We do not forget the simple power of colors. Their ability to suggest emotions, well-being. Even if for years, the video game thought its technological race only under the trappings of a puke of gray, chestnut and khaki. Or that the colors are enslaved exclusively within the service game, persistent or filled to the brim with chests to be plundered, which fixes colors to desire, to greed. Green and blue for the common items that we spend our life as a player collecting. Purple, gold, and orange for legendary items, the kind of stuff that gets players racing. Tornadoes of electric colors but devitalized by dint of being mobilized only for purely practical purposes, reduced to the state of visual indicators intended for an insane player who, by dint of mechanically piling up wealth, does not is moved only at the sight of orange.
And then here it is Bye, a marvelous little Caledonian tale, awakens our senses and settles in our memory in Technicolor. We will long remember the warm depth of the night that falls and shimmers on the ocean or restores all its depth to the relief of a mountain; raking sunlight on tall, sun-bleached grass; the red soil of the mangrove where the water turns black and cloudy; the transparency of the lagoons where the sand turns azure before you dive in to discover milky expanses. The best gift of this little open-world game is to give us back color, to re-enchant it to make it a sensory and sensual space.
Run the bush
It’s not entirely surprising that to see again, we have to see the world through the eyes of a little girl, Tchia. Separated from her father, she turns her back on the wild and heavenly confetti that held her home, in order to reach the big island and ask for help. A forced return to the city experienced as a punishment (by the child as well as by the player). With, comes the deprivation of colors and naturalness replaced by concrete, by straight lines and salient edges, by mechanics. The need for help, to listen comes up against the administration, the form. Suddenly, dialogues in French, the language of the settler, appear when the game has only used Drehu, a Kanak dialect. So we take to our heels, to run through the countryside.
Bye then unfolds in the form of a Zelda light. By borrowing some of its basic mechanics (endurance, parasailing) and its way of ensuring that it is the territory, the call of nature, that guides our steps rather than a series of beacons. With this brilliant little idea in addition: Tchia can inhabit the things and beings that surround her. Not everything, not humans, but a very large number of things. She can slide down a slope in the form of a rock or swing from the top of a palm tree before being projectile in the skin of a coconut. We become animals: doves, crabs, grasshoppers, cats, geckos or sea turtles… So many ways and scales to inhabit the world, to contemplate it differently from the air or the seabed. A perpetual renewal of the gaze which is no stranger to this awakening of colors and justifies the ecoterrorist turn of the little girl, whom we find a few hours later sabotaging factories. Bye is a modest game, created by a team of about twenty people. It is also the most beautiful gateway into video games that we have seen in a long time.