Much like Ed, I've struggled with an angle on Mafia: The Old Country. This is a compact and focused action game with no terminal issues. It triages clichés of modern gameplay convenience for the sake of keeping narrative coherence, except when it doesn't. It's content to tell a simple story with a handful of characters confined to a single region of prewar Sicily. To be clear, in a cinematic or literary context these ambitions would be profoundly unremarkable on their own. But the last entry in this series, Mafia III, took unique and provocative subject matter and stretched it across the skeleton of a map-filling open-world checklist game, so the course-correction or reorientation of The Old Country is, I think, worth noting. 

There are lots of ways developer Hangar 13 has rearranged convention to better tell their story. Knife duels with certain characters are given a simple arena-fighting treatment to lend drama. The player can skip driving or horseback sequences once dialogue has finished. The story frequently jumps ahead in time to the next relevant plot point instead of structuring the plot as an arrhythmic gameplay sandbox with occasional cutscenes. 

But when it comes to storytelling, the "traditional" third-person action game approach (in the style of the first two Mafia games) reveals real inadequacy in the old ways. The camera is stuck to protagonist Enzo's back, in or out of dialogue. Even if you swing it around manually to see his face, it's basically inexpressive no matter the topic. We watch the back of our main character's head, his shoulders and neck, while people talk at or past him. His thoughts and feelings are, visually, quite literally opaque. This is not an involving or meaningful strategy for playing out scenes, unless the intent is to block us from the protagonist. I doubt that is the case; if there's some game design brain damage about making the protagonist in your third-person game invisible to the player to increase immersion, I've never heard it. In any game with the extreme visual fidelity of The Old Country, the old trick of having the player rock up to a conversation and stand there like a wallflower just doesn't work. 

Maybe you think I'm being tedious, but Enzo is not a compelling character and he is not presented in a compelling way. He stands around blank-facing the passage of life before his eyes. I felt much more connection to the brooding Don Torrisi, whose voice actor Johnny Santiago really nails the court-mandated Marlon Brando growl. In their scenes together, Torrisi's commanding aura of latent violence totally flattens the bland, acquiescent Enzo, who remains bland even in the pivotal moments when he decides to betray the family to run away with Torrisi's daughter Isabella.

The semi-cliché about theater being a better analog for videogames than film doesn't apply here; a theater audience is, generally, not part of the story. Yes, they may be involved in some heady Brechtian way, or implicated, but they are in chairs watching character dynamics develop onstage. Generally—and to be clear this is basic theatrical staging wisdom and like any "rule" is frequently subverted, broken, or ignored—generally an actor will turn away from the audience to avoid communicating information, or to remove them from the action. So by obscuring Enzo's face, The Old Country distances us from him. The Enzo we see in cutscenes does not track with the guy we've been steering around Sicily. 

This is a weird variant of ludonarrative dissonance, I guess: not a mismatch between how the player acts in gameplay versus the character presented through narrative but a total absence of the character depicted in the story, an Enzo-shaped hole. It's as if we're seeing Enzo through Isabella's eyes—an enigma subject to the whims of her father's "family," pulled further and further from the family he's chosen to start with her. "This would have been an easy decision for the man I thought you were," she tells Enzo at one point. I guess she's not the only one wondering where that guy went.  

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Astrid Anne Rose is a long-time contributor to Bullet Points. Her work can be found in MEGADAMAGE, BOMB Magazine, and The New Lesbian Pulp, as well as on Gumroad and itch.io.