Ah, a deep co-op video game about being controlled by a parasite! Obviously, this video game would talk about trust, and the phenomenology of experience, right?
You’d think so. Early on, playing the game with my partner, I would have thought so too: we each had a secret! Surely this would end in some grand moral decision, right? However, I think the game merely skims the surface of both of the readings. While the narrative dressing of the game is trust, the mechanics do not follow up on that narrative dressing. What you end up playing is a puzzle game with a bit of moral philosophy lightly schmeared on top.
Why? The problem is that, whether the players trust each other or not, there are no stakes to that trust. You cannot finish the game unless you trust each other to begin with. There was no prisoner’s dilemma problem in which one player can “win out” over the other player; the game gave us no hard choices. The only time that we used the “push each other” mechanic had consequences were at the very end, in which we saw another cut scene, narrative dressing. (Fortunately, the game bugged out at exactly that point, so we got to witness both endings for free.) We could not truly betray each other in any puzzle; the game would just start the puzzle over again.
Okay, you might say: were there not two important choices, killing or not killing Rika or the Mother? However, both of these choices had to be unanimous decisions (no prisoner’s dilemma). Moreover, there were no real consequences to either decision. If you killed the Mother, you merely got a different variant of the puzzles; if you didn’t kill Rika, she dies anyway. In either case, both players “win.”
But then you might say: were not the choices embodiments of Nagel’s experiential phenomenology thing? The concept of the Mother feels like Nagel’s concept of becoming a bat: even as the human grows more bat-like, the human cannot understand what it is like to be a bat (as a human) or like a human (as a bat). But in this case, replace “bat” with “vaguely-monster looking thing that reproduces incessantly.”
Again, the problem is that the game makes no statement on whether these choices are really morally important. When my partner and I played, we talked about whether she still felt pain or not — and, like the human looking at the bat, we felt like we couldn’t ever know her subjectivity, her experience as a weird blobby thing. Neither of us felt strongly about killing her or not; if it was something that we couldn’t know, if Nagel’s point is that we cannot know, that doesn’t lead to very heated moral debates. It was a coin-flip. We chose to kill her just because the guy wanted us to. And just like the mechanic of trust, there were no stakes to the choice: we continue playing the same puzzle mechanics in different flavors until the end. In other words, whether we chose to kill her or not does not really indicate whether we understood her or not, whether experience is attached to a particular viewpoint, whether the Mother is human, etc. etc.
In the end, the game’s mechanics are just about… puzzles. Figuring out what symbols match to what other symbols, and what the puzzle wants you to do. We got really good at moving boxes, jumping up and down, communicating with each other, and generally, having fun. What the game is good at was helping two people who already trusted each other play a fun puzzle game because Bokura Planet doesn’t give you really any hard, moral choices. The game could only address these moral dilemmas if the mechanics and narrative matched, if we had to choose whether to trust each other or not. It doesn’t.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to play, though. Top tier co-op puzzle game. Really fun for just the puzzles.
