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Andy Astruc In Analysis, Experience
Quickhacking Cyberpunk 2077: ACAB
I spent the early part of my first full day in Night City punching cops in the face. In my defence, it was the direct result of me trying to be a good person; I found a woman being assaulted in the corridor outside my apartment, so I shot the guy in the head. The woman thanked me, then started screaming because I had a gun out, and that's what NPCs do when you have a gun out. Anyway, somehow my frankly heroic action alerted the cops, and when I went out onto the landing two of them started shooting at me. Naturally I punched them until they were unconscious, which takes 3-4 punches, in case you're curious.
More cops came, more punching. Suddenly I realised exactly how easy it is to bottleneck the police and keep beating them until they pass out. Uh oh.
Eventually they stopped, I'm not sure why. Perhaps they just ran out of police, or they realised it wasn't worth it to lose thirteen police officers to a mad redhead in the slums. A few minutes later, when I accidentally used a poison gas grenade on a food stall vendor, I discovered something horrible and sinister about why the police kept coming until they stopped coming: they don't actually exist. Rather than walking in from some pre-approved outside location or being dropped off by cybercar, they spawn in from nowhere, pre-filled with sound and fury signifying fascism. Four armed officers and two NCPD drones manifested from the inside of a pile of boxes. In a more metafictional environment this would almost be a clever interpretation of the relationship between the police and civilians, cops representing an omnipotent force that watches your every move and isn't beholden to the rules normal people are forced to follow. Like physics. Here it's more of a shortcut to avoid coding in a more complicated solution to getting the police to harass you. Still, the end result of this—and the fact that apparently LOOKING at cops for too long makes them angry enough to shoot you in the head—is a fear of the police that I'm far too jaded to experience in a more realistically-coded setting. These officers are moody, unpredictable, chaotically violent and duty bound to cause harm. I'm going to do my best to stay away from them.
The inconsequential, unnamed NPCs in general have a similar transient quality. Like Schrodinger's Citizens, they only have form when you look straight at them. When I ran from that merchant I poisoned, he fled his stall while suppressing the urge to vomit; when I backed up, his stall was already being looked after by a brand new procedurally generated gentleman. NPCs are swiftly removed and replaced as you walk around, which is, I'm sure, a technical boon, but is also a big kick in the nuts for my sense of immersion. Nobody you meet matters, even by the standards of a video game nobody, because they'll be wiped and reformed anew before you can say Creepy Watson. Again, this would be a pretty cool setup for a story about reality being a simulation, and the world of Night City even has its own virtual reality system, but in our reality it's just a curious quirk of the code.
Since we're moaning about NPCs, it really bugs me that Cyberpunk 2077 keeps up the grand sci-fi tradition of portraying poor people as hunched, miserable losers, huddled in their garbage slums and trying not to be too oppressed today, thanks. Most folks in this first area (inside the Judge Dredd-style apartment block) mope around like someone took a big shit in their cereal, or sit outside literally begging. It may come as a surprise to developers that low income folks, even in a dystopia, are perfectly capable of having a normal, happy day.
On a more positive note, I did run into a loud man spouting conspiracy theories in the street, and not only could I engage him in a bit of conversation, but after a minute or so some California-accented tourists came to get a selfie with him. There are brief moments where the world of Cyberpunk 2077 feels very alive, and they're very appreciated.
V goes to the Ripperdoc—one of Cyberpunk's cyberdoctors—and gets some new eyes, a new hand. We get dragged into a big new job that will set us up FOR LIFE. It definitely won't go horribly wrong. For one half of the planning process we need to go visit the woman who requested the heist. I kind of like that we have to wait until night time because it's a bar. She gives us a briefing in a room with a very naked hologram and then we get our first taste of a BRAINDANCE, which is a fancy way to say "virtual reality tape recording." These sections allow you to walk or float through a recorded event and pick up little details that give you necessary information. In this case, we get to case the top floor of a fancy hotel so we can get around the security later. It's fancy and I like it. Reminds me of the memory breaking bits from Remember Me. Remember that game? Probably not. It was fine.
I'm getting distracted because there's a LOT going on in Cyberpunk now. These sequences really bring into sharp relief how linear the prologue was; V can chat to various NPCs, decide in what order to do things, go off to check out a few side missions rather than advancing the story. It feels more like the game it wants to be now. A corpo woman named Meredith wants to help me get a thing for the thing we have to do as long as I let her upload a virus to the gang who currently have the thing. I speak corpo back to her with a special dialogue choice and she gets angry and drives off. It feels good to have a little control, and to see the shape of my V emerging. Now all I have to do is head to this gang hideout and get a machine from them as efficiently as possible.
Okay, I can explain. See, Jackie didn't want to sit down and I wasn't paying attention to my responses so… anyway we had to kill them all.
They seemed like they wanted to rip us off anyway, and now we have the thing! But I had to destroy a lot of lives to get there. It turns out that my V is a big fan of swords and shotguns, and specifically the pleasing effect of switching between them while running around like the world's clumsiest ninja. Didn't need to sit down afterwards. Particularly liked that the end of this section gave me the option to sneak around the boss to escape, then it gave me the option to not brutally murder him after I refused the first option. Anyway he's dead.
Before the big damn heist section, I was contacted a few times by a cop with an eyepatch who wanted me to do cop stuff. In Cyberpunk 2077 you can trip over crimes in progress (assaults, robberies, people not filling in their tax returns correctly) and intervene to gain a reward and the respect of the police force. No thank you. The woman on the phone will also send you bounty jobs, the first of which is to literally kill or otherwise neutralise a "good" cop who wants to expose corruption in the force. I cannot for the life of me figure out if this is supposed to be irony, or satire, or completely straight-faced villainy. Suffice it to say, I've been deliberately ignoring any possible way to assist the police. It's perhaps unintentional, but refusing to do anything they want me to do actually instills a weird sense of pride, as if V was shouting FUCK THE POLICE from her car window.
Act one snowballs pretty quickly towards this big job, which requires a lot of hacking and sneaking and includes a bunch of enormous plot reveals I'm not going into here. It was a lot of fun and the writing here is pretty solid. I may have even felt some emotions. Also the robot cab driver is a good example of how to do fun AI characters so take note every other game that isn't Fallout New Vegas.
It does get a little prologue here for a while, in the sense that it throws a big plot reveal at you every 30 seconds for what felt like an hour. This explodes, that character dies, this character dies, this person was really this other thing, betrayal, emotions, you get dumped somewhere terrible, you come back out, a car chase, another explosion, a crash, a blackout, a montage of being incapacitated, more talking. It's all good, mind you, but there's a long time when you're just watching interesting things happen to a character you're supposed to be controlling. There appears to be a struggle the narrative designers had with working out how to tell the story and allow any sort of player choice at the same time. It makes me think of the Hades approach, where every story tidbit is isolated and fed to the player while they go about their actual gaming business. Here, the story sometimes feels arbitrarily walled off from the flow of the open world, actively working against the pillars it's built around.
Somewhere in this maelstrom of CONTENT, the actual title card comes up, now we've been playing for hours. Welcome to Cyberpunk 2077, I guess.
SPEED ROUND: Don't Threaten Me With A Mixed Time
RIght at the start of this act you find out that there's a fight club in the city. Why is there always a fight club?
All the advertising and posters in Night City still feel like they come from a different game with much stupider writing.
I came across a minor accident scene where one guy had rear-ended another and they were on their phone trying to sort it out, and that felt pleasingly authentic.
There was an unexpected instant death moment in the plot maelstrom and I am here to tell developers DO NOT.
Don't put musical instruments in your video game if you won't let me play them.
I still don't know why you'd bother going non-lethal in this game, nobody has explained it to me.
After what seemed like a very lengthy prologue, we finally get into what Night City is actually about: accidentally causing huge amounts of violence and telling the cops to get in the sea. I may have missed the point, or maybe the game isn't making any points. Next I hope to get more involved in the sidequests of Cyberpunk 2077 and put even more points into sword powers.
Quickhacking Cyberpunk 2077: On rails through Prologue City
Here's something weird about Cyberpunk 2077: You're not allowed to be ugly.
That's ugly by the game's very narrow definition, mind. You can't have one wonky eye, or fish lips, or unusually large hands; you can't be overweight, underweight, muscular, shorter or taller than average; your skin must be one of the eight-or-so approved human colours; you can have rude bits, as long as they are big, small or default. Characters must be symmetrical, they must conform to some variation of the two genders, their scars must be aesthetically pleasing.
Some of these are likely design limitations (everyone being the same height makes it easier to program character interactions, a small range of model sizes prevents collision detection issues, etc.), and NPCs get to select from at least one other body type, but when you start creating a character in Cyberpunk there's an immediate feeling of being constrained. Invisible walls erected to keep you from making anything unacceptable, anything that isn't cool enough to let you hang with the many cool NPCs in their cool future clothes, standing in overwhelmingly cool neon-soaked environments.
Welcome to Cyberpunk 2077. We're in the bathroom, and we just threw up. For my class… uhhh background? Upbringing? Oh right, LIFEPATH. I'm a Corpo, which basically means one of the bad guys by all logic of the cyberpunk genre. Arguably the bad guys by present day reality as well. Please enjoy this biting social commentary I've just made, which surpasses anything you might spot in the opening of the game.
"Corporates are the Armani-wearing, Machiavellian mega-yuppies you see in the RoboCop films. Being wealthy and persuasive, they can muster favors and resources beyond what most people can even hope."
That's what the wiki for Cyberpunk 2020, the pen and paper tabletop game 2077 is based on, has to say about Corporates. Their special ability in 2020 is RESOURCES, using their vast reserves of cash and influence to get things done. In 2077… well, let's have a look.
What strikes me about this is how it says… nothing. It feels like it was written for someone who already knows what being a Corpo entails. Be either a winner or a loser, something about secrets, be a bastard of some description. But it also reads like a knowing wink to the fact that this high-flying corporate lifestyle won't be a concern for very long. Maybe something awful is going to happen that renders our character's background choices mostly meaningless. I don't know, just a feeling.
Anyway we were in a bathroom. The Arasaka building, where our V works in their role as part of counterintel, looks exactly like you might expect. All clean lines and soulless interior design. It's a little too cool, to be honest. Like, it seems like an interesting place to work, if you're an asshole. Which sort of ties back into what I mentioned earlier about the character creator: Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that wants to be cool, and wants to give you the opportunity to be cool. You do not have a choice in the matter. You're going to look awesome and say clever, pithy things; people will want to be your friend; your office will have futuristic cyberwalls and you'll stick glowing USB sticks into your cyberhead. So of course the bad guys (this particular set, anyway) work in an outrageously stylish mega-skyscraper. It feels too nice. Too inviting. My head expects an environment as repellent and dead inside as the corporation. Something like the TV station from Detroit: Become Human, Neo's office from The Matrix, or the distressingly clean and bright dystopian interiors of Mirror's Edge. Empty, emotionally draining; dark and oppressive capitalism, rather than dark like the inside of an expensive liquid-cooled PC. Much of cyberpunk as a genre is concerned with the idea of rebellious elements dragging themselves out from under the boot of crushing capitalism, but this makes the space under the boot seem pretty comfortable. Maybe that's part of the point, though, that it gets comfortable under there; or maybe I'm giving CDPR too much credit.
V heads upstairs, her boss is angry about something, her boss's boss is a bad person. Blah, blah, blah. He kills a bunch of people with remote computer powers while you watch, because he's evil. He complains about his boss, and of course that means you have to kill her. Or facilitate her death, at least.
The NPCs, in the prologue at least, are not particularly reactive. They tend to offer one piece of information or flavour only once V pays attention. This person discusses the disasterous job in Frankfurt, another talks about how the media will react to the aforementioned computer assassinations. My boss asks me to take a seat, and if I refuse he pauses for a while before asking me politely to take a seat. And if I still don't then he really loses it and asks me to take a seat. Sir you are willing to murder half a dozen human beings to make a few cyberbucks, I don't think you should accept this sort of employee behaviour. Characters just sort of… stand around, like participants in an amateur production of Waiting for The Main Character. There's no sense of life to the world in here, everything is happening for my benefit. In fact, the only people you properly meet in this opening sequence are folks directly related to V in some way: her assistant, her coworker, her boss, this guy called Frank. We met during Icefall.
Side note: running is a lot of fun in this game. The combination of the sprint animation and the satisfying pounding of my expensive shoes makes me want to run everywhere. I noticed this while sprinting past Frank as he repeatedly called me rude.
Sorry, Frank.
The whole prologue is on rails like this. Conversations pop up as if we're a movie character turning on the TV at the exact moment the news is discussing our brother's arrest. It's fun, it just feels staged. An odd choice, forcing the player through a very linear opening to introduce a game that purports to be all about choice and living your dream cyberpunk lifestyle. A good opening sets your expectations for the rest of a text. Think of pushing the broken-down car with your boyband friends in Final Fantasy XV, navigating a guard-filled dock at the start of Metal Gear Solid, or dashing straight out Peter Parker's window and swinging across the city in Spider-Man. The start of a memorable game is often a microcosm of the game itself, and players are subconsciously aware of this.
Cyberpunk's Corpo prologue mostly means being told what to do and then doing it. You get told you can use the car outside so you go and use the car outside, you head to a bar to find your friend because your friend told you to, you get betrayed by the corporation, of course, and forced into a life of cool crimes for cool people.
Not that you care about losing your job, of course, since you only found out about it 10 minutes ago and V already hated it. The lifepath deal feels like a stab at the Dragon Age: Origins style of bonding a player to their character by investing in their past, but it's so fast! When I played a city elf in Dragon Age I was given a whole district to explore and a complex mix of intrigue, racism, sexual assault and forced marriage to pick through; in Cyberpunk your boss asks you to do something and then some goons tell you not to do that thing.
Oop, hold on, we're doing crimes now. Or stopping crimes, I can't tell. Mainly this section is designed to teach you how the action sections of the game work. We need to sneak up on this guy and decide whether he lives or dies. Then we have to kill everyone else, which is a little confusing. Why are we given the option for a non-lethal takedown on this one poor shirtless mook, when the game knows full well we're about to murder six men in the next room? As teaching moments go, it's poor. Despite being a tutorial, it says nothing about WHY you might want to use a non-lethal option, what the benefits might be versus the downsides. The only upside of keeping this one alive seems to be the idea that he'll wake up later inside a freezer and quickly discover all his friends are dead.
The shooting feels good, so far. Weighty enough, and enemies don't quite take so much damage that you wonder whether they're immortal. There's a decent flow to battle when you use your hacking powers to distract people, lob grenades and make use of cover. It's just a taste, anyway. A sample. A dead body did lodge itself in a doorway, which doesn't seem planned. Also, a still-living enemy flew out the window and kept shooting at me from inside the window frame. And if we're talking about bugs, I feel obliged to mention that my breasts burst out of my shirt for a while.
At this point in the story we find the infamous woman in the bathtub and save her life, the ambulance-cops turn up to lift her away, and we're left to drive home. This is absolutely just a chance for the game to show off its fancy city at ground level and tease some new things you're likely to come across later. There's a car chase which ends with an explosion, some people get gunned down by Cyberpunk 2077's equivalent of SWAT, there's rain, there's more neon. And you arrive home at your apartment, which is entirely too big and too nice to make sense for your character at this point in their lives but HEY, gotta be cool. Narratively, the prologue ends at a weird point where the start of something has happened but there's no indication of the shape of things going forward. Basically you're just this badass who was betrayed and now you… do jobs. Nothing says punk like agreeing to carry out tasks for folks in positions of authority.
SPEED ROUND: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Have Even More Thoughts
I like that you can shower in your clothes for that true Overwhelmed By Life feeling.
Tutorial via holograms is a strangely common technique in video games these days and it's a really boring design choice. Then again, at least they let you skip it.
The TV so far comes off like it's trying to be GTA-style satire but it's not wild enough to be funny so it just feels like a satire of Cyberpunk 2077.
Making it so you can only look into mirrors when you log into them is actually a neat and sneaky way to avoid having to render reflections constantly.
You can buy an extra-large burrito from a vending machine in this future so how can it be bad?
When you look at a sink it says "flush" instead of "activate" or "turn on" and that means every water source in 2077 is a toilet.
My goal for this playthrough was to stretch the game by playing contrary to the rules on purpose. Sadly, the prologue doesn't offer much opportunity to do this, and wants you to stick to the path quite rigidly. Hopefully that becomes less of an issue now I'm headed into the open world. Now excuse me while I lie down sideways on my cyberbed and have some cyberdreams.
Andy Astruc In Analysis
A nice space: Astroneer, Animal Crossing and friendly survival
My dad was a workaholic. He grew up on a dairy farm with a strict father figure, and carried that attitude through the rest of his life, for better or worse. Mostly worse, to be honest. Dad never could separate the difficulty of a task from its inherent worth; if something wasn't hard to accomplish then it was essentially pointless. In his eyes, the struggle was an important part of the task. So he would work very, very hard all the time, to the point of absolute exhaustion, as a way to prove to nobody that he was doing something worthwhile. Anything relaxing was meaningless and needed to be stamped out, including anything anyone else in the house might be doing to relax. My childhood was a little stressful, at times.
Video games have a similar challenge-focused mindset, wherein worth is often measured by the effort and skill required to master or complete the game. The colloquial "git gud" mentality everyone who plays has heard when referring to the difficulty of Dark Souls or the addition of a permadeath mode to The Last of Us Part II. As such, there's an emphasis across the board on survival. Survive the obstacles thrown in your path to reach the end of the level; survive the enemies trying to stop you; survive the elements. Survive even being alive. There's even a whole genre dedicated to the concept of eking out a life under harsh conditions with limited resources—we call them survival games, and they come in a variety of flavours: crafting, open-world, massively multiplayer, etc. As you might imagine, survival games are viewed through the standard video game lens, which means they are scary, violent, deadly, harsh, dangerous, frustrating, exacting and punishing experiences, designed to test the limits of human pain and endurance. They're filled with moments that aren't fun, per se, as much as they are a chance to triumph over something horrible.
But is that really what survival is all about? Struggle?
Certain games take a softer approach, taking players by the hand and saying "hey, this is a tough situation, but I want you to have the best chance of success." These games ask you to survive in a more sedate, realistic sort of way, encouraging improvement instead of punishing failure. They're nice, but they're also still about surviving. After all, surviving the real world is often a matter of degrees rather than brutal game over screens.
Astroneer is a sandbox crafting game, set on strange, uncharted planets and superficially similar to something like No Man's Sky. Players are dumped on a landmass with few materials, an unforgiving landscape and no particular goals. Unlike Hello Games' infinite procedural playground, however, the world of Astroneer has very little desire to kill you. There's no need to protect against radiation poisoning, plants and animals aren't out for blood, and deadly robots won't pitch a digital fit because you touched the wrong tree. In fact, the only major hazard in Astroneer is running out of oxygen, which is very much in your control and easily avoided in most cases. The experience of playing Astroneer is peaceful, even serene. Guiding your tiny astronaut around the surface of the planet is more about exploration and progress than fighting against insurmountable odds.
And yet, it is a survival game in its own right. Players begin with a small base and need to conquer the environment to carry out more complex tasks and therefore explore further. Adapt to the world around you, or fail to make progress. Creatively utilise limited resources. Scavenge materials from your own rotting corpse.
Crucially there is no urgency to anything in Astroneer, however. Survival games like ARK: Survival Evolved, Don't Starve and even Minecraft run on a series of interlocking clocks. Sate your hunger and thirst, manage the dual dangers of day and night, keep your fire burning to cook and scare away beasts but think about how staying too close for too long will leave you light on resources later. Wheels spinning inside wheels, keeping the player alert at all times to the many time sensitive challenges, maintaining a solid baseline of intentional anxiety. Obsidian's Grounded, which is a delightful 1980s take on the genre, currently falls prey to the same need for constant management; hunger and thirst meters drop rapidly while you try to carry out simple tasks, requiring characters to eat and drink far more frequently than a normal human being. The result is a persistent sense of being unbalanced, of barely keeping your plates spinning no matter how much control you exert over the game's systems. In contrast, Astroneer's oxygen supplies are limitless when connected to a base or vehicle, and even the portable oxygen canisters deplete at a respectably sedate pace. Day and night cycles occur, but they don't represent any sort of line in the sand between danger and safety, instead simply providing more or less favourable lighting conditions. With no resources dedicated to micro-survival—making sure you make it to the end of the day, or the hour—Astroneer allows the player to step back and take in concerns of a larger scale; survival becomes less about keeping up and more about moving forward.
The question games like this ask is: can survival gameplay mechanics be fun? Many games in the genre are entertaining, challenging, complex, but much of the pure enjoyment is wrapped in stressful timers and false scarcity. Often to even reach the fun parts of a game like this you're forced to metaphorically or literally punch trees to get the required resources for a mediocre starting weapon, or the water skin that will keep you alive long enough to punch more trees. Don't worry, the game promises, a bunch of cool things are coming, and you glimpse on the horizon a smorgasbord of possible story content, complex machinery, and exciting locations. Hopefully you have the time and energy to reach it.
By contrast, Animal Crossing: New Horizons (yes, I'm comparing Animal Crossing directly to Minecraft, Lost Oasis and Don't Starve, stay with me on this) almost trips over itself in offering the player power and agency. The game immediately telegraphs its intent to ape the style of a survival experience, dumping the player on an empty island and asking them to collect twigs. But the zeitgeist is upended by the sheer cheerfulness and overwhelmingly player-centric nature of the adventure. Welcome to this deserted island, devoid of resources, now here's your free tent and by the way you are the most important person in the world. Yes, you need to mine for materials, but instead of building a rickety fence to keep out the dino-zombie cannibals, you're constructing a museum to keep track of your accomplishments and discoveries. Many survival games eventually make a pivot from 'getting by' to building a life, the experience evolving slowly away from avoiding destruction and towards the act of creation itself; but Animal Crossing, Astroneer and similar games shift that experience to the early game, rather than treating it as a reward for hard work.
It could be argued that by removing the challenges of basic survival from a 'survival' experience, you render the genre somewhat pointless. After all, if there's no chance of failure, how does the player measure their success at surviving? Really, though, it's all about shifting the perspective on what counts as success and failure. Failure in these more peaceful, forgiving environments amounts to an inability to create what you desire, falling short of grander goals, not being capable of designing the perfect machine or most self-sufficient village. Success is superficially similar to a harsher mode of play—explore, master the world around you, increase the range and scope of your crafting abilities—albeit with a shifted overton window regarding the minimum capabilities of a human being presented with five rocks and three coils of plant fiber.
Removing barriers to enjoyment also incentivises exploration; since players don't have to dig through the basics to get to the complexities, they're more comfortable striving for larger goals and taking greater risks. Constant management of hunger, thirst, stamina, sanity, light, bowel cancer, invading monkey-cats, manure supplies, climate change, necrotising fasciitis, and juice levels has sapped the motivation clean away from many of my own playthroughs in countless survival titles well before things got interesting. Yet in Astroneer I've put dozens of hours into crafting mobile science bases complete with alternating renewable energy power sources; my Animal Crossing island is replete with commerce and a complicated maze of hybrid flowers; planets in Starbound are covered with elaborately decorated skyscrapers full of furniture I stole with zero consequence.
None of this is to suggest that survival games as they currently are—dangerous hellscapes designed to test the limits of patience and panicked ingenuity—shouldn't exist, they clearly have a place and an audience. But, like most of the gaming landscape, there's a very narrow, violent and challenge-heavy focus where something much broader and more inclusive could be blossoming. Just because a game is about surviving, doesn't mean it has to be hard, or painful. We're all just surviving out here in the real world too, after all.
A serious study of FFVIII summons, Part III: Everything is fine and normal
The price we pay for using the GF. This article contains major spoilers for Final Fantasy VIII. You can forget reading this and return home by clicking here.
Hello for the first time, whoever you are, and welcome to this exploration of the messed-up monster pantheon that is Final Fantasy VIII's summoning system. What's that? You say we've done this twice already? Oh, right; once to go over the normal, brain-devouring god-beings that live in all manner of creature and classroom computer, and again to discuss whether they represent the undoing of all reality and the eternal suffering of all who live inside. Sorry, my memory gets a little foggy sometimes. It's been firmly established that these spirit beings can bend time and space to their will, but also that you can trap them with enough science, and that—all things considered—the fact that they definitely eat the brains of people who use them is actually a mercy in comparison with their true power. Also some of them are cute.
"So if we keep relying on the GF, we won't be able to remember a lot of things?"
Right on time for a story that began in a school and is about to go into space—because space is where they keep the giant magic dictator lady shrink wrapped for everyone's protection, even though her mad thoughts still infect all TV and radio transmissions, yes that's extremely messed up—the way you find summons, and the summons themselves, begin to lose cohesion. At the beginning it was clear that these were powerful spirits which lent their power to those seen as worthy, but lately it's beginning to look more like they might be manifestations of will not tethered to any particular ideology.
Do GFs even exist outside of the user's mind? When we went to the Fire Cavern on the first disc, were we simply bringing Ifrit to life by thinking hard enough? That would certainly explain how every student is supposed to catch him to pass their exams, even though only one Ifrit exists. I need to centre myself if I'm going to unravel these mysteries. Let's calm down and look at the next GF.
Doomtrain
Okay, it's a train with a skeleton for a head. Doomtrain is a mile-long, fully functional steam train that also happens to be entirely organic and situated in the cold depths of space. When summoned, a track made from magical fire stretches into the heavens and the cursed locomotive rockets through the void before slamming into the enemy at full speed. Doomtrain causes minor poison damage, but its main reason for being is inflicting every status effect in the game, all at once. Think of it as a giant, skin-covered STD carrier with a screaming humanoid face on the front. Yes, the bulk of this summon is actually constructed of bone and skin, presumably from the bodies of its many victims. Then again, it's hard to ignore the fact that it also has a tail, meaning it must be a whole creature of some kind. Why the Doomtrain exists in space is unclear, but it can't be a coincidence that the most likely time to pick it up is when the characters themselves are journeying into orbit.
Perhaps it exists as yet another reminder that the universe is vast and terrifying, filled with unknowable entities who care nothing for the petty squabbles of man. Maybe there are worse things out there than an angry sorceress who wants to make a time sandwich, and some of those things are trains.
Accessing the Doomtrain summon is only possible by obtaining an item called Solomon's Ring and a collection of strange objects. All this information is found in a magazine called Occult Fan, which documents strange occurrences in the style of a trashy "aliens are real" tabloid. The four issues detail the existence of the ring, and obliquely refer to three types of item: tentacles from a Marlboro, an upgraded remedy, and steel pipes. Players need to grab six of each—yes, that makes 666, the number of the beast—and use the ring, which is definitely how you set up a satanic ritual and should not have been allowed. Nobody is supervising these children and so far they have absolutely brought at least four actual nightmare demons into the world.
Doomtrain is part of a long tradition of ghost trains in legends and folklore, and a similar tradition in Final Fantasy games. FFVIII in particular is full of trains, has a train heist minigame, puts you on several trains as part of the plot, situates an entire rebel force on a train, and has one of the main characters dangerously obsessed with riding on trains. So perhaps it isn't the most left-field thing to suddenly have a demonic train, rife with disease, rattling down from the cosmos to enact judgement on the enemies of the cause.
Let's step back from the precipice of madness for a moment, shaken as we are by the spectre of an organic death train, and look at something a little more grounded. By Final Fantasy VIII's standards. Late in the game, after you have your own personal spaceship, you can discover a hidden location out in the middle of FFVIII's vast ocean. Landing here reveals it to be a Deep Sea Research Center, a mobile facility designed to research draw points and replicate or improve existing para-magic technology. If none of that made sense to you, don't worry, half of this information isn't even available unless Zell is in your party when you land, because this game hates to just give you anything. Apparently, the researchers travelled all over the world looking for the largest magic draw point on the planet, and found it here. At some point it was a abandoned, and, given the researchers are still around, it's safe to say they left on purpose.
Side note: what is it about mobile buildings in this universe? Both Galbadia and Balamb Gardens were "coincidentally" built on flying research stations, and now there's this research center. Also the largest concentration of scientists in the present day live in space. I guess when the world is full of moon-spewed monsters, the idea of not having to walk around is very appealing.
Anyway, inside the station you can find a large glowing core that spits out an astonishing amount of random encounters. Approaching it will trigger a dialogue in which you must answer questions-three. After the first two correct answer you need to fight Ruby Dragons, and after picking the third invisible option (yes, that's right) you are thrust into battle with Bahamut. This dragon is blue, with red wings, and honestly fits fairly solidly into what one might expect from a fantasy dragon—except that it shoots energy beams from its mouth. Like Ifrit and a scant few others, Bahamut also speaks directly to the party; the aforementioned quiz confirms the creature as the archetypal "only those worthy may challenge me" sort of big bad. At the beginning of battle, Squall refers to it as "the great GF," which means this is a summon at least those trained at Brain Spirits University have already heard about, and that it's considered to be one of the more powerful examples. Further information about the Research Center, as well as the fact that Bahamut is there at all, suggests the researchers were studying Guardian Forces there, and seeking to harness their power to aid their probably-sinister cause. Bahamut's response to this is to be surprised by the use of the term "GF," and the realisation that they are there to suck him non-consensually into their minds causes him to reveal his fear of humans. This is strong proof for the idea that the people of this world are basically keeping summons as powerful slave workers, drip-feeding them experience and pet food in exchange for indentured servitude.
Before we move on to something else very weird, we should briefly mention the Phoenix, an avian Guardian Force that can be obtained by using a Phoenix Pinion in battle. A pinion is a round gear used in drivetrain mechanical systems; it's also a word used to describe part of a bird's wing. There's no way to tell which meaning the item name refers to.
Phoenix, after being summoned the first time, will appear in 65/256 cases when the party has been killed or petrified, reviving dead party members. It does not cure petrify, because Final Fantasy VIII actually hates you and wants you to suffer. Outside of Final Fantasy, a phoenix is a mythological bird which is either reborn from its own ashes or is born from the ashes of a dead phoenix, depending on who you ask. It seems thematically appropriate to have this creature constantly immolate itself to save the lives of teenagers thrust into the fires of war by adults who could not care less for their safety.
There's a cactus wandering around the world map that is so gigantic it can be seen from space. Nobody wants to talk about it, but it's out there, waiting, shooting needles across national borders, twirling its Dick Dastardly moustache. It lives on the aptly named Cactuar Island, which we can assume is an island so uniformly populated by Cactuar that humanity decided to let the terrifying, dead-eyed plants hold sovereignty over the entire landmass. If you land on Cactuar Island and approach the giant cactus, you get to fight the Jumbo Cactuar, which looks exactly like the other enemies here except for the moustache. And it's flipping huge. Defeating the big boy will automatically give you one of the small boys as a GF, perhaps as an offering from the Cactuar Nation in exchange for leaving them alone.
The line between Guardian Force and Just Some Monster We Keep in a Box gets a little blurry here, since the Cactuar GF is basically just a Cactuar that has to do your bidding. By now though, you should already be desensitised to the suffering of other living creatures so it doesn't matter too much. Anyway, did you know the Cactuar is called Sabotendā in Japanese? Which roughly translates to "cactus pretender." Whereas Cactuar translates to "cactus you are" or something. I made that up because Cactuar is meaningless.
Tonberry King
Continuing the theme of ordinary monsters becoming summon magic, Tonberry is another GF which requires wading through a bunch of normal enemies, then fighting a giant version. Unlike the Jumbo Cactuar—which appears instantly on the map—the Tonberry King only makes an entrance after you kill at least 20 regular Tonberry in the Centra Ruins. Basically, once you are considered a Tonberry-themed serial killer in the eyes of these tiny green creatures, their leader and most powerful hero steps in to save their society. And you murder him too. Tonberry, when summoned, emerges from a sort of portal in the floor, slowly walks across the screen and stabs the enemy with a really big knife. That sounds truly awful, but it's actually okay and even good, because the victim has a little cute sweat drop first and the knife makes a funny DOINK! sound effect that appears in a cartoon speech bubble. Funniest stabbing I've seen for ages.
There is an interesting rumour surrounding Tonberry which posits it might be the GF that Selphie junctioned when she was younger. When the party all realise they grew up in the same orphanage and just forgot because of the Ghost Brain Worms, Selphie admits to once junctioning a GF while training one day, but laments not remembering its name. Tonberry does have a quite high starting affinity with Selphie, and it is conceivable that her Garden sent her to train near the Centra Ruins because it's a dangerous and stupid place to train literal children. Like most FFVIII theories, this is all unprovable and probably wrong.
Throughout this entire exploration, you've no doubt been thinking that these summons are not nearly bonkers enough; that their animations aren't as outrageously long as they could be; that there's room for so much more haphazard religious referencing and unhinged art design. Good news: we're going to talk about Eden.
At the bottom of the Deep Sea Research Center, where you may have already captured Bahamut, there is a vast dungeon. Reach the bottom of this dungeon and you get to fight Ultima Weapon, one of Final Fantasy's recurring challenge bosses, put in many games just so players can show off how much grinding they've done. Inside this weapon, you can find the Eden GF, which is a big disc that has wings and the body of some form of angelic torso on the underside. While the other summons, apart from Pandemona, have some sort of recognisable design which allows the human mind to comprehend their form, Eden is a nightmare of runes, body parts, allusions to technology, and vague shapes and colours. Its name is a twofold reference, calling to mind the Christian Bible's Garden of Eden, where humans first learned to hate their bodies, as well as Final Fantasy VIII's use of Gardens as a PR-friendly name for harsh military schools. Is Eden a failed attempt by the research teams to merge a Garden with a Guardian Force? Did a GF that resembles the Gardens manifest itself after the Garden schools rose to prominence? Are all Gardens a psychic memory of Eden, filtering through into the design ideas of the Garden architects?
Eden's attack is called Eternal Breath, and it is frankly a little difficult to put into words. First, the screen fizzes with electronic static as Eden's face (or face-like object) appears; Eden drops down into a digital grid, overlaid with satellite images and video screens of blueprints. The grid extends to encompass the enemy, then the unfortunate creature is dragged across the field of view until it lines up with the large blue gem on top of Eden's disc. A strange symbol appears under the enemy, and we zoom out further to reveal that the entire planet displays the same symbol, and it transforms the celestial body into an impossibly huge magical egg timer. The symbols activate, firing the enemy out from inside the planet and into the void of space. The beam of energy carrying what must surely be the most unfortunate monster in the game continues into the centre of a nearby galaxy, which detonates violently and becomes a supermassive black hole. Nobody should ever summon this horrible thing, lest we all disappear, screaming and inside-out, ejected from reality forevermore.
Watching each individual moment of the Eden summon is upsetting, and trying to piece it all together is a fool's errand. Parts of the summon suggest the entire world of Final Fantasy VIII exists within a simulation controlled by Eden, and that all concerns of sorceresses and teenage soldiers are petty squabbling conducted by worthless ants. If this is what the researchers pulled out right before shutting their work down, you can understand what made them run. If Pandemona and Doomtrain are harbingers of the cosmic end, Eden is the apocalypse of horror knocking on the front door.
And that's it. No more summons to look at, and the world of Final Fantasy VIII is eternally doomed by its inability to perceive the vast scope of nightmares that exist just beyond the veil of reality. May the gods have mercy on them all. Actually, no, hold that thought, because there are just a few more Guardian Force-related issues to discuss. Next time we delve into the most unsettling, forbidden place of all: the mind of a teenage boy.
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Andy Astruc In Experience
Re-experiencing Death Stranding in the middle of a pandemic
Tomorrow is in your hands. This article contains mild spoilers for Death Stranding, as well as discussion of COVID-19. Click here to be taken back home.
You may not believe this, but there was a time when the COVID-19 global pandemic did not exist. Mere months ago, folks were going about their business, blissfully unaware that the established world order was about to be upended, laying bare the inadequacies of particularly hubristic tin pots and oligarchs. It's possible, in this utopia of ignorance, that one may have heard about a video game called Death Stranding, which is a walking simulator designed to show off high-end rock technology and Norman Reedus' buttocks. While we may never know exactly what Death Stranding means according to its creator—because Hideo Kojima is an AI construct sent from the future—it's easy enough to loosely interpret the experience as some amalgam of commentary on a modern lack of human connection, the encroaching shadow of climate change, and the dangers of putting psychic children in bottles.
Now, we're all worried about the virus. Some of us have been shut in our homes for weeks, others will be stuck inside for much longer. This isn't the world into which the game was originally released. In some ways, it seems a lot closer to Kojima Productions' fiction than before. What better time to turn back the clock and live through the first couple of episodes, with the benefit of hindsight and from inside our very own Death Stranding. How does the game feel, when played in these unprecedented times?
Lonely. As I begin a new game, the opening cinematic presents a screensaver-worthy slideshow of beautiful-yet-empty environments. Cliffs and hillsides and rivers, all devoid of life, and serving to highlight the familiar but oddly alien nature of Death Stranding's setting. These are elements we're used to seeing, but put together in an unusual way; landscapes familiar to Iceland or Scotland, perhaps, but the game tells us this is the remains of the United States of America. Now that strangeness, present before, takes on a new meaning. The quiet feeling of isolation isn't unusual because it's at odds with reality, it feels odd because it fits better now. As we watch Sam Porter Bridges speed across a rocky landscape on his future bike, it seems obvious that he would be alone, that there would be nobody around to witness. People are supposed to stay indoors, after all, it's dangerous to go outside. Walking around the streets of Wellington, New Zealand right now feels far more surreal than a trip through the bleak majesty of Death Stranding; it's hard to look at people out in public and not subconsciously judge them for making the choice. Surely they should be staying home, and not just strolling down the street as if there weren't 300,000 dead from some nightmare you can't even see.
There's the other thing that's immediately striking about the game now: the ever-present menace of an invisible threat. BTs are ghostly entities that roam the land, only manifesting as inky hand prints until it's too late; connection with the unseen danger of a virus—particularly one that can be carried many times over before it reaches someone who becomes symptomatic—is inevitable. The beached things of a stranded universe cause immediate loss, and permanently alter the way society functions, just like an uncontrolled disease. They craft a feeling of fear that is only made worse by the uncertainty about their nature, their form, and how to deal with them. Viruses are, in many ways, terrifying because we don't really know what to do with them when existing systems fail; we lean on vaccines and the concept of pushing through an illness, but beyond that there's really nothing in place. So we end up locked away, just like the population of every Knot City, stuck between believing the problem will be solved eventually and preparing to be trapped in a new paradigm indefinitely.
Early on in the game, we get to see the first signs of Sam Bridges' aphenphosmphobia, his fear of being touched. When I first began playing Death Stranding, it was refreshing to see something superficially similar to my own anxiety portrayed by the main character, someone who clearly seeks out human connection while also being repelled by it. In the present day, of course, we've all been burdened with a sort of artificial touch phobia: increased hand-washing and the looming threat of invisible germs necessitates a cautious approach to other human beings. I felt an increased connection with Sam during his first visit to the beach, his desperate clutching of the mysterious baby to his chest reading as a cry for the physical attention he (and all of us in various stages of crisis management) can't access in the real world.
Flashes of other thematic puzzle pieces litter these opening chapters, and hold their own altered meanings from within the pandemic. Rain in the game has transformed into timefall, a strange phenomena that causes the raindrops to age whatever they touch. This deadly rain forces everyone inside, and the way it steals time, life and any sense of progress from those trapped in it warps into a kind of twisted metaphor for the months COVID-19 and its associated effects have stolen from millions. Interactions occur through holograms and radio transmissions out of necessity, much like the video calls currently becoming the norm for businesses, families and students. The sick, injured and dead are a liability in Death Stranding and much is made of the need to deal with or dispose of them as quickly as possible; the parallels with current political discussions—mainly on the right—about how valuable the aged and infirm really are to society, and how many deaths are an acceptable sacrifice, gave this player some pause.
The way Sam and the other couriers are elevated to heroic, near-deified status is also disturbingly familiar. The game places Sam Porter Bridges very much as a sort of front-line worker in this universe, forced to endure the huge risks of his profession and stay at work so that others may carry on with their lives, uninterrupted by the realities of the situation. Death Stranding is replete with this sort of figure: everyday people who need to keep doing what they do so society continues to function. Instead of hospital workers and supermarket employees, we have porters and distribution officials. Most of our experience of the world of Death Stranding is through the eyes of these working class people, no doubt very deliberately. The population of Capital Knot City, for example, is 42,187, but we never see any of the ordinary citizens of this, or any other, population centre. The only time Sam interacts with people who don't have to struggle with this new world order is when they're asking him to retrieve buckets of paint or carry them over a hill so they can see their boyfriend. Sam is frequently referred to as a hero in the game, and given various legendary monikers to demonstrate exactly how amazing his work is and how much he has done for America. People constantly infer—and often outright state—that only Sam can do what needs to be done. However, much like the current situation in our universe, it isn't always true. Most of his deliveries could easily be completed by someone else utilising the same technology; Sam's ability to 'repatriate' and come back from the dead is a useful safety net, but it doesn't make him as indispensable as those in charge would have him believe. The only thing preventing Die Hardman from putting on some overalls and making deliveries is that he's the boss. The class divide is as real in Death Stranding as it is in pandemic-ravaged 2020.
Most encouragingly, what playing through the start of Death Stranding mid-pandemic reveals is the importance of the smaller things, those moments and activities which were perhaps lost in the bustle of normal life. Much like our own world problems, the issues that Sam Bridges' universe faces are vast, bordering on cosmic; there is no useful way to comprehend or impact them at an individual level. So we find joy in the minutia of smaller tasks: retrieving a box that fell into a nearby river, reorganising our sock drawer by colour, walking over a nearby mountain without falling over. We focus on the parts of our life that we can control, and build routines around the familiar aspects of the day. Sam can't rid the planet of the dead, beached nightmares which stalk every known location; he can't unravel the political machinations of masked powers or terrorist organisations. But he can take an order for six printers over the waterfall and deliver it without a scratch. It is perhaps the nicest thing about playing Death Stranding now, amid all the reminders of a broken world, that you can find satisfaction in simply doing what you can to make the world a better place.
While there are plenty of games that provide respite in tough times, either by allowing players to escape or simply giving them something to distract themselves while the world grinds to a halt, playing Death Stranding now is a surprisingly thoughtful experience. I was intrigued to find that the game takes on new meaning and significance just by virtue of my own altered perspective. Kojima reportedly set out to make a game that provided positive interactions as an allegory for what the interconnected, but very separated, modern world could become. It's rather poetic that as the world drifts apart—temporarily or otherwise—Death Stranding provides a more encouraging message than ever. Tomorrow is still in your hands, even if it looks a bit grim.
Even in a dream: Bloodborne, hope, and keeping horror cosmic
Plant eyes on our brains, to cleanse our beastly idiocy. This article contains mild spoilers for Bloodborne. Click here to be taken back home.
Bloodborne opens in a dark room, with the player lying on a doctor's examination table. A silhouetted figure in the darkness speaks of blood and mysteries to be solved, and a contract to be signed. Even when he rolls into the light, his face is obscured by hair and bandages. The player passes out, and wakes to a nightmarish world plagued by dessicated werewolves and tiny, pale messengers with sideways mouths. But we never see the world outside this bad dream, so maybe it was always like that.
Cosmic horror is difficult in any medium. By definition, the genre is concerned with the unknown and unknowable, the idea that the reality we take for granted is a tiny box that exists in a grander, more terrifying universe. Lovecraftian stories invite us to think about what makes us most uncomfortable, and discover everything is many, many times worse than we could have ever imagined. Good cosmic horror is characterised by a certain sense of hopelessness in the face of unrelenting and incomprehensible forces that exist at a scope which makes humans less important than the dust in their lungs. But it also walks a knife edge, presenting stories in which characters are always seeking that unattainable knowledge, looking for answers, believing that a mystery can be solved and everything can finally be okay. Comic horror is about struggling, even when the robots say resistance is futile, even when the cultists finish their chant and the sky opens, even as they lock the door to your padded cell.
No game understands this contradictory interplay between the known and the unknown better than Bloodborne. What begins as a gothic adventure as obsessed with blood as Castlevania and as keen on hats as Abraham Van Helsing slowly and expertly peels back its own skin to reveal darker and darker truths underneath. Bloodborne drags players down so gradually and with such sweetness that you are likely to have a moment, far too late, that leads you to wonder how things got quite so bad on your watch. What Bloodborne sees, more than any other game in the genre, is the need for hope.
Players, like the protagonists of a cosmic horror story, need to believe there is a reason to keep struggling. They need to see a way forward, even if the path is made of eyes and the moon that lights their way turns a sickly orange red. Which is why every tiny mechanical choice in Bloodborne works in service to that goal, as the world itself sprouts segmented legs and the flesh falls from its cursed bones.
In the opening alone, you can see the perfect setup: a mysterious figure sets up the existence of a mystery, sending you in the direction of further knowledge, and character creation is tied to the signing of a contract, which unambiguously positions the player as making a choice to experience whatever comes next. You are very explicitly asked to shape your whole experience around this conscious desire to unravel the mysteries of Yharnam. This is key to the cosmic horror experience, characters frequently reach a point where they could easily back away from the shadows ahead, but instead they move forward. It's akin to the broader horror trope of the teenager entering the clearly-dangerous haunted mansion, except the cosmic horror protagonist enters mind open, seeking. After a scene involving monsters big and small, the game gives players control and situates them inside a familiar setting: a medical clinic.
Familiar, yet different, of course. Everything in the early parts of the game is a creepier, more unsettling version of something at least passably recognisable. The townsfolk are townsfolk, although they seem far too tall and far too violent; the buildings are impossibly tall as well—and arranged as if they grew organically from a central point—but they recall memories of real-world gothic architecture; werewolves feature prominently among the city's threats, but their fantasy origins are well-entrenched in the public psyche, meaning they are, for a scary story, a kind of expected occurrence. Because of this groundwork, placing the familiar among the unsettling, when recognisable aspects fall away it feels all the more horrible. When the werewolves slowly become discoloured and eventually mutate into twisted wolf marionettes, burdened with extra human arms and legs where none should be, we remember what they used to be, and the dread of realising how far from reality we've drifted is brought home.
But you have to get there, first; keep your spirits up long enough to get to the cold, unfeeling end of the world. One big way Bloodborne does this is with From Software's skillful use of shortcuts. Exploring the world can be a confusing and daunting experience, since the geography of Bloodborne's universe is only euclidean because the PS4 demands it. When players head down a stray alley, or jump from a hidden ledge, only to catch an elevator back to an earlier location, the euphoria is a direct response to the dark and pointless world surrounding them. You're not just excited because you unlocked a shortcut, you gouged the smallest, brightest nugget of hope out of the impassive wall of nightmares blocking your path.
Finding a shortcut in Bloodborne is a sign that progress can be made, even against the worst horrors. The game, despite its difficulty, wants to be explored, picked apart; it wants to be known. So it encourages discovery, and the foolish cosmic horror protagonist, buoyed by their meagre success, slips a little further towards madness.
The game brings otherwise mundane mechanical aspects of the experience and ties them to the specific needs of the genre. Healing is accomplished by consuming blood vials, used in what Yharnam refers to as "blood ministration," meaning that with each use the player is being drawn in and becoming a part of the town. Using the Madman's Knowledge item, encountering bosses, or witnessing other important game events gifts the player with insight, a consumable resource that can be used not only to help with certain character stats, but also to warp the world. Previously invisible creatures appear in all their mind-burning glory, inanimate things come to life, new enemies begin to crawl in. Active participation in the world of Bloodborne is mandatory for all of this, and the many positive and negative results of this provides another intoxicating push.
Many of these mechanics have familiar counterparts in the other Soulsborne games. But where a game like Dark Souls provides them as tools to survive in a harsh fantasy world filled with dark creatures, Bloodborne makes it very clear that every action you take as a player is weakening your tether with reality. Knowledge is dangerous, fear is justified, and ignoring those ideas is a choice you are making. Even From Software's penchant for leaving world-building to be discovered rather than gifted to the player is a service to the cosmic dread. Learning about how the mechanics and items work, examining the bosses and enemies, is necessary to play the game, but is also inviting further decay into the mind.
Cosmic horror is often shorthanded to large space monsters with face tentacles and madmen screaming in spooky asylums. But the core of the genre is far from the vast, unknowable intelligences that oversee reality; at a human, knowable level, it's about the feeling that something isn't right. Cosmic stories are the shadow that looks like a man standing in the corner of your bedroom until the light reveals it was only a coat, except the light never turns on. They're the niggling feeling that you could know more about the world, and the knowledge that you shouldn't. Where other games unceremoniously slot in Cthulhu-adjacent monsters and sanity effects, Bloodborne is content to be the slowly spreading smile on the lips of a helpful doctor. It sits, confident in the horror that exists below the surface and perfectly fine with the idea that you might never get far enough to see it. The fingers were always there, softly stroking your forehead.
Perhaps there's a little Lovecraftian DNA in every From Software game. Each of them asks players to trust the game to lead them to something interesting, slowly absorbs them into the world, teaches them secrets that are incomprehensible to an outsider, and leaves them not viewing anything in quite the same way afterwards. A hunter is a hunter, even in a dream. And there's no way back.
Sad dads and dead mothers: The limited misery of in-game parenting
Terrible news: you've become a parent. In a video game. Someone died, or something horrible happened, or maybe it was great and magical to begin with and then the horrible thing happened. Maybe you died, and that's awful because you were a parent and now your child is alone in a dangerous world; maybe everything would be fine except your offspring has been kidnapped. Whatever the reason, you're the parent or guardian of a human child and you're in for a rough time.
Unless the game is about children, young people have only two purposes in video games: to be annoying sidekicks (and immediately expelled from your party in favour of a dog, or a drunk old man) or to be a source of trauma and growth. If someone has children, the player will be given the chance to see them struggle with parenting in the worst possible ways allowed by the theme. Their significant other will die and they will have to go out into the world with their son and teach them to survive, which is difficult and challenging even for the actual God of War. They will need to rescue the child from death and worse, all the while thinking of the nightmarish fates that could be befalling them, a la Dishonored, or Silent Hill. Even if things start in a positive place, emotionally stable and functional, the slap of video games' heavy hand is never far away. Shadow of Mordor kills everyone in the Ranger's family right after you stealth kiss your wife in the opening, leaving him to angst for all eternity, Fallout 4 shows a glimpse of the joys of being a new father then steals your son 200 years in the future, and The Last of Us spends 15 masterful minutes making sure you appreciate its adorable father-daughter relationship before tearing out your heart and stomping it into the dirt.
The games with traumatic parenting stories aren't necessarily bad; many of them represent the finest art the industry has ever produced. Here's the thing about being a parent, though: sometimes it's nice. In fact, most of the time it's wonderful. Having kids can be a transformative experience filled with moments of joy, laughter, love and admiration. Is it hard sometimes? Absolutely. I have three boys, and some of the most difficult and stressful times in my life have been because of them. But much of the parenting experience is happy, or normal. Most days are about making lunches and listening to them talk about absolute nonsense for hours, or taking them places and watching them just run around being unfinished human blobs.
Yet the overwhelming purpose of children and parents alike in game narratives is to die and generate sadness, or to live on and be a burden which may or may not lead to an important lesson. This trend is especially brutal when it comes to mothers, who almost never survive long enough to matter much to anyone beyond the emotional value of their memory. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Detroit: Become Human, Fallout 3, Heavy Rain, God of War, The Last of Us, Dishonored, and The Walking Dead to name all kill off their mother figures (or hide them away) with the game barely even begun. There are plenty of others. It's bad enough that there is a real-life stigma around parenting that implicitly suggests your life after having a kid is a whirlwind of chaos from which you can never escape. This is not an imaginary point that needs to be hammered home by every second video game.
Stories need conflict, you may retort. Nobody wants to see a happy family dealing with nothing in particular. It's a common assertion about narratives in general that action requires characters deal with obstacles. But defining potential conflict for parents purely in terms of how uncomfortable, stressful and emotionally taxing the act of raising children can be for the characters is narrow thinking. The Sims, while not a narrative-driven game, manages to cast parenting in a realistic light, positioning the act of having children in the first place as a player choice, and attaching positive motivations to them by investing parents and players in their success, however they choose to define it. Dream Daddy does an admirable job of representing characters who manage to be both happy, functional fathers and also human beings who want to date other hot dads. And it may be shallow, but the constant inclusion of a supportive mother figure in each Pokémon game—whom the player can visit throughout their adventure for moral cheerleading and mechanical benefit—is a much appreciated break from the cavalcade of tragedy.
My favourite example of a gaming parent is the King of All Cosmos. Katamari Damacy's arrogant, clumsy and probably-drunk father figure is an excellent example of how a parent-child relationship doesn't need to be played as if the game were competing in the misery olympics. The Prince and the King have a strained relationship at best, and the King is by all accounts a pretty horrible, messy person, but the tone is light and the ridiculous dialogue still hints at a genuine emotional connection. They have fun, they connect, they roll up big balls of stuff and it's not a metaphor for the difficulties of having a dad who's codpiece is the size of the moon.
Consider, even, that something as vast, varied and vital to the world as parenting could even be used as a positive motivator in game narratives. Imagine if a father adventured out into the wilderness to care for his family, not because they were sick or in danger, but because he wanted to be a good parent. Imagine an RPG about a mother of five who gains her power by connecting to her children and forming some sort of Mother Voltron to smite evil. Maybe it would not entirely break the whole concept of a video game story to have two happy, healthy parents who are alive and care for their living children without spiralling into a pit of despair, and perhaps during the week they are super spies that take down Nazi robots. There's even a wealth of material sitting, unused, with regard to games that weave the act of parenting into whatever other activities the player might engage in. Why stop at romantic companions in Mass Effect when you could also parent through dialogue trees and watch your space kids grow up to be the perfect space adults?
These are just some possibilities that become apparent if you simply stop looking at parenting as just a way to tell stories about how parenting is really hard. Everyone already knows it's hard. Think instead about the excitement and magic inherent in the idea of taking control of a new life and guiding it along one of a million potential paths toward adulthood. Think of the feeling you get when you're allowed to take care of animals in games, or given free reign to design, build and destroy a whole city. Raising kids isn't a burden, it's a power fantasy, and games love power fantasies.
Perhaps now we've gotten all of these crying fathers and absent mums out of our system as an industry, we could start to look further into the spectrum of life experience that parenting represents. Given the importance of raising children in pretty much any society, it seems a waste to only ever look at things through the grim lens of everything that could possibly go wrong. Many have postulated that the overall increase in stories about fathers dealing with the tribulations of having kids is a symptom of so many game designers reaching their 30s and 40s while also having children of their own. If that's the case, and given that the overall saturation of video games in society means, statistically, a lot of parents play games, then it might be time for the industry to grow past its "look how grown up we are" phase and start telling a wider range of stories, including ones about happy, healthy parents.
Let's talk about killing animals in video games
There is no shortage of murder in the world of games. If you play them regularly, there's a good chance you brutally slaughtered hundreds of people, monsters, aliens in the last week alone. It's fine, really; one of the more admirable aspects of the hobby is that it allows regular folks to dip their toes into realities that they couldn't—or wouldn't—normally access. Call it catharsis, or curiosity, or feeding the brain worms we dragged kicking and screaming from the primal, dangerous origins of humanity; killing things in video games is fun and good. Even if there is way too much of it.
Besides, society was being desensitised to the human cost of violence long before games were dominating the entertainment discourse. Films had a 100 year head start, while books, art and the theatre have been around for at least a century longer, filling the public's mind with death, dismemberment and daily visions of the worst tortures imaginable.
Then you get to animal murder, and things get a little more murky. Recently there was a minor controversy surrounding the announcement that Naughty Dog's upcoming post-apocalyptic sadness simulator, The Last of Us 2, allows players the heavy, emotion-laden choice of whether or not to kill dogs. You see, sometimes you will be hunted by enemies with their own attack animals, and if you kill the angry pooches their owners will be sad; loudly sad, in the game, because you killed their dog. The stated purpose of this potential trauma, according to a Polygon interview with Naughty Dog co-game director Anthony Newman, is to heighten The Last of Us 2's theme of "regrettable violence," the narrative thrust of the series being to force players into situations where they need to participate in awful acts while also being made to recognise the consequences of these actions. Retailer GameStop made news more recently for a piece of promotional text advertising the game, highlighted in a viral tweet. The text somewhat gleefully (with typical marketing enthusiasm) describes the feature "Dogs" as including moments where NPCs will "cry out in absolute horror when they discover their lifeless furry best friend."
As games dig more and more into emotional storytelling, seeking to create meaningful narratives rather than simply provide a play experience, it becomes useful to examine how the presentation of heavy material is handled. Basically, we need to ask what it means to kill an animal in a piece of art, and what it means to kill that same animal in a video game.
Despite the wide variety of artworks on offer from the entire history of human civilisation, animal murder still isn't particularly common. When it does show up, its generally treated as a pretty big deal, substantially altering the plot or the state of mind of a major character. Old Yeller tells the story of a faithful dog that must be put down after a bite turns him rabid, devastating the family; Marley & Me also uses the death of a beloved pet to elicit sadness from the audience, albeit this time at the end of a couple comedy; John Wick's hero is dragged back into a world of violent professional assassination after his dog (a gift from his deceased wife) is killed. In all of these examples there is an implicit understanding that killing a dog 'on-screen' is a serious decision to make, one that ripples outward. Quotes from Naughty Dog suggest that The Last of Us 2 understands this as well, at least enough to play it for emotional effect. But there are two reasons this sort of manipulative storytelling isn't always fit for games: consequence and repetition.
The consequences in video games for even an action as serious as murder are frequently rather minor. Immediate consequences usually include removing an obstacle from your path, alerting more foes, and, in very rare examples, turning one faction of NPCs very slightly into enemies or friends. Allowing player choice to dictate narrative is a slippery slope, of course, and much harder than the average person would think, but even examples of heinous acts impacting the plot of a game further down the line by design could be counted on a handful of fingers. There needs to a tangible cause-and-effect at play if you want the audience to take anything away from a situation except "thing bad." Killing dogs, for example, is an undeniably terrible action on paper, but if a game's only message is that it's a shame you need to kill these dogs while also very much encouraging you to kill them if you think you need to, then there is no message. Thoughts and prayers for the game universe.
In the Sam Raimi comedy-horror film Drag Me To Hell, the main character, Christine, is a loan officer who denies an elderly woman an extension on her mortgage. The old woman happens to be the very magical kind of old woman, and places a curse on Christine which will see her dragged to Hell after three days. The events of the film see Christine defeat the curse and seemingly escape damnation, but the final scene shows her being pulled into a hellish portal by demonic forces. Why? Well, as part of her desperate attempts to remove the curse, Christine sacrificed a kitten. There is no other point in the film where Christine does anything unambiguously terrible; even the mortgage refusal is in a morally grey area, simply being a nasty part of her job. The cat, however, died for purely selfish reasons. An innocent was harmed.
In comparison, while the game isn't out yet, the discussion around them centres squarely on the moment-to-moment decision and reaction of dog death. You decided to do something that was bad and necessary, now you have to move on and live with yourself. Which is quite easy to do, since you didn't really kill a dog, and it didn't significantly impede your progress. But you regret the violence, maybe. Thing bad.
Players will always have another chance, however, as unlike other forms of media, games function on loops. The most narrative-heavy big budget game still pushes somewhere between 15 and 150 hours, and much of that time is spent replaying existing mechanics. Nothing wrong with this idea, but it does mean that there's a good chance you will have the chance to kill several dogs in the course of your journey. Perhaps dozens, or hundreds. And here we come up against the second half of the problem: something that was emotionally resonant the first time around will not necessarily retain that resonance the 20th time. Killing one dog is a tragedy, killing a million is a statistic. Because games thrive on this concept of repetition, you can't simply rip a meaningful misery from a crafted, author-paced story and jam it into a player-controlled universe. The main character in I Am Legend has a faithful puppy companion helping him navigate the zombie-vampire infested city streets, but when the dog is bitten and has to be mercy-killed by the hero on screen, we feel the trauma and import. At the climax, this knowledge stays with us and subconsciously prepares us for the reveal that our hero is actually the villain of the piece, having murdered so many of the aforementioned creatures. While he made the right choice in killing his dog, that image leaves us ready to believe his good intentions are causing harm to others. If the script was rewritten to include the hero actually mercifully strangling 20-30 dogs, most of the audience would likely already see him as a monster well before the twist.
This sort of dissonance isn't limited to games where you kill dogs, of course. Much has been made of how flippant and friendly Uncharted's Nathan Drake remains, even as he mows down hundreds of men for flimsy reasons; the Tomb Raider reboot took great pains to show players how distraught Lara was at the idea of killing one deer to feed herself, and even showed her struggling to take the life of a dangerous man attempting to assault her, but several dozen hours of bombastic murder porn dulled that revelation somewhat. There are also plenty of games where you kill normally-lovely animals without a care in the world. The Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption position animals as either a threat to your safety or a resource to be hunted, Resident Evil sufficiently redesigns their dogs to make it clear these are no longer creatures worthy of empathy.
Animal death, when given focus, will almost always be shocking, it's wired into every human to be horrified by the concept, the visual, the implications. Regardless of why that is, it makes for a powerful storytelling tool, but games can't just use that tool as if this were a tightly-edited film or novel. If you're going to kill a fictional dog, and you want to convince everyone that you're making an important point by doing so, then the way you make that point had better be just as thoughtful as your philosophical musings. Using it to make the audience suffer, and allowing the natural flow and mechanical setup of video games to undermine even that paper thin idea, makes for a shallow exploration of violence and morality.
The solutions to the quandary—making game narratives meaningful without undermining them with what would otherwise be good gameplay, and without cheapening the content—could be many and varied. But I'm reminded of a recent experience with the God of War reboot, in which I killed a seagull. There are seagulls wandering the skies of video game Midgard, and it is indeed possible to kill them, watch them explode into blood and feathers. But there's no purpose to it, no meaning; you get nothing from the experience apart from a general, niggling feeling that your son just saw you kill a bird for no good reason. In a world full of horrifically violent finish moves and constant death, it was a bird minding its own business that made me think about my actions. Maybe that's part of the answer, devaluing the violence to give players the space to make their own decisions about what feels right and wrong. GameStop definitely didn't tell me about the seagulls.
The Outer Worlds' hollow star and why the player's role matters
French? I can't f***ing read French. This article contains mild spoilers for The Outer Worlds and Prey. Click here to leave the colony.
In the film Groundhog Day, weatherman Phil Connors is stuck in a time loop, living out the same day over and over again. Maybe forever. And he's super bummed about it at first, until someone points out that a person in his position could literally do whatever they want. Lie. Cheat. Steal. Learn to play the piano. Eat forty cakes and wash it down with ten bottles of whisky. Armed with this knowledge, Phil goes on a hedonistic rampage, living out the dream of a life with no consequences. After an unspecified period of time, however, the novelty wears off; being an unkillable god-like being untethered from the petty concerns of biology and polite society means no relationships, no lasting developments, no impact on the world at large. Phil, unable to move forward, becomes suicidal, depressed and nihilistic. Nothing matters.
Video games always cast us as Phil Connors, in some way. No matter the game, every time we boot up an interactive experience we consent to being placed inside one time loop or another, slowly finding our way towards whatever point this particular universe wants to show us. That means the way the main character is positioned in the story is pretty important, and how they interact with the game world is very different to other mediums.
This is all my very roundabout way of trying to figure out a puzzling question: why don't I enjoy playing The Outer Worlds? Obsidian's newest RPG is a fine example of the genre, a worthy follow-up to their other work, and a valid, unsanctioned response to an unspoken request for a Fallout game that isn't full of bugs. The combat is fun, with time-dilation powers, laser-powered swords and guns that make all the correct boom noises. It has a wonderfully endearing cast of support characters and an interesting, topical story about the dangers of corporations holding power. The artwork is beautiful, casting off all notions of muted colour palettes in favour of the true psychedelia of alien worlds. The music, acting, mechanics, setting, enemy design all range from good to excellent. And yet, it's a struggle to get from point A to point B; each moment spent with the game feels like an enjoyable slice of something but fails to compel me to move forward. A quirky space adventure with a dry sense of humour and the freedom to do mostly whatever I choose should be a slam dunk.
Part of the problem comes down to me. The 'me' inside the game, that is, not the real me. The version of me that I lovingly crafted in the prologue, the one making all those big decisions and riding in the spaceship. The most important person in the universe. At first, I named my hero Jervan Cudgel; the plan was to make him the sort of melee-focused pugilist I had so much fun roleplaying in Fallout: New Vegas many years ago. He would be honest (to his own detriment, if necessary) kind of dumb, and look like the bronzed, curly-haired star of a 1970s pulp sci-fi film. This was the plan, anyway.
None of that matters. The Outer Worlds opens with some remarkably efficient storytelling which lays out a few salient facts: there's a colony called Halcyon where corporations run everything, it sucks, a ship full of colonists got lost, and a wanted terrorist is going to break one of them out to help him with his plan to overthrow the status quo. Like much of the game, this is actually pretty interesting and engaging, but it also puts the main character in a very distant position from the outset. You, the player, are one of said lost colonists. Because you've been in cryogenic stasis for a few decades, you have no idea how anything works on Halcyon, you don't know anyone, you have no contacts and you can barely conceptualise the societal norms that perpetuate this twisted version of our own civilisation. Unfortunately, the overall effect of this framing device is a trending towards apathy. Since none of these people are important to me, and I don't even live here, there's no reason for me to engage with their plight on a personal level. There's a beautiful synergy that happens in games at times, where the player and their avatar have motivations, goals or emotions that sync perfectly with each other. The result of this is usually a more cohesive and natural-feeling game experience, since you can more easily empathise. Unfortunately, The Outer Worlds hops onto this train too early, giving us a character that syncs with the player's state of mind, rather than convincing the audience to synergise with the hero. You currently don't care about Halcyon colony and you have no idea what's going on? Good news, here's some dope who also thinks like that.
When you experience the world a little further, you may find yourself actually caring about what happens there; it is, after all, a well-realised science fiction world, full of likeable characters. But once you do, your avatar is still that dope, with no connection to the world beyond the dialogue trees available, no context for his or her actions, and no reason to pick one decision over another. As I decide to shut down the Saltuna factory on Terra 2, saving the deserters and dooming the loyal factory workers, it's me making the decision I would make as myself; Jervan Cudgel might as well not exist, he has no opinion on the subject.
The main character in Prey (the one from Arkane Studios) enters the world in a similar, baby-like state, unmolested by the complexities of the universe and carrying a big box of Convenient Amnesia. But the very different methods of building the protagonist and the role they need to play in their world make for an interesting contrast. Morgan Yu wakes up to a laboratory in turmoil, with the bodies of people they don't know strewn all over and an infestation of aliens they don't understand. Much like The Outer Worlds, Prey provides its hero with access to various computer terminals, many of which contain bits of world-building or character flavour. However, many of these pieces of correspondence refer to Morgan by name, or are actually addressed to them. Those that aren't can usually be traced to someone on the station who this email version of Morgan Yu interacted with, allowing you to trace their significance back through the chain and connect some dots about who they were to you. Recordings and AI companions speak directly to you, as Morgan, and tell you in no uncertain terms why player and avatar alike should give a lot of damns about everything happening. Family members, angry work colleagues and possible lovers drop in either live or posthumously to offer their opinions and emotions to the main character, cementing the idea that you are very real and vital to whatever happens next.
You could argue, of course, that there are successful stories which lean into the idea of a featureless protagonist shaped only by the player's own choices. All the recent Fallout games do this, birthing you from the door of one vault or another into a wasteland you never knew, or simply giving you a job to do. But Fallout 3 motivates you with the mystery of a missing father, New Vegas has someone try to murder you and bury you in the desert, and someone in Fallout 4 steals your actual baby. Regardless of how well each of these was handled, they all stick some simple, primal idea in the player's head that they can agree with the protagonist on. Revenge, mystery, loss. The Outer Worlds has some very grand ideas about the corrupting influence of money and the value of repairing a broken society, but it makes no attempt to earn the hero's attention on those fronts. If you want me to engage with your universe, I need to be in the shoes of someone worth guiding to that goal, and I have to understand how they work.
The way various mechanics function in the game do it no favours in regard to building a main character with some meat. Everything in Halcyon bends just a little too easily to the will of the player; from persuasion checks to combat encounters, there's an overall sense that The Outer Worlds really wants you to succeed. It is almost cartoonishly easy to lie and steal your way through the game. The overall effect of this freedom is to make the player feel as though they're in a sort of inflatable playground where nobody can get hurt and everything will be the safest kind of fun. You can die, like in most games, but you're psychologically prepared for the inevitable truth: the hero is important and powerful, and they'll be fine. Plus, they don't matter, so it's okay if they do happen to die.
By presenting players with a protagonist without context, The Outer Worlds inadvertently creates a stunted version of Groundhog Day's Phil. Without the motivation to improve themselves, they never have any desire to move out of the consequence-free simulation full of cake and shrink rays. Lacking the self-awareness that eventually crushes Phil Connors, they are unable to see the value of limitations and complicated relationships. They stay in the loop forever, completing meaningless, hedonistic tasks. Nothing ever matters.
So, is this why I can't see myself playing The Outer Worlds to completion? Is the lack of a compelling main character enough to soil a game that is otherwise very accomplished? Maybe. Games are defined by their interactivity, and that interaction is primarily delivered through the player character's perspective. Even if a story isn't literally told by the protagonist, we're invited to frame everything as part of their personal journey. So that journey has to matter, it has to be meaningful even while it allows for the spectrum of player choice. Much like picking a narrator for a novel, choosing a game protagonist has the potential to drastically alter the reading of the story developers want to tell. Dragon Age II is the strange, personal RPG it is because it's about Hawke; Alien: Isolation feels so immediately connected to the Alien mythos because Amanda Ripley is the daughter of Ellen; Oddworld feels desperate and oppressive because we're cast as a slave who could be turned into a popsicle at any moment.
Oddly enough, the one time I felt really in-sync with The Outer Worlds was in a third attempted playthrough as an unrepentantly duplicitous bastard, lying my way from conversation to conversation without a single care for the consequences. Finally, the Stranger and I were on the same page. Nothing mattered.
Building character: The slow burn of Dragon Age II
Dragon Age II has the longest and most in-depth character creation system ever seen in a video game, clocking in at around 30 hours. After the initial, perfunctory decisions about lip colour and combat class, the game quickly allows players to craft their ideal fantasy protagonist over the course of several years. When they're done shaping the soft clay of their unique Hawke into the Champion of Kirkwall they always wanted, the credits roll and the game is over; your quest is complete. Flawless efficiency.
In Origins, the first Dragon Age, BioWare created a universe that was brimming with possibility. Like many other big RPGs, it centered player choice and an ability to affect the world around you. The titular origins were important in setting up where the Grey Warden had been in their life, and what contacts they might already have, but there was a strong focus on the idea that the player had a very powerful role in shaping the destiny of fictional Ferelden. Player decisions were largely external, and also very large: save an entire race of people by risking the safety of another, kill mages to avoid them becoming a danger later, execute the ruler of a nation because you don't like him very much. Dragon Age II instead opts for an inward-looking approach, where the outcome of events is de-emphasised in favour of putting the spotlight on how the main character reacts to narrative moments and the people around them. It's less important what Hawke decided to do with the Qunari than how it shaped his or her view of the world.
This shift in priorities is reflected in the way dialogue functions in the game. Superficially, it's similar to other Dragon Age titles, Mass Effect games and other modern RPGs: the player is given a choice of different responses, all of which either embody a particular emotional response or are purely informational. Diplomatic or helpful responses are friendly and non-confrontational, aggressive or direct responses are generally the opposite, and humorous or charming answers are for when Hawke wants to be sassy. What makes the system in Dragon Age II so interesting is that these responses will slowly warp the mind of the player's Hawke, bending them further towards one of those three personalities. From the very first dialogue choice in the game, a system begins tallying a player's responses and choosing a general tone for Hawke based on those choices. While early in the game, players might find themselves having to pick the sarcastic option themselves, late-game Hawke might offer a witty barb of their own accord.
This has a nominal effect on the overall flow of the narrative (the game will never take away any important choices) but makes a huge difference to the way the main character is perceived by the audience. Rather than being a simple mouthpiece for player choices, or a static face and class decision made in minute one, Hawke becomes a malleable character who is growing and changing as events unfold.
Altering the concept of an RPG to focus on the long-form creation of one character isn't wholly done by mechanical means. Everything in the narrative of Dragon Age II is designed to support the idea that Hawke is the centre of this story. The game opens with a simple and oft-used framing device: the storyteller. Varric Tethras has been captured by the Seekers of Truth, and is being asked about the 'Champion of Kirkwall' by Cassandra. The Seeker wants to know how the Champion started a war between the mages and templars in the city, and Varric—being a bardic sort of chap—is going to tell her in the most roundabout way possible. This framing of the entire game as a story reinforces the mythic idea of a hero with a benevolent hand in matters far beyond their station. Behold the mighty champion, see how their decisions shape the world we live in. Except the reality of the story fails, on purpose, to bear that out; Hawke is no doubt an important figure in the city and present for many of the mad things which occur there, but Varric's story frequently makes it clear that Hawke was often swept up in events beyond their control, and that tensions would have escalated regardless. By presenting the audience with the winking and unreliable narrator of Varric Tethras, it invites the player to question not just the events they witness but the role their 'hero' might even play in them.
So, if the story of Dragon Age II wants us to see that heroes aren't always the most important part of a story, what does it want us to see. If you look at the companions in this game, compared with others in the series, there are some clear differences. Where in Origins and Inquisition, the main character is flanked by powerful, important and driven individuals, Hawke gathers a group of misfits, folks barely holding on to their place in the world. Fenris is a slave, consumed by revenge and despised by most; Merril is an elf cast out of her own clan thanks to her relentless pursuit of forbidden lore; Anders is a mage on the run from everyone. Through the story, the characters form a strong bond with Hawke and are drawn into the plot by that bond, rather than a menacing external threat, like The Blight, or a giant green hole in the sky. While not explicitly stated, it's easy enough to extrapolate that if Hawke had not come to Kirkwall almost every one of her companions would have been killed by their respective obsessions or problems. With this reliance on the player character, the narrative further reinforces the idea that who Hawke is holds more importance than what they do.
And what does Hawke get out of all this peripheral heroism? What do they get as a reward for being the Champion of Kirkwall and offering snarky commentary as magic civil war breaks out? Nothing good. From the moment they arrive in the city, the Hawke family are forced to claw their way back into society, participating in organised crime and generally letting folks step all over their dignity. Where the Grey Warden Hero of Ferelden dies a martyr, or perhaps lives long enough to become a monarch beloved by all, and the Inquisitor becomes a similarly beloved hero, Hawke mainly deals with anger and death. Regardless of the player's choices, one of Hawke's siblings will always die in the first act of the game. The other either dies later, is forced into isolated servitude, or actively joins the enemy to the player's cause. Hawke's mother is kidnapped and cut into pieces, then reassembled like a terrifying maternal zombie.
Hawke provides the player with a sympathetic, broken canvas on which to paint a picture of what they think a champion looks like. With the narrative framed around the character instead of the events they participate in, and with the mechanical tools already in place to allow for shaping the way they behave, players can take an active role in deciding what kind of character they want to build. And, since the narrative is never structured to require heavy involvement from the protagonist, players can feel comfortable tweaking their personality and world view right up to the final scene. Rather than deciding how the character players envision might react, they can have a more loose idea of their behaviours, and be guided moment to moment, leading to a more collaborative and improvisational process, akin to creating a Dungeons & Dragons character.
So who is Hawke? More than most other RPG characters, Hawke is a hero shaped by whoever plays the game. She or he is the sum total of all the decisions made from moment one to the end of the epilogue. And they're always changing, just like a real person.
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