![]() ![]() This alone gives off a certain impression of isolation, as characters are always remarking on “being trapped in the storm wall,” and mentioning that there are “miles of desert” around. For one, you are in this city in the middle of the desert. I’ve heard time and again that Spec Ops: The Line presents Dubai as more of a psychological landscape than a physical setting, and that’s true in a lot of ways. They increase in difficulty to the point where you are so overwhelmed that your last squadmate leaves you to “run” while he fights them off in a last-stand moment. But by the end, enemies are generally cold, distant, and professional. Enemies start out somewhat animated and over-the-top, screaming orders at each other, like, well, any military action game. It is fairly normal for enemies to become more difficult as the game goes on, but rarely is this tied to the plot in as cohesively as this. The enemies also evolve, though in quite the opposite way. Each character sounds more distraught as the game goes on. But as the game progresses, they will get more agitated and unhinged, even during gameplay. They seem like a team of professionals who know what they’re doing. In the beginning of the game, you and your squadmates act casual and light. This affects everything from character models to the way the characters talk to each other. Everything in Spec Ops: The Line works together to reinforce this.įor example, you and your crew become increasingly worn-down and unhealthy as you progress. ![]() Throughout the game, Captain Walker is a devolving character who descends into madness as you are making increasingly harmful and destructive errors. You’re here because you wanted to feel like something you’re not: A hero. Walker’s dissociations are digetic, while your dissociations are meta. ![]() As a player, you kind of dissociate from Walker as he justifies his actions, while Walker also dissociates from reality. By the end, you are told that you always could stop, but you didn’t. Which brings us to the meta decision you’re forced into: the decision about whether you should keep playing knowing that you aren’t really the good guy anymore, or if you should just put the game down. The game will not let you progress without using the white phosphorus. Immediately after that last decision I mentioned is “the white phosphorus moment:” the only choice here is to use white phosphorus and kill everyone, including the civilians, or to just fight in one spot until you die. Later in the game, there’s an instance in which you can either take a shot to try to save a vital hostage while letting civilian hostages die, or you can try to save the civilians and watch him get killed. In the first hostage scenario you’re presented with, you can let the hostage get killed, or you can try to save him, in which case he dies anyways. The choices you are asked to make start out simple and become darker and more difficult as the game progresses. This adds a level of agency on your part, deepening the emotional impact of the scenario. And even then, it’s not a matter of pressing a button but of acting out your choice via the game mechanics (shooting, for example) that you’re already familiar with. B decision, but it allows you to make additional choices outside that decision tree. Here, the game presents what appears to be a simple A vs. I’m not sure if it’s actually possible to free both, but the game reacts to that decision, and your crew will try to shoot out the ropes as well. However, you can instead to kill neither and try to free them both. You are asked to execute either a thief or a soldier who killed his family by shooting out the ropes from which they’re hanging. There’s so much I could cover here, but the element I want to focus on for this specific retrospective is how the game uses choice.įor instance, there’s a point in the game where you see two people hanging by their hands from ropes. I actually helped write a group paper on Spec Ops: The Line at the end of a games journalism class in college, so this is a game I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Even so, I had my own perspective while studying this game. Of course, my own experience is going to be biased from that introduction, as this breakdown very clearly influenced my perspective.
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