16/06/2022.

Tail of the Sun : Beautiful Opaqueness

Games are art. This, in my opinion, is an indisputable, irrecoverable fact, and coming to such an understanding all those years ago opened my love of the medium wide. There are so, so many games that swing in the direction of not being that much fun to play, but just feel heartfelt, and meaningful to play. Games that, whilst you might never finish them, you can appreciate what they were trying to do. Today’s game is one of those games. Tail of the Sun is a title that I never finished, that wouldn’t rank amongst my hundred favorite games, but will undoubtedly remain entrenched in my mind as ‘games as an art’, and just how basic you can grind that concept down.

Now, I hate the gaming side of social media. Sure, sure, there are some good eggs here and there, but for the most part it just feels like wall-to-wall, tribalistic bullshit; people who spend way too much time raging about what they hate, and never play, as compared to what they adore and obsess over. Thankfully, the aforementioned ‘good eggs’ can sometimes prove the gaming sphere’s worth. Whilst just scrolling Twitter one day, Washington Post gaming reporter Gene Park (fantastic lad, absolutely go follow his stuff) just tweeted about a game called Tail of the Sun, citing his time with it as a huge part of why he adored Death Stranding, another game that I’ve constantly felt drawn to for it’s vibes and aesthetics. And so I thought - screw it; no manual, no wikipedia, I just got the game running, and dived in. Beyond games designed to be nothing more than madhouses, I don’t think it’s hyperbole for me to place Tails of the Sun amongst the strangest, opaque, yet utterly entracing games I’ve ever played. A game that, beyond its opening hours, I wouldn’t really call fun or even engaging, but yet it drew me in, all the same.

In the early hours of the game, Tails of the Sun is nothing short of fascinating; with almost no instruction, you’re let loose on the prehistoric world - only the manual describes your goal; hunt Mammoths, and harvest their tusks to build a tower to the titular Tail of the Sun. That’s it. Having played a ton of PS1 games in the last year, reading the manual has been a must to have any idea of even basic mechanics. Well, Tail of the Sun doesn’t even give you that. There are no markers, no concrete maps; you must simply wander west, south, east and north, searching for nutrition to build your tribe, creatures to hunt for food, curiosities that dot the ancient landscape, and of course, the mammoths. Essentially the apex creatures of the world, they hold the key to reaching your civilizations nirvana; the Tail of the Sun, built upon the tusks of slain mammoths. Your sole goal, built upon slaughter. Damn. The actions you take are incredibly simple and limited - you can throw and eat items, attack creatures for their meat - for yourself, or to advance your tribe, and you can simply wander the empty, prehistoric, bizarre earth. In many ways, it feels like a true progenitor to titles like Death Stranding (as per Gene Park’s comparison), but also something like the earlier days of No Man’s Sky - a game where you make your fun, finding meaning and entertainment from the weirdness and mundane alike.

Two major forms of progression exist in the game outside of its sole win condition; hunting the mammoths for their tusks. You aren’t going to be achieving that off the bat, so you need to get some gains - firstly, on the micro level, there’s the power of your chosen caveman. Tails of the Sun’s landscape is utterly *coated* in fruits, plants, and other tasty consumables. Each of these tasty snacks, once consumed, will cause a part of your caveman’s body to flash a particular colour, indicating which body part - and thus, which of your stats - have been boosted, and by how much. Want to run faster? Find food that boosts your legs. Want to be able to last longer underwater? Lungs. And so on. It can be hard to tell exactly which foods will buff which body parts, but I generally found eating everything I could be bothered to get my grubby little paws on was enough to keep me going, though their might be a bit of a balance system to it all - putting too much food into your legs might detract from your brain, and vice versa. Consuming meat instead of returning it to your tribe seemingly boosts your statistics the highest amount to every body part at the same time, creating a genuine feast-or-famine scenario - power yourself up by eating all the meat, or returning it to grow your tribe as a failsafe.

The Body system is probably the most opaque part of Tails of the Sun; are stat boosts permanent? Do they degrade over time, and why despite having so much ‘Mind’ food, did it never near the highest level? Seemingly, with some research, these stats have a notable effect on the game’s myriad of endings, but despite this game’s entrancing vibes, I can’t imagine playing through it more than once - maybe two, tops, if you can really get a handle on it, just on how impenetrable it seems to get a straight answer as to how this game works. Hell, it’s obscure enough that the few written FAQs and Guides aren’t remotely exhaustive answers to the mystery that this game is, frequently missing explanations on such elements as the food and body systems. Basically, just eat everything - it’ll do you way more good than harm, at least from what I’ve gathered.

On the macro level, defeating creatures and returning their meat to your spawn point (with a handy automatic teleport, no less) will help expand the members of your tribe, ostensibly giving you extra ‘lives’, since if your caveman dies, they’re dead. Forgotten by the sands of time. So, just like the old days, hunting is pretty critical to keeping the human race going, no? Well, strap in and don’t wander too far, as your villagers are made of thin paper, and initially, will be hunting with the only two weapons evolution gave them. Early game, you’ll be subsisting only on the meat you can glean from the lowest members of the food chain; birds, monkeys, maybe a flamingo? However, returning meat doesn’t *just* give your more lives to work with - a large tribe holds the key to claiming the tusks of the mammoth hordes. Now, I’m not sure what statistics exactly pushes this forward, but some combination of the size of your tribe, and consuming meat and other ‘Brain’ buffing foods will eventually cause your civilization to ‘level up’, providing you with more complicated, powerful weapons to hunt your prey. Mammoths might cut you down without breaking a sweat when you’ve just got the two weapons humanity was born with, but after a few civilization level ups, an axe or a spear is the universal equalizer. You can still get your shit kicked in by a few well-placed swipes of a mammoth tusk, but being able to kill faster and faster will give the beasts less chances to retaliate. It’s a simple form of progression, but potent.

From an objective standpoint, it can be incredibly frustrating not having a single idea - even with the manual - what you should be doing, or how any of it works., but I can imagine picking this up as a kid as just being enamored with how opaque everything is, truly feeling like the sky's the limit. That’s the sad part of growing up - everything has an answer, and mounting frustration will normally send you hunting for it, but with Tail of the Sun having no in-depth documentation, I got to experience that few hours of just… wandering, tryinging things and just seeing how they’d pan out. Does this a good game make? Well, that’s for you to decide.

The game’s director, Kazutoshi Iida, referred to the game’s design as being an ‘Anti-Mario’; by this, he’s speaking on the disconnect between Super Mario Bros. ‘goal’ and ‘gameplay’. Mario is fun because of how timeless the gameplay is, not because of the fact you’re going to rescue Peach. Tails of the Sun is built with the opposite design in mind; the game’s is based around the gameplay of hunting down Mammoths and collecting their tusks and reaching the titular Tail of the Sun. I said earlier that I wouldn’t really call Tails of the Sun that fun to play after a point, and that’s because it feels the game’s aim is to feel fun in *spite* of active gameplay being an afterthought. It’s… an interesting decision, to say the least. A bold one, the kind of game that I feel wouldn’t be released on a home console in today’s gaming climate.

Much of the game’s appeal is its wandering nature, eliciting surprises from it’s sheer, unexplained weirdness. Early on, you’ll likely run into what is almost undoubtedly Stonehenge - a little anachronistic, but sure, I get it. But as you wander further from your central camp, weirder formations begin to appear. Anatomical-esque statues. Stranger, more alien creatures. Sure, your goal is to hunt those mammoths and reach the Tail of the Sun, and just like in those ancient times, life was totally about finding the food needed to live. But yet, there are the moments in between, the transient wandering in search of your sole aim in existence; survival.

The entire experience is wrapped by the visual design underpinning everything; the flat, simple shapes of the hills and valleys, the sea of 2D items for you to pick up, and the ever-present fog, endemic to the 64-bit era of gaming, sometimes a curse, but here, a ridiculous boon. You can wander for entire minutes - hours, probably, if you reckon by in-game time - without seeing even a single animal, a decision that at first I found frustrating, but quickly found contemplative. You’ll spend so much time, wandering empty fields, barren peaks, only interspaced by random objects, a few trees, and an empty mountain… and then something *strange* will peak out of the fog. A statue of a hand. The ruins of a former camp. Strangeness, unexplained, rendered in more detail and care then everything else, drawing your gaze and your questions - why is this here? Who left it? It’s a game that says nothing, and shows little more - which is the exact point. You’re a caveman - you can only explore, and survive.

As far as other 3D titles of the era go, I’d honestly say Tail of the Sun doesn’t hold up particularly well - character models, sans the ridiculous faces (many of which veer into nightmare fuel territory), are blocky and undefined, and some of the animals, like the Sabre-tooth lions, barely look like the creature at all (I kept calling them cougars for some reason). The game doesn’t look great, I won’t lie, but as part of the package of this lonely, weird game? I dunno - it just sort of all fits together. The closest thing this game has to storytelling are cave pictures, detailing the growth of your civilization, and the progress of the tower to the Tail of the Sun - it’s a game that says nothing, but it’s also a game that doesn’t *need* to say anything, but just show. Except when it comes to the light show that is nightfall, with entire worlds and galaxies spinning above, a visual feast that goes to bat with the best the PS1 has to offer. It’s incredible.

I never finished Tail of the Sun. I spent a decent amount of time with it - probably between four and five hours - but there eventually reached a point where I put down my controller and shut it off. Tails of the Sun is an art piece - but like any art piece, you can only stare at it so long before your attention is drawn elsewhere. I explored as much of the landscape as I could, uncovering discoveries, both weird and wonderful. My civilization reached it’s apex, earning me a dangerous arsenal to hunt my prey; my tribe ballooned to over a hundred freak-like individuals - hell, I even hunted my fair share of mammoths, building my tower to the half way point. And then, even as I wandered the lonely wastes of primordial earth, I realized I really had seen everything the game had to offer. Finishing the game wouldn’t have changed my thoughts - hell, it probably would’ve made me despise it. I appreciated what it was, what it did. Also, I was getting increasingly annoyed at how hard it was to find some goddamn mammoths, but all that poetic stuff was the bulk of it.

I don’t know how well this review turned out. Tail of the Sun defies description, being one of the most opaque, undocumented titles I’ve seen in some time. Inherently, intrinsically, yet maddeningly obtuse in its simplicity, it’s a game of vibes and feelings foremost, with its little moments of discovery, and quiet, contemplative loneliness between showcasing its strengths far more expertly then any clash with a mammoth. You give this game to a hundred different people… well, perhaps you wouldn’t receive a hundred different answers, but I can say without a doubt, Tails of the Sun would be divisive. Perhaps objectively unfun, but subjectively fascinating, Tails of the Sun sticks out to me as standing amongst as an ultimate example of the weirdness, and experimental nature not only endemic to the PS1, but to gaming as a whole as it strode truly into the third dimension.