Espial: The Eye from Above - Itch Game of the Week
Just because it’s unfinished doesn’t mean it’s not working
Espial: The Eye from Above is a game created by Team UnderCover. It’s mid-development proof of concept can be found at the time of writing at this page. Team UnderCover consists of Carolina Bermejo, Alvaro Lucas Camacho, Simone Chelo, Leonard Maxim and Liva Stubbe.
One of the most overused idioms people parrot back and forth is the Shigeru Miyamoto quote, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” My problem with this is that it assumes that a game being “good” is the natural conclusion of game development, that enough manhours of polish will eventually make any game a successful work. And while I can’t actually find a citation for this quote (at least on the english net), it does seem to be true of Nintendo’s general development philosophy. Their various teams almost always turn out incredibly polished games that can widely vary in quality based on core design decisions. Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival are both examples of games with the typical Nintendo polish that suffer greatly from poor or outdated base mechanics. Either of those games could have received years more polish and not overcome their respective core flaws.
But I also take issue with the idea of a rushed game being bad, this is just as much not a fair assumption. As of writing three of the seven most played games on steam are still in unfinished, early-access states (PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS, H1Z1: King of the Hill, and ARK: Survival Evolved). These success stories led credence to the idea that a game can be engaging without that polish, that solid design decisions can make a game engaging all on their own.
Another great example of this is Espial: The Eye from Above an unfinished, in development title that exists publicly in the form of a demo of the game’s opening level. In Espial, the player takes the role of a spy darting around on struts high above a busy train station. The player is tasked with taking pictures of a target passing off a briefcase to an associate while maneuvering around on beams and platforms. It’s this pairing of tasks that really makes Espial immediately engaging. To track the target’s movements around the station the player will need to keep their eye on them as much as possible, but to successfully navigate the game’s platforming sections the player must also watch where they’re going to avoid falling to their deaths. These are two systems that must both be attended to but the player can only really manage one at a time, it’s a very rewarding push-pull.
On top of this, the closer the player gets to the action the more points they’ll score for their photos of their target. You can take the safe routes along platforms to keep your eye on the target, but you’ll never get the best angles that way. Thus the platforming isn’t something the player merely does to move about the space, their relation to the events around them matter. It’s not a question of “Can I make that jump?” but “What would it be like if I make that jump, is there better jumps to make form here?” Even in its most rudimentary beta form, this constant questioning makes Espial constantly engaging. The game’s press release cites the Assassin’s Creed franchise as one inspiration point, but frankly Espial does the act of tracking better than that series ever has, (and I say this a a big Assassin’s Creed fan who’s planning to write a series of 10th anniversary essays on it later this year).
Yes, Espial is pretty finicky control wise and can definitely still be fleshed out a lot level and mechanic wise. Currently the height of the player character makes it hard to tell individuals below apart, but it would be awesome to see targets employ much more advance tricks and feints to throw the player off. But it’s a testament to the importance of the game doc design phase that it’s as much fun in its current state. If you’re someone who subscribes to the notion of, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad,” playing Espial could stand to teach you a thing or two about how games go right, and what’s actually responsible for them going wrong.
Espial: The Eye from Above was the game of the week for May 29, 2017.
