This is “A TRAGICOMEDY SET INSIDE YOUR SMARTPHONE” says the marketing. It’s an endearing and very appealing wander through a realised tech world explored in first person and filled with interesting environments full of puzzles, and a pleasant story narrative involving an operating system that doesn’t want to update and erase itself. There’s a light satire of corporate power, involving a resistance movement of eager apps who want to upload to the cloud and to ‘freedom’.

In many ways this is a very well realised project that matches games I have recently enjoyed like Jusant and Deliver us Mars for polish. It is very slickly done, the creativity is great, the voice-acting is good, and the content really hangs together well. But for whatever reason I just didn’t feel a connection as much. Maybe the humour gets in the way a bit, so when the game reaches for sentimental conclusions the emotions just bounced off me like a one-liner, rather than sticking.

The puzzle design has a huge amount of variety, to the point where it is almost a fault. I loved the synergy between the core concepts introduced at the start of the game in 2d (you have app-like powers to DELETE, INVERT, DUPLICATE etc) and then realised and explored in the 3D environments – cool stuff. Many of the environments involve a screen with TRUE statements that you have to disprove by doing puzzles in the vicinity, but there is so much variety to these that it risks becoming overwhelming – the process is not just doing the puzzles, but realising what the puzzle is trying to achieve and why. It’s a lot at times. Although there are more relaxing standard collectibles of various kinds, I found I also wanted a stock form to the puzzles, variations rather than complete reinventions, so the incredibly high standard of ingenuity actually got tiring!

There’s also a hidden element of choice and consequence in the game that is never really referenced until the end. It’s not so hidden now you’ve read this! But you’re given a long list of outcomes that you’ve unwittingly chosen for the characters you meet, and it’s a surprising level of depth for what can sometimes seem like humorous but slightly-empty content. Again I feel the game is struggling against its own depth here – why not tell us that this matters earlier? I would have really engaged with that, and given my chief criticism of the game is that I just didn’t feel empathy or motivation towards the characters this really could have improved the experience for me. I suppose on a second playthrough it really would feel different, and maybe that is the whole point!

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This is a great game and a very smart design. The gameplay loop is immediately obvious (and therefore so is the pitch and the marketing message!) – you climb up! You’re at or near the bottom of what is referred to as ‘the tower’ which is a mass of rock, hollowed out and built upon, both natural and an abandoned place of residence. The implied but wordless aim of the game is to get to the top. There are some vague connections here to the short-lived Grow Home series, and maybe too to Bennett Foddy’s Getting Over It, Doodle Jump or even the streamer-friendly Jump King. Going upwards naturally implies a set of stakes where falling down is the fail-state, and it really needs little more explanation than that.

But Jusant eschews a lot of the obvious tropes and features that I would expect from a climbing game, and also from this sort of ‘post-apocalyptic’ explore-y experiential game. Having finished the game I must admit I don’t know if the game even allows you to fall – I only know that I never did (it didn’t stop me from feeling almost constant vertigo though!). I never entered combat because there isn’t any. For a somewhat melancholy game about an abandoned civilisation I never saw any skeletons, which to me is a big choice to make. Indeed in all the lore dump of the notes I found, I never actually encountered hopelessness – most of the writing in the game contains a down-to-earth practicality that makes it a somewhat uplifting, rather humanistic game despite being empty and kind of hopeless! At various points you pick up a shell and imagine the sounds of this empty place when it was busy and populated, and it really underlines the bittersweet feeling that the game constantly evokes. And it is very careful to never reveal too much or underline its points – often you’re simply looking at a space and trying to work out what it might have been, this is really a lot of the ‘gameplay’ of the game.

‘Jusant’ is the ebbing tide, and the name given in-game to the falling water-level that became an extinction event in this fantasy land (yet enough like Earth to be a useful metaphor) so yes the major theme here is climate change, embodied here as a semi-spiritual relationship between man and nature which has to some extent been disturbed. It sounds a lot more heavy-handed to describe than it actually is. I would say the particular focus is the treatment of animals, a handful of which still scurry about the ruins, but there is the implication that the exploitation of the natural world precipitates the fall of the civilization. Something that obviously couldn’t happen in the real world!

So I think the experience of this game, in some ways, is very familiar to any thinking person in the world today. We wander through the graveyards of decaying homes and industry, the failing climate and its aftermath, we see the obvious implication for the innocent people destined to be killed or displaced by the results, and it feels like a melancholy ritual where we see all that’s lost yet can’t help but still be inspired by the beauty of what we can still see. We hope that we can still see beauty, and positives, and a possible future beyond all this. It’s a considered, subtly authored landscape that we wander through with our own thoughts – this is frankly my favourite type of gaming experience.

Games about space exploration have to grapple with an uncomfortable feature of ‘vastness’ – it’s by its nature impenetrable and unknowable and, in practice, potentially irritating and tedious to experience. These are major caveats to something that also feels majestic – it’s a great way to feel miniscule, to feel nomadic and uncentred, and there’s a spiritual element to this. It’s actually something of a cure for the clichéd power fantasy that tends to dominate character action games. Even though in an RPG really the whole thing is driven by your desire to grow your character, their abilities and reach, in a game like this even that desire is meaningless – in terms of the universe you are but nothing.

Starfield tackles this idea head on in really quite a profound way. At its heart are repeated motifs of death and rebirth, progress through destruction and destruction through progress. It’s quite a daring conceit for a brand of RPG that has been so focused on looting and crafting to literally point out that these rituals are meaningless considering the vastness of the universe. That the bigger picture demands a more holistic view – to let go, or at least think bigger. From a creative perspective, this is really a grand design of self-reflection.

And once the ideas at the heart of the game are revealed, the whole process of playing it takes on a recursive feel. Here I am playing a repeating instanced universe in which I have special powers and knowledge, because I’ve played it before. Just as when I replay Skyrim the nth time with a plan for a certain type of character or focus, here it is inbuilt into the experience. It is ‘save-scumming’ the game! And the game knows it too – it’s a little like the twist of The Witness, where its reveal suddenly gives every part of the whole process a new perspective, a new layer of secrets to find. I wonder if, similar to the Nier games, there are hidden features of repeated playthroughs with profoundly enticing features to reveal. But after all, hasn’t this always been a part of the Bethesda RPG experience? – you play and replay, you reroll, you install a new mod or seven, yet here it is actually built in to the experience.

It makes the surface-level criticisms of the game in current discourse online faintly amusing to consider – worrying about immersion, the frustrations of forced choice, the uncanny valley, all of these standard criticisms of Bethesda’s stock design choices hit a particularly trivial note here. Not that they aren’t valid – most of the main complaints about the Bethesda format can definitely be levelled to some or other extent here. But to some extent the game is built as an evolution beyond those concerns, for those willing to engage with the wider conceit.

I have a laundry list of things I don’t think work all that well, but each encourage a strange experience that I actually treasure. The format of interactions with NPCs simply never convinces me to invest emotionally, to the extent that I always feel like an almost ghostly other operating outside the realms of normal life in-game. The cities always have an uncanny quality – New Atlantis in this game dials that up to new levels, with its empty vistas and liminal spaces. The strange quality of the procedural architecture of outposts and space structures and ships is oddly formulaic, like some grand conceptual joke of boxes littered with crates, notepads, computers and so many office decorations. The UI maze of menus, star maps and inventories, humorless rituals representing the empty corridors of existence.

I’m reminded of a bunch of other games. The strand of space adventures from Elite or Starship Traveller in the 80s. Mass Effect and No Man’s Sky are obvious inspirations to the extent that the game feels like a functioning hybrid. The Nier games as mentioned. There’s also a fair bit of Detroit in there in terms of the production design. The influence of sci-fi book covers and pulp fiction conceits.

And isn’t there a bunch of Groundhog Day in every Bethesda RPG? – this is the culmination of that. The idea of learning the traits of the NPC you plan to romance better next time around. We’re tempted to do what Bill Murray did faced with endless opportunity – to learn the piano or help or hinder some folk around us according to the peaks and troughs of our existential crisis? Whether it’s our desire to cut to the chase or to cling to familiar habits, facing up to that reality of game fiction is refreshingly honest.

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I like the hybrid of forms here. The mix of simple platforming and pixel-perfect movement, alongside the block square-by-square movement that is familiar from the browser-based puzzle engine puzzlescript. It even has a version of the back button in that mode. As you can see from the gif, in one mode you’re hopping about as a white animal, in another you’re the root of the plant that is grown. This is the basis for the puzzle elements here – often you are working out how to activate the plants on a screen and open the door to the next level. You have to end in the right place, on occasions picking up the seeds on route.

I guess the motif here is the circle of life in a way. The animal ‘dies’ and feeds the roots of the plant that spawns a new animal? That’s the way I took it. A symbiosis in form and concept. A wordless co-operation in what seems like an oppressive series of caverns, bringing life. But there’s an animalistic efficiency to it too – the roots grow out to fill the screen, to conquer the space.

As the game progresses you encounter different spaces, different types of puzzle, and a variety of spaces to explore, starting out like caves but ending like messy industrial tubes or even the messy randomness of code itself. Like breaking down this system of life towards its constituent parts, whether game or gene.

A thing I particularly like is the flow of this game. I think it may have been created in part screen by screen almost as a stream of consciousness – there’s a sense of blossoming messy creativity to it that I really vibe with, and which plays alongside the more constructed nature of the increasingly intricate puzzles. I particularly like the empty spaces, at times literally black voids for you to move through. It feels dictated by the mood of the place itself, as if it filled out in an organic way that isn’t necessitated by game logic. It surprises the player.

There are also some ‘cut-scenes’, some tableau that tell some aspects of a story that I probably missed or at least misunderstood. There are corners of the experience that I wonder if I missed out on something. I completed the game but I still felt that sense of mystery. The maze still draws me back in.

Maquette describes itself as a game about ‘recursion’, described below. It’s also the story of a romantic relationship, from meeting to end.

Recursion means “solving a problem using the solution of smaller subproblems (a smaller version of the same problem)” or “defining a problem in terms of itself.” Recursion comes up in mathematics frequently, where we can find many examples of expressions written in terms of themselves.

It’s also the story of a relationship where a key hook was that each partner drew in sketchbooks – the architecture and content of the environments is in some way a depiction of these sketches, which exist as both drawings and concepts and places but also models – in the central building is a model of the architecture which you can interact with. Place a key in the scale model and a scaled-up key will appear in the environment outside by magic – this is the basis for most of the puzzles in the game.

In some way, it’s about scale. I suppose we can look at this relationship and see that it’s one example of millions playing out in a way that perhaps most of us recognise. There’s something universal about it though in some ways its very culturally American and Western – I think that’s a weakness in this context. It’s the world of house parties and sitting in parks and watching movies after work. A bourgeois milieu, and at times this feels acknowledged, like the way you a dolls house might scale up (or the player scale down) and the repetition and pointlessness of the status signifiers of a house/home is revealed.

Radio-style scenes from the relationship play out, and one of the voice-actors is Bryce Dallas Howard. It’s really well written and acted, I found it all quite delicate and real and moving. But without quite understanding the reasons why it turned out the way the story turned out the way it did – it just kind of happens. I suppose when the focus is the recursion itself the actual motivations or emotions of characters feel a bit too much like the background content rather than the foreground drama. But maybe that’s inevitable in a puzzle game like this – it’s hard to feel the emotions when you’re straining to work out some practical visual puzzle.

At the same time, I think making something this ‘connected’ between form and content is incredibly difficult in this medium. The lovers’ sketchbook draws the world that we then exist in, all the architecture and literally everything we see and do comes out of this conceit, the environment informs and often is the tone of the thing. The world is full of motifs from the drawings, and which are then played out at different perspectives and sizes.

But I suppose at times it just tends to be a bit arbitrary. Puzzles around the scale of a key struggle to carry significance – it can feel like the busywork to fill out the storyline (as it is in most games) and that link is then lost in moments. Whose key is it? What aspect of the relationship or the story, or even of recursiveness, is really signified by it? I suppose opening any door signifies a revelation of sorts, an advancement, but it’s a block between the practical and the meta-physical. It is what it is. Some of it can feel revelatory at best, but other bits do not.

And when you’re making a game about a Maquette that signifies a relationship, the holistic feel and significance of the thing is kind of the point. Even the simple act of making ‘levels’ or sequences of puzzles to play through betrays that aim in a way. I think the perfect aim here is that the opening moments and the closing ones relate to each other in some way – that you ended in the same world but wiser. But in a story where there barely is a real world that exists outside of the sketchbooks, it can be bewildering to work out where our place ever is, so it’s a stressful journey.

A fascinating experience, nonetheless…

This is a very new game and I bought it. It’s a refreshing thought to feel actually compelled to splash out on a new game. I feel like I should do this more often for stuff that I really want to play, but that doesn’t come around all that often. You get that smallest injection of giddy excitement to actually play a thing that you’ve sunk an investment into (ie real money, not just a subscription or a demo download or a bundle key or whatever). Why this game? It has a designer I have long respected (Daniel Benmergui), a conceit that feels fresh and witty (arranging comic-book tableau to tell a story) and a playful approach (ie it’s not a stodgy complicated game).

It feels like game length is a topic here. I finished the entire game in less than two hours, and at some point I had to hang my washing during that time as well. To some this would be labelled a ‘very short experience’ and also an unacceptable price in terms of £s per hour’s fun. I completely reject this absurdly limited perspective. In fact I despise it! Fun does not come in hour chunks that you can put a price on – some fun is simply more essential than other fun! To me a completely different paradigm is more appealing – I want a game to be short and meaningful to me!!! I don’t want several hours of ideas sprayed onto my brain – I want memorable moments not meaningless (or less meaningful) hours. My time is valuable to me. At under 2 hours I felt this was the perfect length! It’s not short or very short, it’s just right! The ideas it explored were explored and then it stopped, and this is the way games of this type should be!

Is it a conceptual reversal of sorts? Rather than having a story told to you, you are the storyteller? And as the elements of the game are entirely obvious from the start, there is no obvious tutorial to the game’s elements. So you don’t feel condescended to or guided at all – it feels as if it respects me and gives me status and that feels good! I’m the Storyteller and this is my book! And the solutions, while often probably quite linear, actually don’t feel like that – they feel freer, like the choices that I have made. Wrong solutions can often be fun, and it’s also possible for happy accidents to occur. This sort of light touch is priceless to me.

What ideas is the game exploring? If any, they are lightly explored. The idea of story tropes are lightly satirised I’d say – by uncovering them and expecting the player to gently undercut them, we start to look beyond convention or at least playfully work around it. I like how gender or status norms can be gently undercut too – you can let characters of the same sex fall in love, or have the maid kill the queen etc. It even has fun with familial conventions, oedipal concepts, classical story tropes, immoral or revolutionary outcomes – there’s a kind of dark side to the game that is very gently introduced, and as it feels as if you are the author, it’s almost as if you’re prodding at the seams.

It is, ultimately, slightly limited. I was hoping or expecting for a deeper set of connections than ever actually transpired. There are achievements available for some odd outcomes, which is cool. But I was sort of hoping that stories might interact with each other, that the outcome of one might affect another, that there might be some holistic or macro aspect, or some idea that the storyteller might become victim to their own imagination? It doesn’t happen, and maybe there was just no elegant or comfortable way for this to occur. And in the context perhaps content like that might have seemed way too heavy-handed for the concept – perhaps to add that would have taken the light touch away from the whole concept. Here there are no secrets and that’s okay.

“I wanted to show them something that wasn’t an illusion.”

A re-watch of Jurassic Park is an obvious choice given the release of Jurassic World, which I’ve yet to see but I feel like I already have, if that’s not too cynical a view. I have fond memories of Jurassic Park – I literally remember the scene where Laura Dern and Sam Neill’s jaws drop as a living dinosaur moves in front of them, as in the cinema there was literally the same reaction to the state-of-the-art computer effects that brought the dinosaurs to life.

I was very interested in a recent reading of Jurassic Park that has the movie in some way connected thematically to its actual place in cinema history – the CGI dinosaurs that were so crucial to its success, and the position of Spielberg himself as a John Hammond-esque puppeteer of popular cinema. The idea that the film itself is about movie-making or creating myths, a preoccupation of cinephile Spielberg – “What you got in there – King Kong?”.

Hammond, played by Richard Attenborough in the original, is the enthusiastic puller of strings of Jurassic Park, the popular attraction. Just as Spielberg pulls the strings of Jurassic Park the film. Hammond sits lonely beside his Jurassic Park merchandise slurping melting ice cream. T-shirts, lunchboxes, tie-in products with the logo out front – was this the version of authorship that Spielberg ever expected of himself. Is the film somehow a lament for the blockbuster cinema that the director almost found himself trapped within? An admission of guilt almost? “You packaged it and patented it and stuck it on a plastic lunchbox”. As CGI dinosaurs tear apart the theme park, is it part-joyful catharsis for the film-maker?

Hammond is seen as a paternal figure, a sort of all-purpose creator, the director of the attraction. He announces that he’s been there at the birth of all of the dinosaurs, acting like a proud mother/father. His staff are like unruly teenagers, with Dennis Nedry the ultimate angry child – “Thanks Dad” he announces after another spat. He’s like a doting parent so lost in his creation that he forgets any notion of humanity or morality. How much of himself Spielberg saw in Hammond is unclear, but as the director of the movie one does have exactly the same relationship with crew and actors, and has to maintain the same level of tunnel-vision on the spectacle of the movie.

Think of Hammond as Spielberg, at the introductory presentation to Jurassic Park. The visitors sit in a mini-cinema, and Hammond the ringmaster interacts with a film-version of himself on the screen. He fluffs his lines, and spoils parts of the film. He sits at the back of the screening and talks about how the music will be changed in the sequence they’re watching – very much the self-obsessed director making excuses for his own creation. His guests don’t want to watch his film – they duck out for a taste of real life instead.

There is a constant tension in Jurassic Park between the spectacle of the theme park as an attraction, and the real life concerns of humanity. Twice in the film the hero literally exits a ride mid-presentation, breaking the safety bar to explore the science lab, and running from the moving tour to treat a poorly Triceratops. The contrast between the guided sections of the tour, which fall flat at every turn, and the happy accidents of the excursions behind the scenes – to the Triceratops, the feeding of the cow to the Raptors, the birth of a new dinosaur in the lab. The limits of spectacle – nothing that is shown to you can compare to the experiences of real life.

Sam Neill’s everyday paleontologist seems an intentionally bland everyman antidote both to the slick theme park, and the slick blockbuster film built around it. He hates computers – his first touch of a computer screen sees the image break up in unexplained static. Yet the dinosaurs of Spielberg’s grand creation are, in crucial moments, computer generated. It’s as if the hero isn’t playing the game – is he the part of the director’s personality that longs to escape and break free from the ephemera of blockbuster event movie-making. He can’t even work out the helicopter seatbelts that take him to Jurassic Park, deciding to simply knot the belts together himself – a sign of his maverick disruption to the proceedings. And he hates kids – Spielberg’s E.T. crowned him the king of the kid’s-eye-view.

I’ve always found the character of Ian Malcolm interesting too, played by Jeff Goldblum. He represents the character of the narcissistic ‘star’, who I’m sure Spielberg had plenty of contact with, in the film a rock-star-like mathematician with an interest in chaos theory. It’s odd what little part he actually plays in the film. He explains his notion by using the way a drop of water flows off the back of your hand in a chaotic manner. But I have always thought that what Malcolm is actually explaining is the basis for the huge part chance plays in the way the film ultimately plays out. And this film uses chance as a convenient driver of so much of the action. The way the car falls from the tree just out of reach of the fleeing characters. The way the Raptor slips on the ice in the kitchen freezer. The way the T-Rex appears at the split-second required to save the day at the end of the film. Malcolm is Spielberg’s way of breaking the fourth wall to excuse the dreadful coincidences that litter the film.

Think of the ‘bloodsucking lawyer’ in the film as well – the dreaded creepy suited money-man despatched to check on the progress of the theme park like a dreaded executive sent to check the progress of a film on-set. He warns Hammond about his budget and the prospect of the park being shut down. Spielberg of course faced that exact issue with the very famous story of the creation of Jaws, which went vastly over budget. And just like Jurassic Park, nothing worked properly on that project either. And even faced with the incredible spectacle of a real dinosaur, the lawyer can only enjoy the sight by thinking of the money that is going to be made, cynicism at every turn. At the first sign of trouble he heads off to hide in the toilets and meets a sticky end.

Of course the dinosaurs themselves are the ultimate disruptors in the film. There is ultimately a huge irony in the theme of ‘life finding a way’ or the forces of nature, mutated and angry, wiping clean the notion of humans thinking that they can create at will. They cannot tame the monster – ultimately Spielberg’s career as a showman has led him to be a polarising figure, and his friend and collaborator George Lucas (who edited Jurassic Park while Spielberg was shooting Schindler’s List) would know that more than most. And the force of nature that overcomes the spectacle happen to be embodied in dinosaurs operated on a practical level by animatronic models and CGI effects. These expensive effects, practical and computer-generated, dominate the movie and proved to be the ultimate draw at the cinema – as John Hammond himself says about his own creation, “We’ve spared no expense.”

There’s a telling, famous moment in the film where Bob Peck’s gamekeeper looks in the wing mirror at the approaching T-Rex. It’s a visual joke – the mirror says ‘objects may appear nearer than they actually are’ and we laugh because when a T-Rex is chasing you the illusion is truly fearful. But it’s also a play on the idea that the T-Rex actually is an illusion created by computer – it is not nearer than it actually is, it is not even real at all, the wing mirror is entirely wrong.

This motif of reality and illusion is played out throughout the film. At the first dinosaur dig, computer technology ‘reveals’ the thermal illusion of the dinosaur buried in the Earth. The heart-stopping sequence with the Raptors in the kitchen has a raptor dive at Lex only for it to be revealed that it’s only a reflection of her that fools the raptor (which in itself fools us). Indeed when Lex first sees the Raptor’s shadow holding up a spoonful of wobbling jelly, the silhouette of the Raptor appears in line with a theme-park painting of a raptor – a painted illusion, shadowed by a cinematic illusion, played for dramatic illusion in the film.

There’s also a lot of computer interaction in the film. I’ve mentioned that the hero hates computers. But yet computers created the spectacle that made the film such a hit. Yet the computer system creates the failures that bring the theme park to its knees in the first place. There’s also a strong connection between the idea of computer code, and the DNA strands that make up the basis of the recreated life that gives birth to Jurassic Park in the first place. The famous image of the Raptor in the control room, with code projected onto her skin – is it the code of the DNA that was retrieved to create her, or the code that makes her live in the cinema?

Hammond sits next to his merchandise and slurps his melted ice cream and talks about the flea circus he used to run in his youth. And how the illusion of the flea circus (spoiler: there are never any fleas in a flea circus) drove him to try and create something real. It could literally be Spielberg himself talking about his creations – “It’s still a flea circus. It’s all an illusion”.

There’s a famous hedge maze in The Shining – it’s where the final confrontation between murderous father and his six year old son takes place. But there are plenty of mazes throughout the film – the long winding roads leading to the desolate Overlook Hotel, and the long tracking shots of confusing hotel corridors that make up the majority of the film. Although we spend a lot of time moving through these corridors, we don’t ever really get a sense of the how the areas of the hotel join up together – nor are we supposed to. I suppose, put simply, we’re supposed to feel lost in the maze.

Kubrick puts his films together like puzzles to be solved, mazes of imagery and allusion. All critics seem certain that colours have a symbolic value in his films, though it’s hard to pin down what colour means what in what situation – it’s as if he’s inviting us to work it out, then confounding it at regular intervals. I don’t like references as a thing generally – I think there’s something elitist about putting in something else that you have to know about to enjoy the experience. Kubrick is known for his classical music allusions, but I haven’t spent much time sifting through his choices. One of his primary references was appatently Minos and the maze of the minotaur – the idea of the beast lost in the maze, as a sort of metaphor for the brutality of man trapped in the subconscious. A lot of modern stories seem to offer some sort of variation on that theme, which can become a rather tedious bout of navel-gazing in the wrong hands.

There’s something very mathematical about a rectangular maze design, that I think affects and informs the entirety of the way The Shining looks. Kubrick is renowned for his symmetrical shot compositions, with a central point of perspective, like looking along the straight line of the maze. When things are presented in such a square-on perspective they often have the feel of being constructed, artistic tableau – you’re never not aware of the frame itself, like looking at a very controlled, precise scene in an art gallery. There is very little in The Shining that doesn’t work around that idea of the centre point, the square on perspective, the feeling of being in a square maze. There’s something about duality and mirror images that he also loves, and the apparitions of the twins in this film are iconic, one on either side of the centre of the image, reflecting and related to each other. There’s even a strange idea in the film of recurring, almost resurrecting mirror-image characters from the past, as if Jack is tied to some other human from a different time period, as suggested in the film’s final, mysterious shot, almost impossible to explain.

There’s a wonderful video here that collates a bunch of these similar Kubrick shots together, notably the famous visual effect of the journey through space and time of Bowman at the end of 2001. I do think Kubrick is a master, but it doesn’t hurt his legacy that his calling cards were things that very clearly drew attention to the eye of the director looming over every constructed image. The funny thing about it is that if you continually shoot from this perspective, it is actually harder to create meaning in terms of what we know as traditional montage, because as a director you almost deny yourself the chance to edit a scene for narrative – the only cut you have is jarring. Which probably is one of the reasons why this is a seminal horror film.

What is odd about The Shining, if you consider that it’s considered by some the greatest horror film ever made, is how little it actually relies on horror. We are lost in the maze, as are the characters, and the experience is not punctuated by shock or surprise as such, but a sense of losing direction and perspective the deeper we get. I was struck by the fact that the famous axe scenes where Jack breaks down doors in the hotel, are not presented as ‘shocks’ in traditional horror style – you see Jack raise his axe before the blows are struck. There’s only one moment in the film where somebody jumps out on somebody else. There are a couple of jarring narrative-breaking cuts, like when bloody images are basically inserted into the film. But other than those, the film operates on a system of creeping mysterious tension – we are consistently ahead of the characters, and the horror comes from their creeping realisation of what we already knew. I think relatively few horror films have ever been made using this style of narrative, and it’s absurd really because it’s so effective. I’m reminded of the scene in the film where Jack looks over at the model of the maze, and we see his wife and child in the maze as if through his point of view – we know they are lost and in danger in this place, but they are oblivious to it.

A reference Kubrick probably didn’t intend, was the way the presentation of the film now resembles the way that we often experience videogames. In 1980 the idea of a 3-dimensional maze in a videogame was all but an impossibility, but these days a huge number of videogames approximate the experience of being in a maze, looking for the ‘exit’, trying to get a sense of the space in which you exist, and also being in a place that is often relentlessly square-on. Many games fix their perspective very precisely in exactly the sort of central way that Kubrick did – in games we have spent a hell of a lot of time looking at a fixed point perspective, moving forward into it. Dungeon Master, Tempest, Ultima Underworld, Doom, Myst. What has happened to the modern videogame is that, aware of the deadening undertones and mesmerising approach of such a perspective, games go out of their way to avoid it – levels are deliberately curved and use vertical space deliberately to avoid seeming like mazes. Even though they are essentially mazes. Many modern games want to present the idea of exploring a maze, while actually being straight corridors.

People tend to think that they don’t like mazes, or think of them as frustrating – but people definitely do like puzzle boxes. I think Kubrick definitely intended his movies to be puzzle boxes – to be pored over and endlessly considered due to the clues and images within them. Maybe the internet was originally invented just to give Kubrick fans the chance to share their theories on his films – certainly the internet has massively helped cement his legend. The most interesting puzzle in The Shining, in my opinion, are the hints towards the legacy of usurping native Americans from their lands – it’s explained at the start of the film that settlers fought off native attack while they built the hotel over an Indian burial ground. The centre-piece of the film seems to be the memory/ghost of a party of the great and good, full of British accents and motifs of wealth and status, like a sort of colonial celebration that cannot be erased by time. It’s not the centre of The Shining, but it’s an interesting idea that Kubrick clearly chose to explore.

There’s an interesting documentary called Room 237 about some of the theories around The Shining, but I’m surprised that it is so razor-focussed on content rather than form or structure, obsessing over the actual implications of the work, rather than the intention of the film-maker to confuse and intrigue. The film barely makes mention of the maze, or the Minotaur myth, that I feel is completely central to the film – maybe it’s too obvious to contemplate. Maybe I’m more of a formalist than most, but to me it’s the equivalent of reading the books on the bookshelves to discover the mood of a space, rather than the actual architecture of that space itself. The fact is that the very dramatic structure of the film is as maze-like as any other element of the film, especially because so many of the shots that make up the movie are single shots, the montage almost literally is the structure in most cases. It’s all very well looking at posters on the wall, or props, or intriguing bits of continuity or framing, but such things are insignificant compared to the dramatic thrust of the piece, or the way that the audience receives and interprets it.

But I do think to Kubrick the idea of the maze was more interesting than beating it. I think that goes for all of his films. I think they are constructed in a way that deliberately stops them being solved. He wanted them to be a maze that you are lost in. And actually, I’m sure he realised that a maze only has power while it remains unsolved.