1189: Lifesigns Critical

I completed a playthrough of the DS game Lifesigns last night, wrapping up a pleasantly satisfying experience that I enjoyed very much as a whole.

For those who haven’t read my past enthusing on the subject, Lifesigns is an Ace Attorney-style adventure game/visual novel for the DS that happens to be set in a hospital and occasionally involve surgery sequences using the DS’ touchscreen. Unfortunately for the game, on its original release this caused it to be compared unfavourably (and unfairly) to Atlus’ excellent Trauma Center: Under the Knife, and as such it was passed over by many due to some rather middling reviews that missed the point somewhat.

Lifesigns proved to be a great experience for me, though, and it made me think about all the potential genres of gaming we simply don’t get all that often. And when I say “genre”, I’m not referring to whether something is a shooter or a platform game or an adventure — I’m talking about subject matter. Lifesigns is a medical drama, pure and simple, and that’s something we simply don’t get much in the gaming space. Trauma Center approaches it, but then veers off into crazy sci-fi town partway through — though the more recent Trauma Team does a much better job at remaining at least semi-plausible rather than going quite as batshit as its two predecessors. Then there was 1988’s Life and Death and its sequel Life and Death II: The Brain, but both of those were more simulations of the surgical aspects than narrative-centric medical dramas. And don’t even get me started on Surgeon Simulator 2013 — hilarious it may be, but realistic medical drama? No no no.

As you have probably gathered from my past enthusing on the subject, the strange and wonderful land of visual novels is one of the most forward-thinking subdivisions of the games industry in this regard. In visual novels, we have “slice of life” games that are about interpersonal relationships (too many to name); games about suffering with chronic conditions (Private Nurse); games about supporting people with terminal illnesses (Kana Little Sister); games about being a member of a rock band (Kira Kira) and plenty more besides. The freedom to pursue these rather unconventional subjects — unconventional for gaming, anyway — is due to visual novels’ strong focus on narrative over gameplay rather than the other way around.

But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be any of what we’d traditionally call “gameplay” in there — Lifesigns is a great example of how you can keep something narrative-focused and still provide the player with things to do. The player has the option to move between different locations at will rather than being railroaded around the place by a completely linear plot; the player can ask various characters about pieces of information they have gathered; the player occasionally has to convince various characters to do or think things by presenting them with appropriate pieces of information; and, of course, the player has to pick up the scalpel and perform everything from appendectomies to emergency open-heart surgery.

Basically I think what I’m trying to say is that I’d just like to see more games about relatively mundane subject matter — and they don’t have to be visual novels to be that way. I want to see an interactive sitcom in which you play one of the characters and interact with the others, but in which nothing of earth-shattering importance happens. I want to see more interactive medical dramas. I want to see more games like Ace Attorney where the focus in criminal investigations is on the lawyers, not the police or private detectives. I want to see more “slice of life” games like Cherry Tree High Comedy Club. And, should I find myself never having to look down the iron sights of a realistically-rendered machine gun ever again, I most certainly won’t be sorry.

Note that as ever, I’m not saying that massively popular subsections of gaming such as competitive first-person shooters should go away. But I am saying that those of us who prefer something a little more sedate and cerebral should be catered to a bit more, that’s all. We’re getting there, slowly — I’ve certainly found enough to keep me entertained without even looking at the triple-A sector for a very long time — but there’s still some distance to go before the same people who tune in to House every week are picking up a controller to play a new Lifesigns game.