Proteus is a sharp departure from what most people think of when they start talking about video games. Set in a randomly generated psychedelic landscape, the aim of the game is to…
…and here we hit upon the thing that makes Proteus a bit of a talking point for some people. The game does not give you any clear goals or win conditions.
The beautiful, colourful and calming stress-free landscape of Proteus does make it perfect for one thing and that is learning how to control games played in a first person perspective.
Easy if you can play the piano
First person games, or first person shooters (FPS) as they’re often called (and I argue that the term FPS still applies even when there’s no actual S involved) take quite some getting used to if you are not already familiar with the controls.
On a PC, you will be using a mouse in the right hand to move where you are looking and aiming whilst the left hand will be operating the keyboard, normally the W, S, A and D keys, to manoeuvre the character.
Throw in some common keys like the spacebar to jump, Ctrl to crouch, E to use things and then the left and right mouse buttons to fire a weapon, and you are suddenly performing the mental acrobatics that you need to perform whilst playing the piano.
FPS games on consoles are a little more forgiving, but you are still controlling the left stick to move and the right stick to change the camera view and it’s still getting your two hands to do different things at the same time.
If you’ve ever learnt to drive, you know that when you start out, you have to learn how to do operate each single component of the car from the steering through to the gears and the brakes. It takes a really long time (even longer if you are me) before you are comfortable enough with all those different elements to start paying attention to what’s going on outside of the car as well.
Learning video games is exactly like that and FPS games are probably the best example. Once you have learnt to control one car however, you can drive pretty much anything with just a few minor adjustments. This is exactly the same with video games. Once you have learnt to play one FPS, then you can manage just about any other game that is controlled in the same way. Most of the time, you can even move the controls around in the options menu if you can’t handle the subtle differences too.
Why is Proteus a good place to learn FPS controls?
I learnt how first person shooters worked gradually because they were still a new thing when I was young. The first games of their kind weren’t even really three dimensional so you didn’t need to worry about pointing your view point up or down.
Many veteran game players have therefore learnt these systems by being chased by demons, desperately trying to scramble out of alien-invaded research facilities and a slightly younger generation has probably learnt it by fighting in the digital Second World War of the early Call of Duty games. It would be difficult to recommend any of that as your first first-person experience partly because a lot of these older games have not aged well, but also because if you are still even slightly unsure of video games, jumping straight into a frantic FPS could just kill your interest entirely. Not being able to handle your character whilst also being shot at is incredibly furstrating.
So what is Proteus?
Over the last week or two, I’ve been talking about some of the more typical triple-A games that the industry churns out, but games are so much more diverse than that. There’s a good chance that you’ve walked past big billboard ads for Saints Row IV, The Last of Us and most recently Evolve and there’s a tendency for people to assume that those blockbuster style titles are all we’ve got.
Proteus by a similar token is a bad game to hold up and try to show you that other types of games exist. In the alternative indie-games community it is still considered a bit of an oddity, but it is a good way of showing you that gaming is at least a varied landscape.
Proteus is probably the first world that I will get utterly lost in when virtual reality becomes more mainstream. It is a game exclusively about exploration and discovering spectacle. The world changes with each new game that you start and there’s something almost meditative about the landscapes it produces.
Meditative might be the quality that makes Proteus perfect for a newer player to these style of games. Nothing is going to rush you along, nothing is going to put you under pressure to excel at control schemes that you might not be familiar with and this could very well be a gateway for you being able to handle some of the greatest games that have ever been produced.
Proteus is available on the PC, Mac and there are also digital versions on the Playstation 3 and PSVita. The PC version can be found on the official Proteus website or through digital distribution hubs Steam and the Humble Store.