Collaboration, Cooperation, and Contention in ‘A Way Out’
Split screen gameplay is nothing new, but it doesn’t take a reinvention of the wheel to innovate in the realm of video games. Josef Fares’ second game, A Way Out, blends a compelling narrative with groundbreaking game mechanics. Thankfully, the hype around this game wasn’t even close to enough; this game defines its own territory without ever coming off as a gimmick.
Cooperation is at the heart of A Way Out, a core design element which enables this game to establish its own genre and stand on its own two feet as a game in its own right. From the game’s beginning, two players with two controllers are required. We are introduced to the game’s dual protagonists, Vincent Moretti and Leo Caruso, who meet in prison. Vincent and Leo are both wrongfully sentenced, having been wrapped up with the wrong crowd. Both characters bond over their mutual hatred for the one responsible for their imprisonment: Harvey.
A Way Out tells its story largely by way of flashback. Intermittent airplane scenes pepper the game’s first half, telling the story in recollective form. We get the sense that Leo and Vincent are involved with something bigger than the game’s premise: a prison escape.
Vincent and Leo meet each other under inauspicious circumstances, where they unwittingly team up against a gang of prison thugs that have been hired to kill Leo. Vincent, the “fresh meat” of the prison, gets thrown into the ring and has to fight for survival. This scene epically weaves both players (and their respective characters) in and out of combat. One player has to dodge, counter, and throw retaliatory punches. The other player, watching, plays off of the violent distraction to throw some damaging combos of their own. I have never seen combat so seamlessly integrated into narrative and characterization. This cornering scene becomes the stage from which Leo’s and Vincent’s incipient friendship develops. It also establishes the teamwork that will be necessary from both players; prison escape is not a one-man endeavor.
The prison setting of the game’s first half functions like a well-woven tutorial. It not only builds up the story’s main characters, but it introduces the player to the game mechanics that will prove vital to the story’s unfolding. Leo and Vincent are practically cell mates, with a thin wall dividing them. This thin wall becomes crucial in some dire situations, where both characters are able to pass tools back and forth without guards noticing. As Leo and Vincent devise a plan to escape prison and track down Harvey, they become wiser to how this prison is organized. As they learn, so do we.
Their escape begins with a chisel. This chisel is enough to chip away at the cell’s wall, behind the affixed toilets, leaving a hole just wide enough for each character to escape. The game takes on an escapist tone, borrowing from stealth mechanics like Sly Cooper, as each player has to coordinate while the other chips away at the hole in their cell. While Leo chips away at his wall, for instance, Vincent has to keep watch for guards who patrol the corridor. Vincent will need to distract the guards as they walk by, giving Leo more time, and vice versa. Eventually, when successful, both Leo and Vincent will have bought enough time to carve out a hole in each cell, rendering their escape one step further towards success. The whole game takes a Shawshank Redemption tone at this point.
Cutscenes are not idle, passive fixtures of A Way Out’s narrative. From the game’s beginning, cutscenes only take up half the screen. Leo, for instance, might engage with the game’s NPCs, e.g. fellow prison inmates. As Leo dialogues with other characters, Vincent can move around in and interact with the world. In the prison yard, for instance, Leo might be palling around in conversation while Vincent painstakingly exercises on the pull-up bar. Interactivity, as a design element, is never taken for granted. There is always something to explore.
Cooperation takes on a new dimension of gameplay during the actual prison break. One game mechanic features Vincent and Leo standing back to back, locking arms, as they mutually ascend a vertical shaft on their way out. The players have to coordinate their trajectory upwards, something that requires verbal communication and precise timing. If the players ascend out of sync, both Leo and Vincent fall. This moment of collaboration outmatches any sort of multiplayer, split screen mechanic that most games adhere to.
A Way Out happens in three main acts. The first act is the prison break tutorial section. The second act is the actual escape, heading to Mexico to kill Harvey. The third act flips the whole narrative on its head.
The first act introduces characters, motivations, plot points, and game mechanics. In one fell swoop, the game launches into a righteously indignant story of criminals wrongfully convicted. Our protagonists find camaraderie under the dire stresses of prison life. Their mutual struggle for survival and desire for revenge unites them. It becomes clear that Vincent, the brains, and Leo, the brawn, need each other for survival. In the same way, players need each other to move forward in the game’s story.
The second act changes the whole tone of the game. Until this point, A Way Out has been a blend of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and Telltale’s The Walking Dead (Season One). The Brothers element undeniably surfaces as a relic of Josef Fares’ previous game that requires two characters to be simultaneously manipulated on one controller. A Way Out seems like a logical extension of that game mechanic, simply expanding into two controllers instead of one. The Telltale element comes forth in the moments of choice.
Choice, as a game mechanic, surfaces in situations that also require collaboration on behalf of the game’s two players. Like Telltale, your choices affect how the story unfolds; the only thing missing is the ominous “Leo will remember that” prompts that loom throughout Telltale games. These choices, however, differ greatly in that no one character can make the decision. Multiple times in the story, the players will have a choice between carrying out something “Leo’s way” or “Vincent’s way.” Leo’s way is usually more obnoxious, less subtle, and more overt. Vincent’s way is usually more strategic, less boisterous, and more measured. The players, each identifying with the character that they’re controlling, have to negotiate which path they take through the narrative. There is no middle way.
Without thoroughly exhausting the narrative arc of this game, one important ludonarrative consideration must be discussed. (Spoilers!) Throughout the first two arcs of this game, Leo and Vincent have been collaborating and cooperating to progress through the plot. The third arc of this game, however, challenges both players. Fresh from their expedition to Mexico, in which they successfully killed Harvey, Leo and Vincent return by plane to America. Upon arrival, the two are held up by the police.
With red and blue lights flashing, guns pointed at them, everything changes: Vincent turns on Leo. The two fateful protagonists, after having surmounted the insurmountable, find themselves in conflict. Vincent reveals himself to be an undercover cop. Leo’s criminal legacy, bared in all its nakedness, is used against him: this has all been a setup. The cooperation that has transpired and trust that has been forged between players and protagonists is then shattered. The players now have to face off.
In a moment of fight-or-flight desperation, Leo captures Vincent at gunpoint, ensuring the duo’s escape from the swarm of police that have cornered them. They flee into a warehouse in which they square off in a violent, embittered conflict. Leo justifiably feels betrayed after baring his soul to Vincent. The brotherly bond that has developed over the story’s unfolding is subverted, and the two players have to subdue each other with firearms.
The final firefight between Leo and Vincent also flips a few gaming tropes around. The guns that the players selected at the game’s middle now prove crucial: the battle is affected based on your choice of semi-auto, rifle, auto, etc. Both players start out with full health, which is whittled away by the other player through combat. Eventually, over the course of the final conflict, Vincent and Leo find themselves half-dead, broken by battle, fatigued. Guns cast away, body armor shed, the two resort to fists.
One of the more notable and implication-laden mechanics of the game’s final scene arrives based on skill. To the degree that one character does more damage to the other in this final shootout, mobility becomes impaired. In this final scene, an MP5 gun lays at the edge of the rooftop from which both characters end up in a brawl. Both characters, in a fit of resentful rage and embittered violence, struggle across this rooftop towards the abandoned gun. Whoever arrives first at the gun is determined by the degree of health that the character has maintained throughout this fight; if one player severely injures the other, the injured player will move slower towards the gun than if the tables were turned. For once, the game rewards competency, as opposed to collaboration, in this scene.
A Way Out wraps up its otherwise adrenaline-packed story with a tasteful moment of narrative closure. Whoever wins on the rain-drenched rooftop at the game’s end is awarded the perspective of the game’s final scene. If Leo wins, he rejoins his family and brings Vincent’s love letter to his pregnant wife. If Vincent wins, he pays a visit to Leo’s trailer in order to console his wife and child. In either case, the final fight on the rooftop results in one character living, one character dying. Neither can live while the other survives.
When the game’s final volley ends, and the victorious player’s perspective is adopted, the narrative ending is almost a victory lap for the player. It’s a way of lending moral correctness to the skillful, successful player.
A Way Out is the kind of story that absolutely requires a second playthrough. Players should be advised to naively play through before doing too much analysis. But given the game’s structure, it becomes clear that at least two main paths are traversed over the unfolding of A Way Out. There’s the Leo-centric style of decision making, and the Vincent-centric style decision making. There’s also two distinct ways that the narrative wraps up: either a Leo or Vincent victory. But there’s something to be said for the debates that players will have between each other as the narrative unfolds. That is, with each binary decision, the players become aware of how there are other possibilities tucked into alternate versions of the narrative. Like Russian nesting dolls, each version of the initial playthrough yields another version of itself inside. You’ll finish this game wanting to play it again.
To reiterate: narrative agency is placed in the hands of the more skilled player during this game’s conclusion. There’s also a moment of fusion in the way this game divides its character arcs with its players, namely in how someone playing Vincent’s character can feel alignment with the story’s ending. The player who controls Vincent, the cop, might actually want to take down Leo, the criminal, at the game’s end. This all creates a special relationship between the two players who, in sync with the narrative, are now out to get each other. This allows for a unique degree of role play that coincides with the narrative shift. As the tone darkens at the game’s end, the significance of the players’ own relationship to the characters shifts.
There are also innumerable easter eggs that serve as breaths of fresh air from the game’s dramatic story. Along the way, the players will find musical instruments (in a kind of nod to Guitar Hero) and board games like Connect Four; they will find horseshoes and archery ranges; they will find elements of this world that indirectly supplement the world that contains A Way Out’s narrative. Beyond narrative differentiations, there is replay value simply in terms of embedded lore alone.
In thinking about how to talk about this game, the first half is definitely a hybrid between Brothers and The Walking Dead. That much is clear. The second half, however, borrows from two totally different franchises: Uncharted and Metal Gear Solid. The introduction of firearms into the game’s second half entirely restructures how the characters engage with the world. Enemies begin to appear in greater number, and it becomes easier to shoot your enemies rather than sneak up and strangle them. The combat, including gun mechanics and how your character is supposed to seek cover and avoid fire, borrows heavily from the Uncharted franchise (a fact confirmed in Fares’ 2017 GamingBolt interview). The game’s narrative conclusion similarly takes its tone, mood and atmosphere straight out of the pages from the Metal Gear Solid franchise.
Josef Fares has a unique ability to push the medium of video games further, into unknown and unforeseen territory. A Way Out tells its story via cooperation, but this very cooperation is the stage that frames the inevitable conflict between characters, between players. The tension that each player feels during the final conflict is born of the bond that players must forge throughout the game’s beginning. If Fares didn’t write the prison break scene, or the following escape, then the tension between characters simply wouldn’t exist by the game’s ending. We have to experience Leo’s betrayal to believe it.
Story-based games aren’t often lauded in terms of multiplayer. But A Way Out complicates this trend by framing the entirety of its storytelling in terms of multiplayer. Conversely, to describe the story of this game in terms of multiplayer shortchanges its storytelling capacities. A Way Out is nothing if not story-driven.
It’ll be an exciting few years as we watch this game be written and rewritten into the canon of how video games tell stories. Who knows how other developers might integrate multiplayer into storytelling? Who knows what other kinds of stories might be written around this back-and-forth multiplayer mechanic? Most excitingly, who knows what story Josef Fares has to tell us next?
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