Pattern

Pattern thrives on the orchestration of impulses. It’s a game about the shifting nature of the familiar world and the drive to capture the moment before it fades away. The objective is deciding which moment is most perfect while the thesis suggests that knowing this moment may be impossible. The product is a metaphor for the process of following imagination and acting on inspiration. With life’s limitations always spinning your compass, how do you know the best direction to follow?

Exploration is Pattern’s primary means of expression. It opens at dusk from a first-person point of view in a dilapidated outdoor lodge. The evening sun shines in through the absent roof and reflects light off of broken columns. Stone chairs surround a smoldering fire, and the smoke suggests the player should approach and investigate. You’re prompted to rest. You do. Then you wake up somewhere else: a procedurally generated vividly colored wonderland.

Tangible progression is simply a matter of finding the next smoky fire, resting at its foot, and waking up in a brand new world. Pattern, however, would much prefer the player stick around and embrace the ambience of its surreal landscapes. A rapid day and night cycle will shift the sky from cyan to mauve to crimson. Flora will sprout and bloom and shift colors at a moment’s notice. Manmade structures come in natural forms like abandoned castles and absurd figures like giant highchairs. Each world is a small collection of assets realigned and rearranged with every footstep. To a point, there’s a certain pleasure in just passing through Pattern’s glowing environments.

When I first played Pattern, I moved through four or five distinct biomes before it reset to the lodge. One featured snowy mountains and pine trees. Another was filled with blue lakes and clay-like spots of land. Another was desert with hot yellow sand and a clear blue sky. In these spaces I appreciated the daydream landscapes and listened to the melodic concert of guitars and synthesizers. I assumed I had come across something along the reactive lines of Proteus but mixed with the unadorned aesthetic of Eidolon if I had played Eidolon immediately after doing acid. After an hour I was pleased with the experience and decided to move on.

The next day, when I took another run at Pattern, I found something quite different. Suddenly there were neon blue orbs throughout every world. When I approached one of these orbs, I received a message from a presence who I assume is Pattern’s designer. The text dominates the screen but its lowercase projection suggests humility rather than authority. It’s more of a suggestion instead of a direction. After all, how can you direct a world with no explicit goal in sight? More blue orbs, seemingly placed at random intervals, continued a direct line of communication. Even if the player rests and moves to a different world, the messages proceed in a straight line.

The first message is simple: making games about my life is tough, it always feels like I need something to say. They go on to provide insight about the author’s creative process. They talk about the challenge of producing games and the pressure to make a statement with their creations. They discuss losing their train of thought, betting the farm on the first idea, and their confusion in deciding which idea should command the most of their attention. It builds toward an understated argument on the nature of creativity and how many traps must be negotiated in order to make it out of any creative process.

Pattern made me think about my own creative exercises. When I write a game review, I agonize over what to say in the summary box at the top of this screen. I write and rewrite it until I can’t tell if it’s either perfect or it doesn’t make sense, and just kind of assume it effectively communicates an idea. I know what it feels like to find an angle that I think is golden and then go hard trying to flesh it out with an articulate argument. Sometimes I have a good idea but forget it before I can write it down. Other times I catch myself in cycles (patterns!) and have to escape before I get wrapped up in another immobilizing trap. Creative processes, while yielding vastly different products, can connect through the same mental pathways. It was hard not to see flashes of my own writing process inside of Pattern’s affirmations.

These messages are directly tied to Pattern’s world. The inability to isolate an idea and commit to it is represented by the constantly changing scenery and new angles of light that always reveal another source of inspiration. The procedurally generated world has the benefit of going on forever but the drawback of trapping its occupants in a never ending cycle (and while they can escape, they can only escape to a new cycle). When I saw the giant sword in the ground for the first time, I followed my impulse to figure out what it was and what is was doing there. A new idea presented itself just when I thought I had it all figured out. Possibility was always on the horizon and I was never sure if I had seen everything.

Pattern’s solution for managing this crisis is its in-game camera. Holding down a button prompts a quick animation where the camera’s viewfinder is brought to eye-level. The player can than snap a picture that will last in digital perpetuity. It’s the same function as pressing F12 and generating a screenshot through Steam, but its presence as a mechanical component of the world suggests a greater presence. Rather than allow an idea to escape, it’s possible to capture it and remember what it was like at this exact moment in time. Ideally, looking back on it, the player will be able to remember what they were feeling and maybe even what the music sounded like.

It’s possible my read with Pattern may be too generous. A player is just as likely to leisurely pace around its world and conclude it has nothing to say beyond the approximation of a first-person kaleidoscope (curiously, I didn’t “finish” looking at all of the orbs, only seeing maybe a dozen, but when I quit and came back, they were all gone again and I couldn’t find a single one). For my experience, Pattern awakened some kind neural pathway that I had always been aware of, but never really thought about. It made me consider my writing process with a new level of self-awareness, as if someone had given me a guide for traps I was always falling into. It makes me wonder if another player will always receive the same message or if they get something else entirely from their time with Pattern.

Pattern’s blossoming world and ethereal music, forever trapped in a constant state of flux, are pathways to understanding the ambiguous complexion of the creative process. It suggests that all ideas can be transitory as it explores the rivalry between indecision and confidence. The limitations are clear, by Pattern’s own admission it’s a fleeing experience, but with it comes the power to articulate one of the more abstruse processes of the imagination.