‘Father and Son’: Bringing Closure to the Past
Growing up without a dad, you start to imagine all the possibilities of what he’d be like. Is he heroic or cowardly? Is he a man of great accomplishment or a miserable alcoholic? This kind of paternal question is the quintessential embodiment of innocence. We want to know where we come from so that we can understand who we are and therefore how to live in the world that is begotten to us. Father and Son earnestly asks these timeless questions.
Father and Son is a story-heavy mobile game that can be explored in an afternoon over a cup of tea. From the very art style to the controls, dialogue options and concept of the game itself, Father and Son meditates on the spiritual role that art plays in our lives. The game begins with a time capsule: a place and a date, with “day one” labeled for us to recognize the finitude of the adventure.
Michael, the nondescript protagonist of this game, arrives in Naples, Italy, the adopted home of his late father. Michael’s father, Frederico, abandoned the family when Michael was a child, leaving his mother to raise young Michael on her own.
Michael struggles with forgiving his father’s choices. In a professional sense, Frederico pursued a prestigious and fulfilling career with Naples’ National Archaeological Museum. In a familial sense, the pursuit of his career cast a shadow on the lives of a lover and her innocent child. In Father and Son, Michael bravely returns to Naples to confront this paternal ambiguity.
The game begins with Michael’s muted resentment. We see him in the apartment of his late father. Simple gestures like pouring himself a cup of coffee become efforts imbued with significance and self-care. Losing a father, even a distant father, can be devastating to one’s sense of identity. For Michael to inhabit his father’s space, in the very apartment, city, country, etc. is a brave attempt at bringing closure to his father’s death.
Father and Son invites contemplation. Frequently, your character is invited to lean on one philosophical elbow, over a balcony. The game styles itself around a crowded but ambient Naples, Italy. Your character, uniquely detailed amongst the rainbow of onlookers and tourists in the streets, silently makes his way towards an impending destination: The Naples National Archaeological Museum.
The museum welcomes silence, though not at first. Like me, it seems Michael is a bit of an introvert; he isn’t visiting this museum to meet people; he’s visiting this museum to come to terms with his past. But, from the moment he steps foot inside the beautiful building, he is greeted with warmth by people who knew his father, not as the shady figure who abandoned a wife and child, but as a respectable intellectual whose contribution to the world constitutes nobility on behalf of his son. The greeting lady in this instance knew Michael’s father well, and she encourages him to visit varying exhibits within the museum.
Michael is also afforded space by himself for contemplation. This contemplation shifts into temporal dilation, where he not only drifts into artistic realms, but other time periods themselves. At a very literal level, some pieces of art that Michael witnesses take him to another period of time entirely. At one moment, he is Michael, at another moment, he is an ancient Pompeii citizen.
The game’s visual narrative implies that the artwork and the mind of the artist are the necessary conditions for the timeless atmosphere, what we seek in the permanence and profundity of hallowed spaces, that is to be found in museums.
We find out by adjacent context that Michael has inherited some of his father’s talent. He encounters up to five sketchable monuments throughout his travels through Naples. His sketches reveal an elegant simplicity that contrasts with the heavily curated atmosphere of the museum.
For a mobile game, Father and Son offers dialogue options that suggest narrative consequence. At the game’s beginning, a seeming neighbor of your late father gives you advice and directions. The friendly lady at the museum plays out her dialogue in distinctly different ways in response to your mood. Even your eventual date
at the game’s end is contingent upon the ways that you decide to respond.
Father and Son encountered me with perhaps the weirdest prohibition that a game has heretofore, namely, requiring me to physically attend the museum in the game to progress certain areas of the story and on the museum’s map. What narrative value this adds is obviously truncated by ignorance. Maybe when I finally visit Italy, I’ll write a follow-up piece. But for now, hats off to Father and Son for developing an off-limits part to the game that they clearly knew wouldn’t be readily accessible for many/most players.
I don’t have a lot of faith in mobile games as a publishing medium. Too many games berate you with advertisements, too many games flounder in the technological constraints, and too few truly breathe in the gaming market. Father In Son is no masterpiece. Very little is truly “gameplay,” but that doesn’t for a second mean that there is no “game” in its story.
Playing Father and Son isn’t just a passive narrative scrolling adventure. This game tests your own assumptions about who you can trust, rely on, and call “family.” More importantly, this game teaches you about your own impulses to forgive.
In a final scene in the game, Michael writes a letter to his father, Frederico. You are offered two simultaneous options of how to write this letter, and the game gives you bits and pieces of how you might go about developing this letter.
A first choice in the difference between these two letters is whether to address the letter to your “father,” or to “Frederico.” The formality involved tells all the tale. Soon, you’ll find yourself winding between convincing yourself that you’ve always been correct in your resentment of your father. Or, you’ll find yourself walking back some of the more adolescent commitments you’d made to curse the hardships that your father’s early disappearance caused your mother.
In between the chapters of Michael’s story, we are thrown back in time to Pompeii and Egypt and even a pre-modern Naples. These characters that make up the historic landscape aren’t just red herrings or strangers or even historical figments. They are accessed in moments when Michael is in touch, so to speak, with them.
Michael time travels through his art. It’s safe to say that even he doesn’t realize it. But we all know what that metaphor of time travel means. As the great psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote in his book, Flow, time disappears when we are working on things that both challenge and engage us, fulfill and frustrate us. Michael, in Father and Son, isn’t secure with his identity as an artist, and so the game is literally (but not entirely) his becoming another person, his losing himself in time.
The relationship that Michael has to “flow” as a psychological state is finalized in the brief but enduring final scene where he visits his father’s grave. In the midst of a flowery row, only Michael’s father’s tombstone lays unadorned. The game ends with Michael rectifying this emptiness. Perhaps he fills a bit of himself back up in the process.
So much could be said about such a short game like this. But the game’s final scene, montaging the ages against the sunset, is unforgettable beautiful. Michael looks upon the same sunset as thousands of years ago. The times may have changed, the garb may have changed, the language and culture may have changed, but the stories have not. Michael is as much Pompeii as he is Egypt. Michael is as much his father as he is himself.
What sunsets are we overlooking? What views are we sharing with all of human history? Where do our hearts and minds echo the wishes and passions of centuries past? This small game might offer an answer, however temporary.
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