style which is kind of ugly, but offers some cool electronic music which changes according to the season.

Its a really short game, but then again it doesnt have much to deliver gameplaywise so im glad it didnt drag on. In the end i think its a bit too artsy for my tastes, but it did offer some cool moments.