Blurring Genres

People who have seen me play action games, especially games that allow me to save anywhere and reload quickly, know that I have an odd habit of not being content with merely completing a section of the game. By and large, I feel challenged to a way of progressing through the challenges posed to me in a way that causes me the least damage while progressing through the sequence as smoothly as possible. Depending on the specific style of the game, this can mean anything from stealthily removing guards one by one from the shadows to removing the heads of every enemy from the greatest distance possible to using surgical explosive strikes to deform the environment and eliminate the threat.

This could be understood as a desire to preserve my characters life in case another difficult situation is right around the corner, but I intuitively understand it more as a path finding exercise. I feel that, of all of the possible ways to get through a game, there must be some ideal path, one that the game mechanics best support and that is most in line with the character I am manipulating and the atmosphere I'm working in. In this way, the game is much like a puzzle for me to solve, and the experience of iteratively improving my solution is therapeutic in a way.

Now it seems that the fine folks at Ubisoft, and particularly the team behind the Splinter Cell series, have come to the same conclusion. I downloaded the demo for Splinter Cell: Conviction the other day, and while I will say that it doesn't feel like Splinter Cell as I know it, it is a perfect, even planned example of the action game meets puzzle game approach. Mike Fahey at Kotaku came to a similar conclusion during his hands on last month, but I couldn't have realized the extent to which it worked until I played the game for myself. Figuring out where enemies are, the order in which to mark them, and finding the proper guard to melee in order to set off the chain is entirely a matter of trial and error, of learning the level, and of following the path you've decided on until it either shows its imperfections or gets you through the level ideally. You can make up for a botched sequence by getting back to cover and either popping off the enemies individually or sneaking back into the shadows and starting over again; but doing so is both harder and less fulfilling, seemingly be design.

I'm not certain if Splinter Cell: Conviction is a game I'd actually go out and buy, but it's interesting knowing that other people see these games the way I do and that maybe I'm less "weird as hell" and more "ahead of the curve".