Wide Ocean, Big Jacket: Microcosms
At one point during Wide Ocean Big Jacket, one of the characters, Ben, tells his girlfriend’s aunt that the camping trip they’re all on feels like a small life within a much larger one. It’s an apt description for the feeling that immersion in nature elicits: As though you exist, disconnected from real life, in a time immaterial and unreal.
It’s also a fitting description for Wide Ocean Big Jacket itself, which invites the player to join a camping trip with 13-year-old Mord, her boyfriend Ben, and her Uncle Brad and Aunt Cloanne. The camping trip takes place maybe over a weekend, and the game plays in about an hour.
During this time, the player’s job is to direct the conversation and occasionally where characters are walking. There isn’t really a main character in Wide Ocean Big Jacket; who the player directs depends on the scene. The fixed camera makes the scene interactive while limiting what the player can do and where they can go. It also balances the characterization, because the scene never focuses on one character for too long. I knew exactly who they were in the hour I spent with them.
While Mord and Ben are sharp-tongued teens who oscillate between brash confidence and anxious uncertainty, Brad and Cloanne are adults with jobs and lives and friends — too young to be old and too old to be cool. Brad and Cloanne are, naturally, much closer to who I am now, but Mord and Ben are relatable if you have ever been a kind-of-shitty 13-year-old, which most people 13 or older have probably been. I saw myself reflected a little bit in all of them.
The other effect of limited movement is that it’s what forces narrative progression, though “narrative progression” applies only, I think, in the most technical sense. There’s really no narrative to progress; the player is just invited along to observe conversations both mundane and meaningful. It’s like peering into a terrarium: For a moment the player experiences an entire ecosystem, miniature, self-sustaining, and lush.
Wide Ocean Big Jacket is, as Ben might say, a condensed experience, but it’s no less substantial or heartfelt for it.
