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# What is the meaning of this Gauloises-smoking, red-wine drinking Belgian art game?
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/hands-first-gauloises-smoking-red-wine-drinking-beglian-art-game/
- Published: 2012-11-26T17:49:29.000Z
- Updated: 2015-11-17T14:49:31.000Z
- Description: Here are the things you can do in Bientôt l’été (Soon, the Summer), the new art game from Belgian developer Tale of Tales: -Walk on a beach -Close your eyes -Run with your eyes closed -Find objects on the beach -Watch your house change sizes and shapes -Read and listen to cryptic conversations in Fr
- Author: Joseph Bernstein
- Tags: News, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-26 09:39

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/previously/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/bientotlete-alpha3-hotel.jpg)

Here are the things you can do in *Bientôt l’été* (Soon, the Summer), the new art game from Belgian developer Tale of Tales:

\-Walk on a beach

\-Close your eyes

\-Run with your eyes closed

\-Find objects on the beach

\-Watch your house change sizes and shapes

\-Read and listen to cryptic conversations in French

\-Listen to distant French music

\-Play chess

\-Smoke Gauloises

\-Drink red wine

That’s it. When I first played the game earlier this fall at IndieCade, [I was not impressed](http://killscreendaily.com/articles/game-theory-porn-stars-and-mexican-wrestling-kill-screens-indiecade-superlatives/?ref=killscreen.com), and I dismissed it, glibly, as the first game based on *Nights in Rodanthe*, leading a friend to joke that I was being unfair to *Nights in Rodanthe*. Having played an almost-finished version of the game away from the play-happy context of IndieCade, I wish to amend myself, and put this fascinating little game in context.

– – –

*Bientôt l’été* belongs to a new class of games such as [Dear Esther](http://dear-esther.com/?ref=killscreen.com) and [The Snowfield](http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/snowfield.php?ref=killscreen.com) that fall under the clumsy but useful tag “experiential”, which is a way of saying they are not particularly goal-directed, feature deliberately sluggish or alienating controls, and do not concern themselves much with goal-directed fun. They use the vocabulary of videogames (open-world exploration; control of an avatar; WASD controls) but eschew the structure. The point is to produce an effect in the player.

Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey, the Tale of Tales duo, describe their game as

> Not a deep message that we shout from the mountain. We really have no clue. It is a sort of philosophical drill to burrows in your heart helping you to discover what’s underneath your deepest feelings. And underneath that.

All the sincerity is a little much, and there are times during *Bientôt l’été* when the heavy-handed artiness of the experience becomes so ridiculous as to prevent the player from feeling anything except a snickering irony. If you can engage the game on a purely aesthetic level, though, it is clearly a sophisticated piece of work. The ghostly look of the game combines with a swirling score to produce an unusually intense melancholy. I don’t think there are any great truths hiding behind the aggressive symbology of the game, but as a way of getting pleasantly sad, it certainly does the trick.

I look forward to a time when games are in a real conversation with the older forms and do not need to use red wine and chess as a shorthand for sophistication.

This is the level on which *Bientôt l’été* excites me. Games have been for the most part fun-delivery devices – sometimes ingenious ones – that even at their very best produce just that, fun (and occasionally fear). Rare is the game that communicates a deeper or more shaded emotion. I think *Bientôt l’été*, though over-the-top, is symptomatic of a healthy move for gaming, towards using the tools of the medium to express a wider spectrum of feelings. That’s what art, ultimately, is for.

I’m a bit conflicted, though, because if I saw *Bientôt l’été* in a museum I would think it was a joke in the vein of Barney Gumble’s[ Pukahontas](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWAOEw9LUNs&ref=killscreen.com) (“Don’t cry for me, I’m already dead”). Because I’m playing it on a computer, though, in a medium that has never even attempted to tickle the intellect, I have different standards for it. I’m not sure if this is fair, but I do look forward to a time when games are in a real conversation with the older forms and do not need to use red wine and chess as a shorthand for sophistication.

A friend joked that *Bientôt l’été* is actually a “being French” simulation, what with the Gallic tobacco puffing, Cabernet Sauvignon swilling, longing for a golden past, and profusion of profundities. It’s funny, and it’s sort of true. It’s also a sign that games are becoming more than just a way to have fun, even if they are in the very, very early stages.