Recent reviews by Faeryn

"Fools! You tried to POP its GLISTENING MAGNIFICENCE, but you just made it angry." - Councilor Vay Hek

What would you call "depth"?

Let's say, we have a movie.
When you see people crying, sad music in the background, you "cry" anyway depending on your level of empathy or various other emotional factors.
Or maybe you see the heroes riding in victorious, saving the day, setting the wrong right. Triumphant and upbeat music playing. You feel content and happy.
You see bad things happening to characters you like and you can't do anything to prevent that. That makes you angry, right? Frustrated perhaps?

Do you see a pattern here?
The first example is what I would call "forced" emotions. Why the hell would you cry because someone who isn't even real is crying while some slow and otherwise boring music is playing? Why would you be happy when the nonexistent heroes save the fictional world from a threat that was devised by a well (or not so well) paid writer?
I'm no psychologist so this comes from common sense and observation.
Because we have these little "hooks" of empathy. Seeing all these things pull the strings inside you that make you care for your fellow human beings. It means you're human.
Since most viewers are humans, these tools usually lead to success easily.
Kind of simple, isn't it?

Let's go one step further.
You see a story about someone's mother/father/wife/child/brother dying. No sad music or crying people involved but you still cry anyway. Or not. Have you experienced it perhaps in your life? Have you cried then?
Lovers reunite in a long embrace. Happy, isn't it?
Someone you never even met breaks up with his/her partner. Yeah, ♥♥♥♥ happens.
A squirrel dies. Oh. Poor thing.

As usual, there is a pattern here too. This time let's call it "relation". People feel more connected to things that they experienced in the past or are experiencing now.
This is a bit harder to use in a fictional work. You need to know your audience. But this can lead to greater success than the first example.

Use these tools to make good works of fiction. Movies. Books. Games. They will sell well if you're a good writer/animator/actor/whatever and you have a good marketing team and about half a million other factors. They're enjoyable.

One more step.
You experience the story. Read it, watch it, play it, whatever. Then you start to feel things you don't know you could feel before and you don't know why you're feeling them. It hits like a truck and leaves you on the ground for the days to come, but when you get up, you're a new person.

That
is depth.

I don't know why I cried when To the Moon ended.
I don't know if I felt happiness or sadness or the million shades inbetween.
Perhaps I felt all of them.

To the Moon has everything I mentioned above, and it's way more than the sum of it parts.

(That said, this isn't a traditional "game" per se, there aren't many mechanics. It's more like a somewhat interactive story.)