Over the weekend I spent a fair bit of time playing Stellar Blade, enjoying the action while doing my best to ignore the Discourse™. But that fun was killed when the game asked me to start moving around random boxes to complete elementary school math puzzles. And not just once, but multiple times in various areas throughout its open “Great Desert” map. Real fracking immersive, right?
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I was so unmotivated to continue playing that I ended up shutting off my PS5 to go do actual housework. I had a number of real-world objects that needed to be moved around and cleaned up in real space and I’m not coming to Stellar Blade to simulate that. So much for escapism!
Stellar Blade isn’t unique in this issue. The polarizing shift between adrenaline-pumping action and moving boring bullshit around, I think, just made it more apparent in that instance. But it reminded me of how much I dreaded doing this in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, how boring it gets in a variety of Naughty Dog games, and probably many others I can’t recall as easily (maybe because they all blend together in my head).
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It’s a game design trope that feels tiring and unnecessary. It’s the definition of “filler content” that does little else but slow the action of the game down for seemingly no good reason. Do people enjoy these kinds of segments? Do game developers think “wow, this will be a really compelling and engaging game sequence to challenge our players with”?
Sure, sometimes the whole “move X object around” feature can give characters a moment to spout some exposition or engage in dialogue with other characters (The Last of Us does this a fair bit). But did anyone imagine playing FF7’s Temple of the Ancients segment in its glorious, highly anticipated remake with the thought of “wow, it would be cool if I had to block massive currents of the Lifestream with random cubes the Cetra so conveniently built for us!” Rebirth, a game I otherwise loved, had no shortage of exhausting silliness like this.
But it’s rarely the case that such challenges are even challenges. The only way to fail at these “puzzles” is to not do them.
Unlike physics puzzles in Half-Life 2, for example, where you’re asked to think about how forces like gravity and buoyancy work, there’s nothing engaging about a game asking you move an object to a prescriptive place (and often only one place) typically marked very clearly with a dash of yellow paint.
Other games have used the concept of moving an object around in a more challenging way. The original Gears of War springs to mind in this case. During an early segment, you’re tasked with surviving a gunfight while pushing a car down a street, the fire from its broken engine providing you with necessary light to avoid getting killed by the creatures that lurk in the darkness.
In these cases there’s something at risk or a challenge you’re asked to overcome that require you to push or pull a big-ass object, not the game saying “hey, you, player, just move this thing to this destination for, um, reasons.” Asking me to move a yellow crate around to match up with a number pattern? That’s just free digital manual labor. Time to go re-read some David Graeber, I guess.
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