The You Testament

The You Testament is Matt Dickie's final game, end of a nearly ten year career of one individual who does all the programming, art, and design of all of his games, and has produced them with rapid proficiency. This title takes all the lessons he's learned about flow and fun, and then distorts them in order to achieve something altogether more meaningful.

The You Testament has you playing a historically unknown disciple of Jesus the Christ.

You can customize your height, speed, strength, hair and robing, yet you can't adjust the skin color, making you the black disciple by default, like Chris Rock in Dogma. You walk around Palestine in the time of Jesus, the game consists of multiple square regions thatching up the environment and populated by GTA-style people who largely behave like cardboard automatons, and yet, it makes sense. Likewise the production values are quite low, you can walk up against the skybox limit of each area before the next one is loaded; instead of detracting from the game it gives you the visual sense of a 50s era Bible epic like Ben Hur, willing suspension of disbelief takes on a new connotation.

The gameplay itself involves exploring the land and encountering Jesus early in his ministry; you end up becoming one of his first disciples. Jesus teaches you how to meditate and channel spiritual energy; the game has a chakra system that allows your to manipulate that energy with the key pad and activate different abilities, overcoming hunger and eventually the laws of physics. This is Jesus as Morpheus, the metaphor of a computer game is later utilized and you can play with the polygons turned off, the underlying models revealed. These abilities can then be extroverted into public miracles.

The eastern influence to spirituality can be viewed as blasphemous by practicing Christians, but more likely they will be viewed as boring, failed gameplay, by practicing gamers. If you're a Christian gamer, may god have mercy on you. However the real significant of these are two-fold, first in the sublimation of the will that you undergo by playing in this leaned-back manner, and second in the interactions with the mindless masses through this mode. Roman soldiers will come up to you and kick you as you meditate, you will have to ask yourself if reprisal is the best choice. People will break into random mob violence, stealing and whoring, and you may be tempted to join them, but then you consider that while finite state machines and random generators don't capture the nuance of human characters, they do a pretty good job of estimating the collective brutaility of the super-chimpanzee.

You will want to overcome, and if you find yourself hanging on a cross, doing nothing but waiting to die for hours of real-time gameplay, you will find yourself in a meditation more profound than any mantra or mandala, wondering if you're having fun or if it should even matter, until your character dies or in your fitful boredom you suffer a death of patience. So I'm happy tonight... I'm not fearing anything, I'm not fearing any man, mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord.