Wide Ocean Big Jacket
PC, Switch
Sometimes we too readily think about life as a series of milestones: the accomplishments and big decisions that shape our existence. Yet often it’s the smaller moments that define who we are. And within those moments are the serendipitous occasions where the right people in the right place at the right time combine to generate the kind of experience that proves quietly pivotal. Turnfollow’s short coming-ofage story, in which an aunt and uncle take their niece and her boyfriend on an overnight camping trip, seems an innocuous excursion, but it’s one where we see the trajectory of four lives gently but perceptibly changing.
That Wide Ocean Big Jacket captures one such moment while maintaining the airy tone of a Sundance Audience Award-winner is one of its many accomplishments. Cinema is in its very bones, in fact; while at times you control characters directly, often you’re fixed to a single spot and must guide the camera as if directing a scene. One highlight sees you wheel it around a campfire, flicking between the reactions of the protagonists as they listen to a horror story. Dialogue, meanwhile, is presented like silent-movie intertitles, allowing Turnfollow to rearrange scenes between shots, shifting the focus from words to meaningful silence and back. As much is communicated in the pauses as the exchanges, even when you’re simply ambling along a trail.
Still, outside one furtive late-night beach jaunt – which gives us the opportunity for some clumsy cartwheel practice – this is more about the people than the place. As archetypal cool aunt Cloanne pulls out a cigarette, husband Brad, keen to maintain the patina of responsibility, asks in a hushed whisper whether she should be smoking around the kids. She fobs him off, but her unflappability is later tested when she’s forced to give ‘the talk’ to her niece. Scene-stealer Mord, vacillating between flip and earnest as 13-year-olds do, is all limbs, her gawkiness brilliantly captured by Carter Lodwick’s expressively angular art. “I’m like a big robot with a bunch of pilots,” she observes while impatiently bouncing her leg, brilliantly summing up that awkward adolescent phase where our bodies feel alien to us.
It’s all so wonderfully observed that when we cut to Brad preparing to pack up for the ride home, we feel our heart ache a little. And when we’re invited to pass a ceremonial stick between the characters, we agonise over the meaning of our choices – the dialogue that follows, by some small miracle, reflecting our own internal reasoning. What a rare delight this is: while other games concern themselves with the big moments, this funny, sincere tale reminds us that it’s the gaps in between where life really happens.