I think I’ve made abundantly clear by now that I’m in full-bore hype mode for the forthcoming Tamriel Rebuilt expansion (which, by the way, is due on the twenty-third of this very month). I admit it’s a little strange to introspect on this from a distance as a majority of gaming media and its public breathlessly await new information on Grand Theft Auto VI. It appears poised to rake in a billion dollars or more during its initial release window in reflection of its status as the world’s single most anticipated media object, while I sit here marinating in similarly breathless anticipation for an update to a mod for a game from 2002. I could hardly give less of a damn about whichever triple-A games are about to come out, and I feel about a thousand years old.

I gotta tell you, reflecting upon my unrestrained excitement for Poison Song has revealed an eerie poignancy under the surface. I’ve been playing, studying, and otherwise consuming video games for almost three decades, and, while my confidence in the medium’s artistic potential has never been higher, my confidence in the industry that commercializes it has reached a nadir of fathomless depth. The march of the gaming industry used to impress and awe my peers and me, regularly hitting massive strides in technological achievement only to surpass itself again multiple times within the same console generation. Now, those achievements are rarer and less impressive, and I see no particular reason to believe the trend will reverse any time soon.

Allow me an indulgent anecdote to illustrate. Remember when Call of Duty made the jump from 1944 to the present day? I sure do — I was twelve years old at the time, squarely in the demographic of impressionable young gamers with whom the shit was designed to resonate most. The first time I played Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare back in 2007, I could tell right away that something significant was happening. Sat around a TV screen in a room filled with other twelve- and thirteen-year-old reprobates, we marveled aloud at the astonishing graphical fidelity and the engrossing verisimilitude behind the game’s simulation of modern combat. It was, from a certain perspective, my cohort’s version of the transition from Wolfenstein 3D to Quake: a dramatic, history-altering enhancement of the gaming experience that was obviously transformative from the first instant it was experienced. Sharing it on a single console via four-player splitscreen (remember when that was a thing?), we jogged around a map whose lifelike rendering more than made up for its dreary, greyish-brown art design, and we fragged one another with weapons just like those we’d seen on television and in the sports departments of rural Walmarts. Even as underachieving, dumbass kids, we could all tell right away that we were watching history unfold with every gout of blood and blast of shrapnel that painted the screen before us.

Point is, there was a time not all that long ago when even a multiplayer-focused shooter could astonish the gaming public. I do feel a tinge of unpleasant irony remembering Call of Duty in such rosy terms — a bunch of us in that room went on to develop unhealthy obsessions with the mind-numbing, emotion-deadening loop of sensory engagement that characterized the multiplayer shooters of the late 2000s and early 2010s, and I happen to believe that the franchise in question quickly devolved from a vanguard of innovation into a catalogue of trite nonsense whose long-term impact is best measured in disappointed video essays. The yearly franchise installments of these practically indistinguishable multiplayer shooters were like a sort of proto-slop, efficient to create and reliably bankable even as they were practically devoid of artistic merit in their own right.

But, while gamers were certainly exploited by design paradigms that engendered emotional dependence on corporate products, it was all a fairly compelling value proposition nonetheless. Games and the hardware they ran on were affordable, of generally good manufacture, and designed with the user’s convenience and satisfaction in mind. The industry was obsessively growth-oriented, but its strategy for achieving that growth was still largely founded upon selling innovation in hardware and in game design. Motion controls, for example: the Wii and its imitators may have long since washed out with the tide, but anybody who was alive and gaming back then surely remembers the boundary-crossing excitement that accompanied it.

Things are different now. The corporations that so naïvely sought infinite growth via graphical advancement and hardware gimmickry now find themselves well beyond the point at which that sort of innovation is realistically bankable. Now, the strategy is founded upon anti-consumer bullshit like gambling mechanics, operant conditioning, and absurdly inflated pricing. To the immense consternation of the suits responsible, cracks are showing even in this strategy as consumers fail to tithe their meager savings at levels great enough to offset the exorbitant costs of modern triple-A development. Now, it appears the industry is flirting with the next desperate, flailing attempt to generate infinite money, this time by conspiring to seize technological sovereignty from the consumer altogether. As the AI industry continues to suck up every last transistor’s worth of surplus memory in service of flexing on the poor, marginalizing all but a privileged handful of emotionless slop-merchants, one can already hear the C-suites hungrily anticipating a permanent future of inaccessibly expensive computing hardware that they can simply rent out to the rest of us. It’ll be like Google Stadia, but significantly worse and also compulsory.

A DIFFERENT APPROACH

With hopes that you’ll pardon my scholastic vernacular, I say “fuck that shit.” Comfortingly, I’m not the only one saying it, and that’s what I wanted to talk about in this installment. Early last week, you see, an opinion piece by PC Gamer’s Morgan Park touched off a minor phenomenon in the sphere of gaming discourse by calling for the community to embrace what Park calls “the great Tech Pause.” A grandiose moniker, to be sure, but the concept is simple and intuitive: rather than just bemoaning our misfortune at having been excluded from the class of rapacious, rent-hungry, slop-deifying cartoon supervillains, we ought instead to “appreciate what’s already in front of us. Embrace your mid PC! Become overly interested in controllers! Buy an emulation handheld! Get into the wonderful world of Linux!”

It’s easy to empathize with Park’s warrants for this argument: a first-rate gaming PC will set you back about seven grand; the Steam Deck has inflated to a thousand-dollar MSRP; and even the supposedly democratizing console market is demanding $650 for a PS5. Even as the affordability of basic necessities becomes a source of anxiety for countless millions of people, the tech industry expects unprecedented remuneration in exchange for goods that are ever less able to live up to their costs. “The mediocrity of the new is so profound,” asserts Park, “that being stuck with ‘just OK’ hardware is increasingly a savvy move… there are enough great games I haven’t played to fill the rest of my days.”

Hardly a panacea, I admit, but one can hardly deny that there’s something delightfully subversive about the idea of simply refusing to participate in the farcical mess that the modern games industry has become. Today, in the latter months of 2026, I think we’re well beyond the point of pretending that the supposedly cutting-edge releases coming out of the modern triple-A production paradigm represent a generational leap in technology, design, or general appeal. GTA VI, having thoroughly saturated the media landscape, may be perceived as an exception in the near term. But if it does, all it proves is that a billion dollars and several thousand staff can produce a massive hit if given over a decade to do so — not exactly a picture of long-term stability, for reasons we’ll discuss more in a bit. On broader analysis, however, the past several years have laid bare the flattening of the technological curve.

That’s the perspective from which I see a meaningful avenue of resistance in embracing a tech pause. My own PC is still eagerly and flawlessly running the same gaming hardware that I installed way back in 2018, and my expansive library of games that were developed with that hardware in mind remains entirely capable of holding my attention and inspiring my imagination. So too do any number of the countless hundreds of newer, worthwhile indie games that, by nature of comparatively subdued presentation, target much more accessible hardware. And that’s before we even approach any discussion of, you know, enjoying the vast corpus of excellent games developed between ten and forty years ago.

If there’s any part of this worth analyzing with a critical eye, it’s the very concept of “mid hardware” itself. My GTX 1080 graphics card, though about a decade old and literally incapable of driving the latest and greatest in ray-traced, DLSS-enabled streamer bait, is still an immensely powerful unit of computing hardware in absolute terms. With what am I really coping when I moan about my inability to replace it? How subversive am I being, really, if I throw up my hands and assert my peace with this supposedly “mid” technology? Am I not doing the big-money industry’s work for it by so denigrating the machinery that was once top-of-the-line by said industry’s own standards? In this day and age, when most of us carry ultra-powerful microprocessors on our persons at all times, what even is mid hardware?

“Mid” is in the eye of the beholder. It’s one thing to convince myself that a graphics card from before the ray-tracing era is ultimately suited to my needs, but even that could be considered ostentatious from a certain perspective. A lot of folks don’t have discrete graphics cards or self-built gaming PCs in the first place, yet have no trouble contenting themselves with lower-spec games that run on the integrated graphics packaged into their CPUs. Hell, even that much represents a certain excess. By way of example, I’ve lately taken a tourist’s interest in the modern 8-bit computing scene. Seriously, have you seen this shit? Folks are building affordable and versatile computing platforms using off-the-shelf microelectronics as if we never left the eighties — projects like the MEGA65 and Commander X16 each host active and enthusiastic communities of über-nerds who, even in 2026, are developing new games and other software for computers of comparable power to machines from four decades ago.

The buck doesn’t stop at hardware specs, either. Consider the games themselves! I mean, look, what massive hits has the triple-A industry produced over the past eighteen months? Assassins Creed: Shadows; Doom: The Dark Ages; 007: First Light… some of these games are good or even great by mainstream reckoning, but which among them represented genuine, user-perceptible innovation in game design1 or even in graphical presentation? And furthermore, which among them was met with pre-release hype, post-release accolades, or the general goodwill of gamers to an extent even remotely comparable to the likes of Silksong, Clair Obscur, or similarly high-profile mega-smashes from the sub-triple-A sectors?

That all said, I suppose I should take a moment to address the elephant in the room. GTA VI will soon arrive to quench the decade-old thirst left behind in the wake of its predecessor, at least for a certain segment of the gaming population. I’m sure the game will rake in as much money as has ever been printed when it releases in November, but that’s not necessarily a portent of an industry in any less dire straits than usual. GTA VI has cost in excess of a billion dollars to develop, requiring a double-length development cycle even by the already staggeringly protracted standards of the modern industry, not to mention the thousands of full-time and contracted developers and management personnel required to bring it to fruition. I think it’s safe to say even now that GTA VI will represent the largest video game launch of all time, and perhaps even the biggest media launch, period.

...but then what? Four-figure headcounts, ten-figure budgets, and decade-long development cycles are self-evidently unsustainable as a strategy for game production going forward. Maybe Rockstar will get right to work on GTA VII or Red Dead Redemption 3 or a billion-dollar, open-world, multiplayer-focused sequel to Bully. But under the current paradigm, that’ll just mean another five or ten years of patiently waiting for the next hype-devouring monstrosity to suck all of the oxygen out of the broader gaming discourse. Who the hell else will step up to fill a billion-dollar vacuum of that magnitude? Bethesda? Maybe, if TES VI showed any signs of life. Microsoft? Perhaps if this were a competition over who could lose the most money in high-level game production. Ubisoft? Please.

And, by the way, what exactly is driving the hype behind GTA VI in the first place? It certainly isn’t the gameplay, of which we’ve still seen virtually nothing at time of writing. I struggle to believe that the fancy-looking graphics alone are responsible, which in any case are only marginally more impressive than Red Dead Redemption eight years ago. Besides, where do you even go after a game like this that requires inaccessibly expensive hardware to drive graphics that represent increasingly diminishing returns on the investment? For as long as the Western triple-A gaming industry continues to obstinately insist on glossy production value over all other concerns, up to and including the quality, playability, and availability of the games themselves, I don’t see how on earth it can escape the gaping pit into which it’s dug itself.

I’ve said this before in an earlier newsletter, but it bears repeating: if computing hardware remains beyond the reach of ordinary consumers while big-budget games continue to be postured as luxury products, there won’t be anybody left to buy the fucking things within a few years’ time. The farce we could be in for defies all common sense. Will EA and Microsoft strike some kind of circular financing arrangement with Tencent to buy up all the millions of copies of games that aren’t being sold to actual consumers? Will they announce the construction of gigawatt-scale datacenters in order to better rent out computing resources to the less fortunate? Will Asha Sharma begin publishing frantic, rambling op-eds about how Game Pass will transform the world and leave the skeptics behind?

I have never had so little confidence in moneyed games production or in the tech industry that undergirds it. I cannot properly express — at least not without swearing quite a bit more — the stodgy mixture of frustration and pity I feel toward the people who are working their asses off to sustain this flagrantly unsustainable status-quo. And, whenever it does eventually come crashing down, I won’t soon forget the faces responsible for getting us to this point, not least because I expect they’ll face next to no accountability from their partners in parasitism.

Fortunately, I do still have some confidence in gamers themselves. As time goes on and the industry’s growing desperation manifests in increasingly brazen attempts to separate suckers from their money, I see a growing contingent of consumers who are unwilling to tolerate being openly disrespected as gullible fools. Practically anywhere you look, gamers dedicated to preserving and propagating game design in its capacity as an artform are growing in number and are forming communities around their shared passions. The aforementioned 8-bit computer scene is one such community, and I might also submit the groups who’ve dedicated themselves to recompiling fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-generation games for modern hardware. And, of course, I keep singing the praises of the volunteers developing Tamriel Rebuilt and will continue to do so until the White House lawn bears golden monuments cast in their images. The Powers that Be may take my DDR5 RAM kits and my RTX-enabled GPUs, but they’ll have to wrench Morrowind from my cold, dead fingers.

Thanks so much for reading to the end! What do you make of this “Tech Pause” concept? Do you find yourself taking active and deliberate steps to resist the games industry’s ongoing enshittification? I want to hear all about it — tell me in the comments below.

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Well, the hardware crisis continues unabated and the video game industry exhibits the tact and stability of Weimar Germany, but at least fans of Western-style open-world RPGs are in for some major windfalls in the near term. Thanks to Xbox’s sudden turn from disengaged, bureaucratic management of its subsidiaries to taskmaster-like domination of those subsidiaries’ valuable IP, we now have first-party confirmation of a new, Obsidian-developed Fallout game, alongside modern remakes of Fallouts 3 and New Vegas. They’re also doing something with Fallout 76 and Fallout Shelter, which I’m sure will be deeply gratifying to whichever invisible cadre of gamers still boots those up every day.

Of course, the ongoing shortage of Taiwanese silicon and the corporate industry’s ceaseless avarice forces many of us to question whether or not we’ll actually get to play any of the fucking things. My own graphics hardware dates back to around the destruction of the Second Temple, and I’m not exactly holding my breath for a brand-new Fallout RPG that’ll run on it. And, with the job market like it is, I don’t anticipate an upgrade becoming fiscally tenable any time soon. And even if I suddenly won the lottery and could replace my rig with a top-of-the-line GPU supercluster, this is Bethesda we’re talking about, and it’d still be a few weeks before the modders came through to fix the release version’s performance. As usual, I’m ushered into the dank refuge of low- and no-budget projects made by independent creatives.

Fortunately for us deprived wretches, that scene also promises marvels to come. At time of writing, the release of Tamriel Rebuilt’s Poison Song expansion is, according to project leadership, “imminent.” Tamriel Rebuilt, in case you’re new around here, is a modding project as old as Morrowind itself whose central remit is to implement the entire landmass of the titular province as the original developers once intended. The team behind TR releases major expansions every year or so, each with dozens if not hundreds of hours of new gameplay, and it’s all done as a passion project whose result is entirely free to the end-user. I first brought up this latest expansion several months ago in a post about how little I trust modern Bethesda around Morrowind,1 and the hype has built reliably ever since. I can’t remember the last time I was quite so excited for a mod to update, and it seems I’m not alone — in the wake of last year’s excellent Grasping Fortune expansion, about which I effusively gushed last year, there’s a positively ravenous appetite among Morrowboomers2 for TR’s next major release.

It’s been a long time coming, too. Poison Song was first teased back in October of last year, some five months after the release of Grasping Fortune. It promises a bevy of features, some of which have been eagerly anticipated for the better part of twenty years. Of particular note is the introduction of House Indoril and the Ordinators as joinable factions, a sentence I know will electrify Morrowind veterans and puzzle everyone else. No matter — our subject for this week is more general and accessible.

This week, in anticipation of Poison Song once again extending the life of everyone’s favorite millennial RPG, I thought it’d be nice to reflect on the approach I take toward roleplaying in singleplayer games. I have video games particularly in mind, of course, but I’ll note here that pretty much everything I describe below maps neatly onto my approach for singleplayer pen-and-paper roleplaying — I’ve been meaning to write about the latter for quite some time, so expect to hear about it before long.

I should also note that the process I’m about to describe applies specifically to RPGs in which you’re expected to create a custom character who isn’t already well defined by the game’s fiction. There are plenty of RPGs that have you embody an existing, already developed character — The Witcher, Planescape: Torment, practically every BioWare RPG, etc., etc. — that present great roleplaying opportunities of their own, but it’s tricky to cross-apply this methodology to them. Perhaps I’ll write about roleplaying a predefined character some other time.

Now, then:

PRE-GAME

It starts with the mechanical foundation of the playthrough, i.e., the playstyle. I almost always decide in advance how I intend to build a character, and the extent to which I commit to an early plan is proportional to how tightly the game couples character-building with gameplay progression. For example, when I start a new playthrough of New Vegas, I pick a single weapon skill to focus on in the early game, but don’t worry too much about it because I’ll invariably pick up so many superfluous skill points that almost every skill will approach its maximum value by the third act. By contrast, if I’m playing a game like Underrail that enthusiastically punishes suboptimal characters, I’ll decide on more or less the entire build in advance and rigidly stick to it.

But even for titles where early-game build choices don’t constrain later-game decisions in any irreversible manner,3 I always put at least some thought into this. The reason is that the set of things at which a character is skilled and the background that led to them being so skilled is one of the most fundamental aspects of a custom RPG protagonist’s identity. This, I believe, is a large part of why Western fantasy RPGs have tended to converge on the warrior/mage/rogue trichotomy: representing skills and background as a discrete profession is a convenient, shorthand means of projecting identity onto a character, and even the most unimaginative philistine can fantasize about those three in particular.

With that handled, I consider how my character came to arrive in the game world and what motivates them once they’ve arrived. And, again, different RPGs can make this anywhere between trivial and impossible depending on their own story contexts. It’s no coincidence, for example, that practically every Elder Scrolls game begins with your character languishing in state custody: you need accept as given only that your character was arrested, and it’s up to you to decide why that happened and whether or not it was just. Some RPGs make this very difficult, and one just has to cope. In Fallout 3, for example, any fantasy will have to reckon with the fact that every character spends almost their entire youth in Vault 101 under Liam Neeson’s emotionally distant guardianship. Others — the likes of Kenshi and Mount & Blade come to mind — are instead superlatively open-ended and so permit almost any conceivable background (so long as it’s post-apocalyptic or medieval in nature, respectively).

Finally, I decide on my character’s disposition toward the game’s main quest. My approach to this is wildly variable, depending on the game in question. In Morrowind, particularly with Tamriel Rebuilt installed, I almost universally ignore the main quest and leave Vvardenfell to its gruesome fate as I depart Seyda Neen middle fingers raised. In games whose narratives are highly main-quest-driven, e.g., New Vegas, I instead decide on how attached my character is to the main quest’s impetus and play accordingly: in some playthroughs, my Courier is laser-focused on revenge and beelines to the Strip in order to execute Benny in broad daylight, with as many witnesses as possible; in others, Courier 6 doesn’t hold too big a grudge and spends the game’s first fifteen hours gallivanting around the southern reaches of the map in search of fat loot. Finally, in games with no main quest whatsoever (again, Kenshi and Mount & Blade are my index examples), I extend the character fantasy to come up with near- and medium-term goals4 that motivate my character in the main quest’s stead.

IN-GAME

Once the setup is complete and the playthrough begun, it’s all about applying the decisions I’ve made about my character to my engagement with the game world. Some of this is a fairly straightforward matter of realizing the build in gameplay, e.g., through gathering equipment and considering faction membership. If I’m playing Morrowind as a battlemage, for example, I’ll find some dope-looking heavy armor and join the mage’s guild. Decisions like these are typically no-brainers, because they’re mechanically incentivized by the character build — in Morrowind, for example, I’ll immediately try to acquire whichever weapon matches my highest weapon skill, because doing otherwise will result in my impotently swinging at the empty space just in front of a mudcrab for minutes at a time.

But there are many aspects of gameplay intrinsic to RPG design that lack any kind of mechanical enforcement of this nature, and that’s where things start to get more creatively fulfilling and more intellectually challenging. Few RPGs ever made5 have represented abstract concepts like characters’ personalities as whole-ass gameplay systems, so the act of embodying your character as a person instead of just a cipher for some archetypal profession is done all but entirely within your own imagination. This can have some important utility that I’ll try to illustrate with an example.

Consider the first ten minutes of Morrowind, in which you’re released from custody and sent through the local Customs & Excise office before you’re set loose into the game world. One thing you can do pretty much right away — and which plenty of Morrowind veterans recommend — is to ransack the building, stealing everything that isn’t nailed down. Among the loot to be had for so doing is an expensive limeware platter that you can hock for a big early-game infusion of cash, and a key to a warehouse that contains vast amounts of valuable narcotics and materiel. Burglarizing this apparatus of the state is, by any objective measure, the “optimal” way to start a game of Morrowind. So why doesn’t everyone do it?

WHY BOTHER?

Well, because only a very particular archetype of protagonist would even consider something so suicidally risky6 in the first minutes after being released from custody.

Now, if you actually happen to be playing that archetype, i.e., the world’s most recklessly bold kleptomaniac, then robbing your erstwhile captors evolves from cheesy powergaming into a genuine expression of your protagonist’s agency. Of course, if you’re playing such a thief and then spend your ill-gotten gains on alchemy training and potion ingredients so that you can artificially boost your non-rogueish skills, you’ll be right back in cheesy powergaming territory. Embodying your character in a believable, narratively satisfying manner is a continuous process that takes commitment, creativity, and a little bit of discipline. But for my money, doing so pays dividends that are more than worth what little cognitive burden it may add to the experience.

What might those be? Above all, it’s a way of translating the principles of effective storytelling into the gameplay experience. The best RPGs — in my opinion, at least — are those that give their players the necessary latitude to create memorable sequences in gameplay and to string those sequences together into a unique and personal story. This is probably the single most important reason that I’m still playing the likes of Fallout: New Vegas and Morrowind even sixteen and twenty-four years after their original releases: they construct compelling and versatile opportunities for roleplaying atop a foundation of rich setting design, and trust their players to make the most of it all without railroading them into any particular approach. I suspect this is also a major reason behind the continued strength and enthusiasm of these older games’ respective modding communities, whose memberships naturally select for creativity and devotion to roleplaying.

Beyond that, it simply makes for a more stimulating and memorable gameplay experience. I find that as I get older, I increasingly favor gaming experiences that make me think and feel something, and commensurately disfavor games that tend to soothe and numb. There can be no doubt that playing an RPG with a heavily optimized and extremely powerful character lends itself to a soothing and numbing experience, and it can be fun in its own right, but it’s just not what I’m after nowadays. It’s so much more stimulating and memorable to struggle against adversity in pursuit of a goal, even when my own self-imposed restrictions are the source of that struggle and my own whim the source of that goal.

I’m very curious to hear about how you prefer to approach the act of roleplaying in your RPGs, and particularly so if your approach is considerably different from mine. Part of the beauty of the medium is how different people can enjoy similarly fulfilling experiences from wildly different approaches to a given game, and I imagine there’s much to be learned from your perspectives on the matter. Meanwhile, my fingers remain crossed for a Poison Song release date any moment now, and you can bet I’ll have a lot to say about it when we have it before us.

Thanks for reading to the end! How do you approach roleplaying in singleplayer RPGs? Do you prefer games that mechanically incentivize it, or do you want your RPGs as open-ended as possible? What’s most important to your own process? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll see ya next week.

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There, mission accomplished. I signed up for a Game Jam, slapped together a halfway-presentable hack-job of a primary gameplay loop, and submitted it with a few hours to spare. It may be a patchwork agglomeration of royalty-free assets, and the code may be more poorly engineered than the Deepwater Horizon, but it’s finished and playable. It’s called Orbital Freefall 2037, and you can play it right from your browser on itch.io if you want. Fret not about wasting too much of your time — you’ll get the complete experience in about three minutes, or less if you skip the intro.

The event in which I participated was the peculiarly titled Gwueble Jam 2026, named for a portmanteau of its two primary facilitators.1 Its main theme was the phrase “Slow Burn,” and its optional, secondary theme was the word “chair.” These were revealed during a livestream on the Sunday before last — I was at a community theater production of 1776 at the time, learned about the theme during the intermission, and subsequently tuned out Edward Rutledge’s critique of Northern hypocrisy as I began subconsciously brainstorming.

When all was said and done this past Sunday, my submission was one of 185 total entries. There are material prizes on offer for the top-five placers, and results will be announced after the voting period ends this Friday. I’ve played enough of the other entrants’ work by now to lose all but an iota of hope of a top-five finish, but I learned even more than I expected and it was surprisingly enjoyable. I want to mention up top that I’m frankly awestruck by how kind and supportive the strangers on itch.io turn out to be. The direct feedback I’ve received thus far has been almost effusively praiseful, and there’s scarcely a trace of negativity to be found anywhere near this event. I’m kicking myself for not having tried this sooner, and I’m already looking ahead to some Jams I might try out in August.

But let’s not hitch the cart too far ahead of the horse. This week’s edition is a follow-up to last week’s outsider analysis of Game Jams, and we’ll move from theorizing to actual reflection. Final judgements are still to come, so all that remains for now is to extract some worthwhile takeaways from the experience. I’ll also try to play another few dozen video games in the next thirty hours,2 but that shouldn’t be a problem as long as I stay so intractably unemployed.

Here’s the plan: I’m going to tell you about my game, such as it is, and about the lessons I learned from piecing it together from spaghetti-code and phlegm over about a dozen working hours. I’ll close by drawing your attention to some of the more impressive projects I happened to play during the rating period thus far. Let’s begin, then, with a segment I like to call…

WHAT I LEARNED FROM HASTILY DEVELOPING A GAME ABOUT PLUMMETING FROM ORBIT

We might as well start with the title. After finishing the end-game sequence and declaring the project good enough for government work, I spent around fifteen minutes trying and failing to come up with a witty pun to use as a title. In lieu thereof, I settled on Orbital Freefall 2037, a matter-of-fact moniker that communicates the place, manner, and time of the game’s sole mechanic. For those of you without the time or patience to try it for yourself, here’s a quick look at what twelve hours of hasty effort bought me:

The game’s premise, expounded upon in the intro sequence whose implementation pissed away an hour of my precious time, is simple: a decade into the future, near space is polluted with the wreckage of orbital data-center satellites launched by tweaking billionaires made overconfident by pharmaceutical abuse. When your space station’s critical systems are destroyed by a hunk of space-crap, the crew elects you to pilot a jury-rigged landing vehicle back to the planet’s surface to summon help. The objective is to fall from low earth orbit to the ground without crashing into debris, and you navigate around it all by means of shifting your weight and selectively firing a rocket booster. The challenge is in dodging obstacles without overusing your engine, lest you run out of fuel and plunge into the ground at terminal velocity. If instead you succeed in making it to the ground, you’re rewarded with a vapid “You Win” message that stands in for the elaborate celebration I had vaguely imagined.

I’ll leave it up to individual players to judge for themselves whether or not OF2037 earns its sale price of nothing. My own verdict: I mean, it’s okay. I’d be pissed off if I’d paid money for it on Steam, but it would’ve kept me locked in for five or ten minutes if I’d found it on addictinggames.com back in 2007. That feeling alone is a surprisingly gratifying reward for my effort.

Gratification aside, here’s a list of my other principle takeaways.

1. JUST DO IT

You know, despite my towering intellect, ravishingly handsome features, and world-historical degree of unpretentious humility, I’ve never been all that confident of a creative. I’d been considering joining a Game Jam for months before actually doing so the other week, excusing myself each time on some tenuous basis that made it easy to pretend I was being responsible rather than craven. And, a few times over this past week, I slipped to nadirs of faith and hesitated about even bothering to submit my work.

But I’m damn glad I did. For one thing, my game — though mechanically insipid and thematically underrealized — at the very least holds a candle to the best work of my co-participants, and that’s considerably better than I expected for my first-ever attempt at releasing a game. For another, I came tantalizingly close to a prize-worthy end product. Had I joined a team or at least committed myself more thoroughly, I could’ve extracted a few dollars of reward money from the arrangement.

2. FOCUS ON THE PRIMARY GAMEPLAY LOOP

Alright, let’s very quickly recap: a primary gameplay loop is the moment-to-moment procedure of interfacing with a game as a player, independent of whatever that procedure is building or progressing towards. Examples: in Pac-Man, the primary loop is eating pellets while avoiding ghosts; in Super Mario Bros., it’s moving between platforms toward the right-most extent of the level; in League of Legends, it’s reading ethnic slurs in the chat window. You get the idea.

“Focus on primary gameplay” is extremely common advice for game-dev neophytes, and it’s only now that I can intuitively and viscerally understand why that should be. As it turns out, there’s a huge temptation, even very early on, to commit time and resources to polishing. Once I had an idea for a gameplay mechanic, it only took twenty or thirty minutes to prototype a character controller and an environment. Almost immediately thereafter, I started to get sidetracked with UI design, animations, and even a goddamn narrative background.

Of course, when you get down to brass tacks, these are all polish-related set-dressing as far as game design is concerned. And, although polish is certainly a crucial, unignorable aspect in presenting not only video games but indeed almost any media object, one really needs a smooth and structurally sound surface before one can polish with any mind toward improving the finished product. As I mentioned above, I spent around an hour putting together an intro sequence that, while vaguely amusing and decently effective at injecting my authorial voice into the project, adds practically nothing whatsoever to the overall experience. It’s time I could more profitably have spent on almost anything else. An actual ending, for example, instead of the sexless “you win” message that appears if you make it to ground-level. Point is, you really oughta finish baking the cake before you try to frost the damn thing.

3. THE BARRIER TO ENTRY IS LYING FLUSH WITH THE GROUND

At its highest and most professional echelons, game development remains a very challenging and intellectually strenuous pursuit. Of course, the same could be said of any kind of skilled work whatsoever. But for those of us getting in at the ground floor as hobbyists, it turns out to be remarkably accessible, and we have the steady march of technology to thank for this. Gone are the days when game-dev required an intimate knowledge of computer architecture and mathematics — any modern engine can take care of the gritty details of interfacing with hardware or computing matrix transformations, requiring little more than creativity and motivation of the user.

Nowadays, as the power and availability3 of computing hardware have increased nearly to the point of diminishing returns, game development has never required less domain expertise nor been more forgiving of cognitive blindspots. The proof is in the games themselves. As a personal example: at least one entry I played from this Jam was made in a drag-and-drop game engine designed for young people first encountering computer programming. As a broader example: Toby Fox’s Undertale, one of the most celebrated indie games of the 2010s, is said to implement all of its character dialogue using a switch statement with over a thousand cases.4 This all makes me feel awfully foolish for doubting my own abilities, especially given that I have actual, transferable skills as a one-time professional software engineer.

Meanwhile, my own choice of game engine — that is, Godot 4.7 — made trivial many of the tasks that I was dreading until it actually came time to deal with them. Exporting a browser-playable build of my finished game almost felt like cheating: I clicked a button to automatically download an HTML5 export template, and my whole project was transcoded to a fully playable WebAssembly build in less than a second. It’s similarly trivial to make native builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and it all gives me reason to hold out hope for the platform-independent land of milk and honey toward which gaming advances in fits and starts.

4. GAME ASSETS ARE BASICALLY POST-SCARCITY

Relatedly, I’m only now beginning to truly appreciate the overwhelming availability of royalty-free assets5 available on the Internet. I must have spent at least a couple of hours just browsing OpenGameArt.org for sprites and background graphics, and could’ve spent quite a lot more had I not barely managed to refocus on the objective before me — it’s quite fun in its own right. OGA is just one among dozens of resources for free or extremely low-cost game assets of premium quality, and I consider it no exaggeration to say that one could build a career on releasing games that thoughtfully curate and flip these sorts of open assets.6 I suppose there are probably loads of indie devs doing exactly that, and I just haven’t clocked it before on account of how professional a result one can achieve by doing so.

Almost every last art asset in my project was made by someone else (and, of course, duly credited on the game’s page). Of those, around half were released straight into the public domain with absolutely no stipulations on their use, and the rest under highly permissive Creative Commons licenses that asked only for attribution.

And, before I move on from the subject, thank God for Kevin MacLeod.7 If even ten percent of us were as publicly minded as him, there would be no strife or conflict anywhere on the planet. Failing that, at least I was able to do justice to a track of his that I selected as background music.

Alright, that just about covers it. Final reflections: this was a damn good time, I created and released a technically finished game of which I’m somewhat proud, and I thoroughly recommend Game-Jamming to any of you reading who’ve ever considered it.

There are definitely a lot of things I’d have done differently, given a second chance. Join a team, for one — I decided not to because I knew I’d have a busy week and didn’t want to risk letting anyone down, but I think another few brains would’ve dramatically raised the ceiling of quality and even put me in contention for a podium-finish. Would’ve liked to provide some closure for my players, too — OF2037 makes a decent first impression, but a shit-awful last impression on account of how hard I rushed the ending. Lessons learned for next time, and I suspect said next time won’t be long from now.

Finally, let me leave you with a few other submissions from this Jam that are definitely worth your time if you’ve got a few minutes to kill:

• CHAIRSONIST, which features what I believe to be a totally original gameplay mechanic in directing light through a lens to burn a target

• Burn in Hell, the first game I’ve played since 2012’s NeverDead to feature ripping off your own head as a primary mechanic

• The Hot Seat!, a nifty platformer with a unique movement mechanic, an intriguing premise, and high production value up to and including voice acting

I sure do appreciate your joining us for this detour from The Spieler’s usual programming, and I hope you learned a thing or two along with me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got another few dozen games to rate.

Thanks for reading to the end! With the Jam over and my schedule back to its baseline level of inactivity, we’ll return to our standard fare next week. If you end up playing my submission, I welcome your constructive feedback and your sardonic piss-takes in the comments. I’ll see ya next week.

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Happy Wednesday, friends! Or, Thursday, perhaps. At time of writing, I’m not entirely sure when I’ll get this one out. It’ll have to be a shorter installment this week, since I’m busier than I’ve been in awhile. On top of a nice bit of contract work that fell into my lap, I’ve got a third-round job interview this week that I should recently have completed by the time this lands in your inbox. And, late last week, before I’d committed to either of the above, I decided to fuck around and sign up for a Game Jam. My submission is due on Sunday, and I have every intention of pulling through even though these other commitments (and, indeed, this newsletter you’re now reading) conspire to overwhelm my schedule. I take solace in scripture: though God giveth our burdens, He giveth also our shoulders. And caffeine, and prescription stimulants.

If you know anything about me — most pressingly, that I’m a lapsed software engineer with a consuming passion for the art of game design — then you probably won’t be surprised by my decision to go through with entering a Game Jam. I’ve entertained an interest in practicing game-dev for nearly as long as I’ve studied it, going all the way back to hacking together worthless, unplayable, culture-polluting Flash games for Newgrounds at the age of ten. And, ever since I decided to extricate myself from the pestilent farce of the modern software industry, I’ve been in search of a way to exercise my coding muscles other than endlessly configuring and reconfiguring my Linux workflows. Besides, I hear there’s community and fulfillment to be found in Game Jams, and I’d quite like to see the extent of it for myself.

As I write, I have a pretty good concept and less than a week to realize it on my own. I have absolutely no idea whether I’ll even succeed in submitting anything, much less a game that could stand out among several dozen other submissions, but I expect I’ll learn a lot regardless and that it’ll provide worthwhile subject matter for next week’s installment. I’ll plan on telling you more about this particular Jam and my own experience with it then. For now, using what little free time I can steal between collating forms and buttering up hiring managers, I wanted to talk about how the rapidly growing popularity of Game Jams reflects broader changes in how games are made and enjoyed. This ought to have particular resonance in light of the professional games industry’s many, many PR tribulations of late, and we may even be able to extrapolate into broader consequences for game development as a profession.

Thanks in advance for tolerating my unusual brevity this week — I’ll do my best to make up for it in the next one, where I’ll plan on sharing how the Jam went and how my own work stacked up to the other submissions. And, assuming I succeed in submitting something I’m even remotely proud of, I’ll drop a link to the Itch.io page so that interested readers can have a go for themselves. Now, then:

ON GAME JAMS

I suppose we’d better start by defining “Game Jam” for those of you beyond reach of the peculiar institution. The fundamental idea of a Game Jam is that you design and develop a video game — ideally from scratch1 — over a relatively short period of time.2 Some Jams are for solo developers, others allow for teams of various sizes. Almost all feature some kind of theme around which submissions are meant to focus, thereby demanding creative effort of the participants and rendering it difficult to gain an unfair advantage by preparing in advance. Submissions are often judged by the participants themselves, who play and rate everyone else’s submissions (or as many as they can) according to a rubric. Prizes are typically available for the highest performers — the Jam I’m doing is a smaller one with a $150 cash prize for the winner, but larger Jams with corporate sponsors may award four- and even five-figure prizes.

The point, above all, is to develop a game under circumstances that encourage creativity, innovation, and outside-the-box thinking, and to do so for an audience of interested peers rather than a commercial audience. The effect is to emphasize the qualities of game design conducive to artistic expression, and to deemphasize those that get in the way. It engenders community among those who participate, and the simple addition of material incentives (however small) encourage everyone to try their best and to push the medium forward in so doing. They can also build lasting connections between creators of different backgrounds and aptitudes — even with no programming ability whatsoever, one could still play a crucial role in a Game Jam by lending one’s other artistic talents to a larger team. It’s no surprise that these things are increasingly popular among nerds with a little bit of free time.

What may surprise, though, is the extent of that increasing popularity:

Given the enormous breadth of options, it can fairly be said that there’s a Game Jam suited to just about anyone at any stage of their creative journey, and at almost any time of year. Scrutinize the graphic above, and you’ll pick out a handful with fewer than ten participants — those might be good for wetting one’s whistle in a low-stakes format. Contrast, say, the Game Maker’s Toolkit Game Jam, which is just beginning at time of publication and has some thirty-thousand registered participants. And, of course, one can find everything in between.

There are Game Jams suited to all sorts of creatives, and they’re going on more or less continuously. There are indeed some independent creators who participate in a Game Jam at almost all times, moving from one to the next, racking up connections, prestige, and prize money. I suspect it’s even possible to make a modest living on nothing but Game Jams if one were dedicated and skilled enough. But, of course, anyone who regularly wins Game Jams is well positioned to find commercial success as a full-time developer. Plus, if you happen you put together a submission of particularly high quality and promise, you might well build upon it and release it as a full product3 — by way of example, a recent promotional video on YouTube from Game Maker’s Toolkit listed a hundred Steam games that began as submissions to their yearly Jam.

So, Game Jams are as popular as the polio vaccine, and for good reason. What can we infer about the changing tenor of professional game development? I have three thoughts to share.

First, we’re witnessing a huge and rapidly expanding concentration of talent in the industry’s extraprofessional sphere, i.e., among creatives who are not actively employed by development studios. The registration figures for the abovementioned GMTK Jam alone equal something like 5%–10% of the games industry’s entire professional workforce,4 and that’s just a single operation. One can’t help but suspect that, as the professional industry continues to lay off personnel in their thousands with as much care as you’d sweep dust under a rug, those personnel will have sudden gluts of free time and may well find their way into Game Jams.

Second, Game Jams have become something approaching a de-facto entry point into the games industry for a wide swath of interested parties. It used to be that you’d get your foot in the door of professional game development through scholastic achievement and/or by distinguishing yourself on high-profile projects. But, as several thousand recently jobless folks will tell you, hard work and acumen no longer guarantee job security in this punished, Sisyphean industry. If there can be any such guarantee, it comes from building useful connections and a personal reputation that can shield one against the industry’s cruelest ravages. But it’s certainly not limited to people already adjacent to the professional industry: those without the robust academic backgrounds that traditionally lead to industry employment are an obvious cohort, as are professionals from other industries with enduring interests in the field (e.g., yours truly). Exemplary performance in a high-profile Game Jam is a laudable inclusion on a CV. It’s also a fairly reliable means of building and courting an audience, particularly if one lacks the wherewithal for a traditional marketing campaign.

Finally, moneyed interests are taking notice of Game Jams and their increasing popularity, with many implications both promising and foreboding. It won’t surprise you to hear that these events, which can draw the attention of thousands while occasionally producing significant commercial successes, have attracted the attention of sponsors and advertisers galore. Some of these, such as e-learning platforms, asset stores, and indie publishers, are innocent enough and seem like natural fits for events that seek to elevate the potential of promising, early-career game devs. Others, like advertising platforms and AI startups, seem worthy of reasonable suspicion. It’s trivial to imagine a medium-term future in which the highest-profile Game Jams are ludicrously overproduced spectacles awash in corporate lucre, utterly indifferent to the creative spirit that inspired the earliest Jams. Or, more optimistically, one can imagine Game Jams producing a handful of surprise mega-hits that draw the curiosity of major industry decision-makers. Might they then reevaluate their decade-old strategy of releasing creatively emaciated, trend-following horseshit that disappoints the buying public after six- or eight-year development cycles?

I mean, probably not. This is the modern games industry we’re talking about, after all. But if there’s one central conceit I’d like you to take away from all this, it’s that the development, distribution, and enjoyment of games can thrive well beyond the rigid, imperial confines of the contemporary C-suite and its perverse structure of incentives. There’s hope for us yet, and it’s to be found in its greatest concentration among grassroots initiatives like Game Jams.

Thanks for reading to the end! Again, I appreciate your patience with this more brief and off-the-cuff installment. I should get my schedule back under control in no time, and I’ll be delighted to share the details of my smashing success or humiliating failure after completing my inaugural Game Jam this weekend. In the meantime, I’d be delighted to hear about your own experiences with Jams or about any great games you’ve discovered from them — tell me about it all in the comments, and I’ll see ya next week.

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Working in high-level game development these days must feel like working in London during the Blitz. I’m not going to bother recapping the McCarthyesque bloodbath for which Xbox became responsible earlier this month, gut-wrenching as it is — I’ll limit myself to recapping the damage to our subject for this week, i.e., Obsidian Entertainment. In addition to losing somewhere between sixty and seventy members of its 285-person staff to this latest purge, an in-development sequel to last year’s Avowed has been cancelled. So too have a pair of unannounced projects.

But as any long-time reader of The Spieler will by now have guessed, by far the most interesting news from my perspective is the sudden announcement that Obsidian Entertainment will develop a brand-new Fallout game in lieu of its previous assignments. As is known to any remotely engaged student of modern gaming history, Obsidian is the studio responsible for developing Fallout: New Vegas, a triumph of the artform and one of the greatest games ever made in spite of a severely truncated development timeline and treatment by its parent companies bordering on outright abuse.

Even more eyebrow-raising is the complementary news that Joshua Sawyer has been tapped as the game’s director. Alongside many other important credits on which we’ll shortly reminisce, Sawyer was the Director and Lead Designer on New Vegas back in 2010. Having previously stated in no uncertain terms that he’d return to direct a Fallout game if and only if he were afforded substantial creative latitude free of undue constraints, the news of his elevation on this project is just about worth a shred of cautious optimism. So is the realization that a few other greybeards from Interplay and Black Isle1 have — apparently by coincidence — found their way back to full-time employment at Obsidian just in time for this project’s announcement.

It’s the craziest shit, you know. Had you told me just a year ago that Obsidian was developing a new Fallout game with Josh Sawyer at the helm and a murderer’s row of franchise royalty waiting in the wings, I’d probably have worked myself into an absolute lather of hype. But now, in 2026, these developments reach our ears amid what must be the darkest period through which the games industry has suffered since 1983 at the least. Among those of us who make a habit of watching the industry, any morsel of hype is inevitably tempered by the knowledge that high-level game design has become a stinking, bloodstained, egregiously mismanaged abattoir of professional fortunes and consumer goodwill. I want so badly to feel excited and energized by the prospect of a new, Obsidian-developed Fallout RPG, but much stands in the way of that excitement. We may as well try to make sense of it.

This week, we’re discussing the bizarre contradiction upon which this ostensibly forthcoming Fallout game is founded, to wit: even as no studio or team is better positioned to nail this project, one can scarcely even contrive a more unsuitable corporate environment in which its development is to take place. There’s certainly room for optimism among those who aren’t yet comprehensively beaten down by the gaming establishment, but sober-minded realism is called for. Over the rest of this installment, I’ll try to figure out precisely how to balance it.

I: DEVELOPMENT IS IN THE BEST POSSIBLE HANDS

Let me quickly explain my priors. There currently exist four full-3D, first-person RPGs bearing the Fallout moniker — 3 (2008), New Vegas (2010), 4 (2015), and 76 (2018) — and I’m of the marginally controversial opinion that only New Vegas among them is a great game. The others certainly have redeeming qualities (even 76), but FNV is a singular work of genius when put up for direct comparison with its siblings in the franchise. There were many reasons for that greatness, but all of them essentially boil down to the creativity and professionalism of the team at Obsidian, and the commensurately uncommon tolerance for risk that gave that creativity and professionalism room to maneuver.

But all the creativity in the world is worth little without a vision through which to channel it, and so it’s fortunate that New Vegas had a visionary at its helm of Josh Sawyer’s caliber. Sawyer’s career spans the breadth of this millennium, beginning with a Design credit on 2000’s Icewind Dale.2 He was elevated to Lead Designer for that game’s 2002 sequel and for 2006’s Neverwinter Nights 2, thereby cementing himself as one of the more storied and important figures in modern CRPG history. In between, he was Lead Designer on Fallout 3. Not the Bethesda version, mind you — he was in charge of Black Isle’s planned sequel to Fallout 2 until its principal figures left the moribund studio to form the very Obsidian Entertainment that now appears destined to return to the property. It’s no surprise, then, that Sawyer enthusiastically accepted CEO Feargus Urquhart’s offer to direct the Fallout spin-off that Bethesda offered his team in 2007.3

What most excites me about Sawyer’s being tapped to direct this forthcoming Fallout game is his demonstrable passion for New Vegas. That he was a capable and dedicated steward of its development is obvious enough from the quality of the finished product.4 No less impressive is that he continued to support the game on his own time after it was released: if you’ve never played New Vegas with his famous rebalancing mod, popularly known as jsawyer.esp, I urge you to install it for your next playthrough.5 It makes an enormous number of changes to the game’s balance and progression, producing a far more mature, challenging, and systems-driven experience than release version could deliver. Consider how uncommon it is for directors of high-profile, triple-A game releases to personally support their games post-launch — consider what dedication would inspire such a thing, and be therefore grateful for Josh Sawyer’s directing this new game.

But Sawyer isn’t the whole story. Or, at least, I strongly assume he’s not the whole story, because seemingly unrelated circumstances have conspired over the years to bring Black Isle’s Fallout figureheads back to Obsidian as full-time employees. Some of the most notable are:

• The aforementioned Feargus Urquhart, who was president of Black Isle before becoming CEO of Obsidian in time for New Vegas’s development

• Leonard Boyarsky, art director and lead artist on Fallout 1 and arguably the foremost progenitor of the franchise’s legend-making aesthetic — he’s now a key player at Obsidian, having recently co-directed both of the Outer Worlds games

• John Gonzalez, Lead Creative Designer and Writer for New Vegas, responsible for almost all of that game’s main plot and its most memorable characters — after writing Horizon: Zero Dawn and its sequel, he announced his return to Obsidian in early 2025

• And, last but by no means least, Tim Cain. Credited as producer, lead programmer, and original designer of Fallout 1, and arguably the single most important creative voice in the franchise’s history, he came out of retirement and returned to Obsidian late last year6

Since Xbox is now evidently calling the shots with regard to the studio’s production schedule, it seems only logical that these folks will have at least some involvement with the new Fallout game. I suppose it’s possible that they’ll keep their distance in order to work on their other projects (which would be an ominous sign for Fallout) or that they’ll just leave Obsidian outright (a positively fell omen, should it come to pass), but I have no evidence right now to support any of these possibilities. Accordingly, I’m prepared to risk future disappointment with my optimistic prognosis that the next Fallout game will be developed by the franchise’s most historically important and celebrated personnel.

So, assuming that’s the case — and, by God, I hope it is — then the folks in charge of developing this new game are about as perfect a team as one could possibly desire. Alas, it doesn’t bode well that they’ll be taking orders from the likes of modern Xbox leadership, and that’s what gives me pause.

II: XBOX IS A PISS-POOR STEWARD FOR FALLOUT

Let’s not beat around the bush: Xbox is pushing an interstitial Fallout game because it desperately and urgently needs a win in the wake of its profligate bloodletting of late. Greenlighting a new installment in a beloved franchise and assigning it to the most beloved studio in that franchise’s history is about the most dicklessly straightforward means imaginable of manufacturing such a win. Based on what I’m reading about Xbox’s sudden and extraordinary changes in corporate strategy — in essence, a polar reversal from the acquisitions-and-growth strategy of the Phil Spencer era — it seems reasonable to conclude that the success or failure of this notional Fallout title is of borderline existential consequence for Microsoft’s gaming division. Microsoft itself has more than enough runway to survive without it, of course, but it could certainly use a PR victory of its own if for no other reason than to prove that it’s got something in mind for its shareholders’ futures other than the market’s fifth- or sixth-best GenAI chatbot. But while its parent conglomerate spends as if money had no value, the risk appetite at Xbox is as cavernously low as it’s ever been. My pessimistic expectation, therefore, is that the decision-makers with the power to order Obsidian around will do everything they can to minimize risk in the new game’s development.

So, what can we expect?

Well, put it this way: if I’m wrong and Josh Sawyer and his team — however much that team may involve other Fallout grandees — are given free hands to design and develop as they see fit, then I have no reason to predict anything less than a great game in the end. And if morale is kept high, i.e., if Xbox doesn’t continue to fecklessly gut Obsidian’s already reduced workforce in some ham-fisted effort to boost efficiency, then a game as good or perhaps even better than New Vegas is on the table.

Of course, given Xbox’s recent history of doing precisely the opposite, I have no particular reason to expect that its leadership has any interest in assuming the risk of such an endeavor. God forbid we find ourselves in this project’s dark timeline, then I predict instead a ruthless Bethesdafication of Obsidian’s formula, and I do not like the shape it takes in my mind’s eye. My paranoias are many: a strictly single-player experience with important content locked behind a deluxe-edition paywall; an in-game cash shop featuring worthless cosmetics and predatory microtransactions; a decree demanding “accessibility” in the form of staid, bland, and dumbed-down storytelling in a misguided effort to expand the potential audience; a retail price of $80 or more in spite of all the above… I could go on with this catastrophizing for some time.

I won’t, though, because I can’t stand to think so pessimistically about a forthcoming game that should, by all rights, get me as hyped as I’ve been for a game in a decade or more. So, let’s lay aside the negativity for now, regardless of how grounded and evidenced it may be, and fantasize instead about the best-case scenario. The first Fallout game since 2010 to feature a thoroughly developed setting and an intellectually mature narrative? A roleplaying system that rewards creativity and forethought over mindless dopamine-chasing? A legendarily excellent modding ecosystem to compete with the greatest in the medium? All of these outcomes are, at the very least, plausible.

Since Bethesda itself (supposedly) has all hands on deck to work on The Elder Scrolls VI, itself a couple years away at the least, the similarly anticipated Fallout 5 is probably a solid decade away. This implies that the time between Fallouts 4 and 5 will somehow be even longer than the already piss-taking interval between Skyrim and TES 6, and so one could very reasonably argue that the time is right for another Obsidian-style interstitial game to bridge the gap somewhat. I can’t fault Xbox leadership for hitting upon this strategy, blisteringly obvious though it is, since the logic behind it is generally sound. Nor can I perform any distaste over its having plucked the Fallout IP from Bethesda’s ravening maw — if Todd Howard et al. ever sincerely believed that the franchise’s fans would be content with occasional Fallout 76 content updates for fifteen goddamn years, then of course they were sorely mistaken.

But those of us who are in it for reasons beyond quarterly returns are now compelled toward vigilance and caution, because the eventual reaction to this new Fallout game could make or break a great deal of fortunes in Obsidian, Xbox, and beyond. As more information gradually comes out over the months and years to come, dedicated Fallout fans and our appraisals of Obsidian’s progress will be looked to as augury of their game’s reception and commercial performance. Gamers themselves, though broadly disrespected and dismissed by the non-gaming executives who shape high-level design, aren’t yet wholly powerless to affect the trajectories of those figures’ decision-making. If and when hype is called for, by all means indulge in it. And when some games industry journalist all but inevitably leaks news of anti-consumer decisions yet to be announced, let there be no quarter. We might just get a worthy Fallout game once all is said and done.

Or, I mean, maybe an underresourced Obsidian will grind away at it for the next five years before Xbox reshuffles its C-suite again, whereupon some hollow-faced ghoul will cancel the project and fire the entire studio. Even then, at least we’ll still have New Vegas.

Thanks for reading to the end! I appreciate that this installment was a real dog’s breakfast of cautious optimism and gloomy prognosticating, and I’m still not entirely sure how to feel. So, I’m very excited to hear your takes on this latest news coming out of Obsidian. Do you anticipate a worthy game at the end of it all? Why or why not? Let me know downstairs, and I’ll see ya next week.

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“A tormented secret agent with emotional and psychological problems attempts to stop an international cyber attack. This dark emotional mystery intensifies as he is betrayed by those he trusts and loves.”

So reads the official synopsis for Dire Duplicity, the latest film by celebrated auteur director Neil Breen. I, for one, couldn’t be more excited for its post-theatrical release later this year. I adore the man’s filmography for the earnest sincerity in which every work is drenched, even though they all tend toward lifeless cinematography, schizophrenic editing, and script-writing that reliably triggers a combination of gleeful laughter and second-hand embarrassment for everyone involved. But you need only look just past those apparent defects to find a spark of visionary creativity that speaks truth to the cruel world that inspired it.

I’ve had Breen on the mind a lot these past couple of weeks, and not just because of the new film. See, a few weeks ago, noted games-writing peer got into my comment section and insisted I try a solo-developed game from the better part of a decade ago called The Slater. I did so as soon as the Steam Summer Sale brought its price down to a dollar and change, and the experience was unforgettable. If you re-read the synopsis for Dire Duplicity above, replacing “secret agent” with “former cop” and “cyber attack” with “designer drug trafficking ring,” you’ve got a more-or-less watertight summary of this truly mind-bending indie outing.

Released in 2018, The Slater was solo-developed by one Alessandro Laina, a mysterious creator about whom my research revealed nothing. All I can say with confidence is that his studio, Laina Interactive, is notable for developing and publishing this one game and nothing else. That it exists at all is impressive in its own right: video game development is taxing and laborious under the best circumstances, and the fact that a single man was able to realize so specific a vision — complete with a cast of (mostly) professional voice actors and an original musical score — is a remarkable feat regardless of the final product’s overall quality.

Incidentally, that overall quality is, by any standard measure… not so high. Let me be absolutely clear up front: from a game design perspective, The Slater is a thoroughly mediocre also-ran in its genre whose frequent and deliberate invocation of the mechanically superior Hitman franchise does it no favors; from a storytelling perspective, it’s derivative, disorganized, and shamelessly trope-driven almost to the point of self-parody; and from a technical perspective, it’s a poorly optimized freakshow that couldn’t reliably hold sixty frames per second on my hardware even though my PC was top-of-the-line when the game was new. In short, there’s practically nothing to recommend this game from a perspective of traditional criticism.

And yet, I devoured the entire thing in no time flat this past week. Like a Breen film, it’s unmistakably the work of an uncompromising auteur possessed by a very particular vision, and I can hardly think of a more suitable balm for the gruesome skin disease that is the modern games industry.

Allow me to briefly run you through The Slater’s gossamer-thin premise. The titular protagonist and player character is Mark Slater, a former police officer and violent, unrestrained psychopath who seeks extrajudicial revenge against the criminal underworld responsible for his father’s murder. Mark’s father, whom we meet in a flashback as a pair of exposed shoes under a tarp at a crime scene, apparently came too close to the truth of said underworld’s remarkably sophisticated trafficking ring. The son must complete the father’s unfinished work by destroying the traffickers’ means of production and slaughtering their entire leadership structure.

Over the course of the game’s six missions, Mark robs, murders, and scowls his way through a variety of colorful locales ranging from a classy resort hotel to the world’s stickiest fetish bar. We ought to talk about the practicalities of how it realizes its story through gameplay, and then I’ll tell you about everything that makes it stand out as a work of auteur creativity.

GAMEPLAY

Here’s the short version: The Slater plays like a downmarket installment of IO Interactive’s venerable Hitman franchise, overflowing with evocations and callbacks thereto. Specifically, it plays like a first-person spin-off of Hitman: Contracts with a tiny fraction of the polish and about ten times the charm.1 One could reasonably call it an outright knockoff, but I can hardly call that a criticism — Hitman is a beloved franchise for good reason, and there’s no reason why IO ought to be the sole proprietor of its uniquely engaging blend of stealth and skullduggery.

The reason why the Hitman games — and, by extension, assassination games in general — are so enduringly popular should be fairly straightforward: the fantasy of infiltrating densely populated centers of intrigue and neutralizing high-value targets right under the noses of their protectors is an instantly compelling premise. In contrast to stealth-focused sneak-’em-ups like Splinter Cell or Thief, which are first and foremost about avoiding detection, Hitman and its derivatives are centered around social manipulation. Why skulk in the shadows to avoid patrolling guards when you could simply wait for one of them to go for a smoke, strangle him with piano wire, steal his clothes, and hide in plain sight among his fellows? If that doesn’t suffice to bring you right into the Big Bad’s tour bus, it should at least get you up into whichever clocktower or belfry is best positioned as a sniper’s nest.

So, as with Hitman, the foundation of The Slater’s stealth mechanics is the art of disguise. Mark shows up to every mission garbed in a nondescript leather jacket in which he rarely remains for long, for uniforms affording various levels of status and access are scattered throughout every level. Some are loose on hangers or stuffed into lockers, but most are worn by NPCs with mercifully short memories and alarming predispositions toward smoke- and piss-breaks.

And that’s just as it should be. Even in the first Hitman game from over twenty-five years ago, disguise was an important tool but never a panacea. Agent 47 could easily garotte a bodyguard and don his suit, but he’d then have to vigilantly avoid prolonged or reckless exposure to the dead man’s colleagues. The guards in Hitman games actually come across like security professionals in that they notice inconsistencies and investigate their suspicions. If you stole one of their uniforms and then calmly moved about the level while maintaining a safe distance from the others, your disguise would do its job. But if you ran around at full speed while climbing over railings and screeching like a gibbon, the guards would quite rightly assume something was amiss and draw their weapons.

Not so in The Slater, in which the right disguise is an utterly incontrovertible means of free access to a level’s most tightly secured zones. In general, you can ascertain the intended progression of a level by wandering around and taking note of every doorframe at which a pair of stern-looking toughs hold up their palms and warn you away, and then returning once you’ve found clothes that match their expectations. Guards have absolutely no ability to recognize familiar faces and will politely wave a properly disguised Mark straight through their checkpoints even if they angrily rebuked him earlier that same minute. One of many unintentionally hilarious aspects of The Slater is how quickly guards will go from “Area off limits! Get lost!” to “Long day, huh?” or “Hey, you look like you could use a lap-dance!” just as soon as the fit’s on point. Meanwhile, you’re free to sprint around secure areas, jumping on furniture and slamming into chance passersby, and no one will bat an eye. They will, however, turn their heads to face you even if you’re standing directly behind them. It’s the sole marker of intimidating vigilance that these NPCs have in them.

The only time when careful movement is called for is when Mark finds himself in a restricted area without the right disguise, which is very occasionally made possible by alternate passages through ventilation ducts or external windows. In these cases, being spotted is tantamount to an instant game-over and you may actually need to carefully time your movements while patrolling guards’ backs are turned. There were exactly three sequences in the entire game where I found myself doing this, and it so happens that they were the foremost gameplay highlights of the entire experience. Failure, though rare, is sharply discouraged by the inability to save progress during a mission — if you fail, you start over. Accordingly, The Slater genuinely can produce moments of rock-solid tension that get the heart racing and the palms sweating. The problem is that, during the sixty-to-ninety minutes between each of these tense encounters, there’s practically no feeling of jeopardy whatsoever.

The main issue is that Mark is only ever under threat while enemies are alerted, and alerts are supremely easy to avoid under most circumstances. You’re given a suppressed pistol in every mission whose report is quieter than a pin dropping onto a shag carpet, and even that gets hardly any use.2 With his bare hands, Mark can choke to death any person who comes within five feet. The process takes about three seconds, after which the body can be dumped in whichever dumpster, laundry hamper, or wardrobe happens to be nearby. The game is incredibly unsubtle about signposting which NPCs it expects you to choke out and where it expects you to do so — every single level features at least a few NPCs wearing valuable uniforms who step out for a smoke or a piss every two minutes, with such periodical regularity that you could set your watch to it. Invariably, the corner in which they do so prominently features a container suitable for hiding a cadaver. At most, you might need to wait a few seconds for some other nearby NPC to wander out of sight before rending your target’s neck.

But although the game sets up ample opportunities to murder conveniently dressed bystanders, and indeed doesn’t punish you in any way for taking advantage of those opportunities,3 every level can be finished without killing anyone but the specific targets you’re given at the beginning. Disguises necessary for level progression are always available on a hanger someplace, and whichever keycards or VIP badges are necessary to get you through critical checkpoints can be found on tabletops or janitorial carts. There’s no penalty for indiscriminate slaughter as long as you’re not caught in the act — for Mark Slater’s interpretation of “justice” is superlatively personal — but you’re awarded a bonus achievement for finishing a mission without catching extraneous bodies. For this reason, by far the most stimulating way to play the game is to treat each level like a sort of goon-themed puzzlebox that gradually unfolds itself as you bloodlessly accumulate useful inventory items.

This turns out to be very deliberate on the part of the developer, who gives it away on the game’s Steam store page. “The Slater is a story-driven first-person stealth-action-puzzle game,” he writes. “Think of your enemies as puzzle pieces. How do you get past the guards? Who do you kill and how?”

The biggest unanswered question I’m left with after finishing The Slater is whether its puzzle-like progression was intended from the beginning or simply a naturally emerging lampshade for the profoundly nonreactive enemy AI. Since nothing short of witnessing a corpse or having a gun pointed in their face will elicit a reaction from most NPCs, they come across less like people and more like fleshy set-dressing. It’s very rare for them even to communicate with one another. In one particularly hilarious moment, which I clip below, a womanizing target makes crass overtures at a pair of swimsuit-clad ladies who are programmatically incapable of dignifying him.

The bottom line is this: if you go into The Slater expecting a first-person Hitman game, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. The game’s many evocations and references of IO’s masterpieces are just that: surface-level allusions to a thematic inspiration that seldom add up to any material gameplay impact. But if instead you go in expecting an explorative puzzle game with minor stealth elements, it delivers fairly competently, and doesn’t overstay its welcome at a runtime of around four hours.4 With your expectations thus calibrated, you should be able to enjoy the singularly unique manner in which The Slater presents itself and its story.

PRESENTATION AND NARRATIVE

Graphically, The Slater is at the higher end of solo-developed Unity projects from the late 2010s. That is, it looks just about passable as long as you’re not looking too closely. Certain textures have mismatched resolutions and certain environments are bizarrely underlit, but almost nothing stood out as particularly bad. The major exception is the lip-syncing when characters deliver dialogue to camera, which is shockingly awful for 2018. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that Deus Ex did a comparable-if-not-better job at matching characters’ lips to their syllables all the way back in 2000. Everybody flaps their jaws up and down like ventriloquist dolls, but I can hardly complain on account of how hilarious it makes the more serious, emotionally charged dialogues.

I can complain about its technical performance, which is remarkably inconsistent for a game developed before ray-traced graphics were commercially prominent. My PC is fitted with a GTX 1080, which was in the upper tier of consumer graphics hardware when I installed it in the year of this game’s release. But despite the game’s relatively simple 3D graphics and fairly uncomplicated environments, the damn thing was running loud and hot while occasionally dipping below thirty frames per second.

Speaking of loud and overheated hunks of emotionless hardware, let’s talk more about Mark Slater. I mentioned up top that he’s given a fairly bog-standard murdered father as his principal motivation, and that he was once a police officer. These details are just about all we’re given of Mark’s backstory, and so further analysis of his character requires information from the game’s cinematic cutscenes. I struggled for awhile trying to pithily encapsulate his character, and here’s what I came up with: you ever see those Crank movies starring Jason Statham? Slater is like Chev Chelios if he needed tranquilizers instead of adrenaline to stay alive. Mark’s affect is universally low, even when he finds himself at the limits of screaming emotion — he’s always either stone-faced and growling or stone-faced and brooding.

But it’s when we come to what passes for a plot that The Slater truly comes into its own as a video game that could’ve been directed by Neil Breen. Mark’s foremost objective in his revenge tour is to disrupt the production and sale of a designer drug called D-Pain, which his father was supposedly killed for investigating. The circumstances surrounding the trafficking ring are, to put it lightly, unbelievably contrived. Better still, its contrivances are answered with even greater contrivances as needed to progress the narrative. A spoiler-light example: in one mission, Mark steals the device used to manufacture the drug, which is postured as some kind of hyper-advanced triumph of underground science, irreplicable and irreplaceable on account of the expertise required to create it in the first place.5 But after Mark destroys it and kills the scientist who devised it, the story loses all its forward momentum and so has to invent a new character who’s suddenly capable of making a new one after all.

Actually, let me talk a little about the supporting cast. Mark, despite his persistent stone-facedness, is probably the biggest drop of personality in an ocean of utilitarian stock characters. But a few of them have a bit of flavor, and the voice-acting is deeply entertaining in spite of its roughness. Most of the actors are palpably trying their best to sell what little they’re given by a woefully undernourished script. A few of them favor various affectations in their performances that reliably veer into outright comedy: one VA, as an anonymous waiter standing in front of a bathroom mirror, loops through a motivational evocation of Travis Bickle; another portrays a mob boss and does a scuffed impression of Marlon Brando that had me in fucking stitches the first time I heard it. Seriously, imagine Don Corleone delivering these lines without the barest hint of irony:

The story itself is almost incoherent, and its main function is to provide narrative excuses for Mark to travel to interesting places and kill goofy criminals. It’s the sort of story I could spoil entirely without depriving you of anything, and the main reason I won’t be doing so is that I just can’t be bothered to recap the staid and insipid events leading up to Mark’s confrontation with the man who killed his father. As for the ending, even to call it a damp squib seems unfairly generous — there is absolutely no perceptible denouement for Mark Slater, who seems to be at a loss for what to do now that everyone even tangentially responsible for wronging him now lies decomposing in a laundry hamper someplace.

The script is, in a word, blisteringly trite. But its hackneyed clichés and stale reference points add up to something considerably greater than the sum of their parts. The Slater, while superficially generic in presentation, isn’t generic in the way that, say, AI-generated text tends to be. Instead of averaging safe and flavorless expressions into a whole that vaguely resembles human communication, it reads like a schlocky B-movie written by someone with bold ideas and a microscopic budget. I earnestly enjoyed it in precisely the same way as I earnestly enjoy Neil Breen’s filmmaking: at the core of the product, one hears the unmistakable voice of a human creative with a vision on which they won’t compromise. As a result, the wooden acting, trope-driven storytelling, and amateurish implementation of the supporting gameplay mechanics all come across as sincerely charming.

This all contributes to The Slater’s core appeal, which lies not in its overall structure but in the moment-to-moment experiences that compose it. For example, when Mark strode into a meeting with an old handler in the lead-up to the final mission, I had no reason to expect anything but dry context. But when, out of nowhere, Mark angrily demanded explosives and was responded to with “you are a seriously fucking crazy motherfucker,” I nearly fell out of my chair. That is an experience you simply can’t get from ultra-polished projects from major studios — not even the best Hitman game can replicate it.

It’s been a grueling month for the games industry amid the latest round of mass layoffs and yet more closures of beloved studios, hence The Spieler’s nearly single-minded focus on celebrating independent game design these past few weeks. The Slater is, in many ways, an ideal capstone following our discussions of enormous, multidisciplinary fandoms and strides in accessible tools for game production: it’s a confident and uncompromising work that, despite a cavalcade of enormously under-realized parts, comprises a whole that I found alternately charming and hilarious throughout. I think its retail price of ten dollars is a little steep for the four-ish hours of entertainment on offer, but its sale price of $1.49 makes it an easy recommendation for any gamer with the right sense of humor.

I have no idea what became of Alessandro Laina after The Slater — his socials are barren and his trail cold, so I’m not holding my breath for a follow-up. But even if we never again hear from Laina Interactive, we ought not forget its solitary opus. More than ever before, the games industry is in dire need of fearless, intrepid creatives who are prepared to see their visions through to realization even in the face of obstacles that profit-focused studios would consider insurmountable. If you’re in it for the love of the art, you can’t possibly fail.

Thanks for reading to the end! I originally planned on a briefer installment this week, naively thinking that I wouldn’t get much material out of The Slater. I was clearly wrong on that account, and I do genuinely recommend it to any lover of outsider indie game design with a couple bucks and a few hours to spare. Shout-out to Jim for the excellent recommendation, and I’ll see ya next week.

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Well, word on the street is that the RAM crisis will continue unabated for the foreseeable future, seeing as major manufacturers are guzzling hyperscaler capex like so much Jonestown Kool-Aid. Meanwhile, their benefactors plot to rent computing hardware to the wretched menials, and their peers in triple-A games publishing lay off personnel as if by fetishistic compulsion. The Steam Machine costs more than the Manhattan Project, Rockstar is locking singleplayer content behind an additional tithe on top of GTA VI’s $80 MSRP, and all of the above is allegedly in service of progress. At times like these, one either throws up one’s hands and consents to appease the emotionless machinery of the tech industry, or else fortifies oneself in whatever territory remains uncolonized. The latter, of course, is why I was so heartened last week by all the progress being made on OpenMW.

See, when I called for optimism in our previous edition, I certainly wasn’t expecting that the high-level games industry would suddenly retreat from the cliff-edge of filthy excess. The silver lining of this naked anti-consumerism in the games industry is that it reliably stirs the wills of folks who still care about the medium for artistry’s sake, and enough of them remain that I can still feel a few warm rays of hope. So, until circumstances improve, damn the technopolized games industry and to hell with modernity in general. Let’s instead wallow in whatever is left untarnished by playing another fan-created reimagining of a game from ages ago.

For my part, I spent a lot of the past week or so playing the new Super Redux-Redux mod for 2012’s Hotline Miami, which was exactly the sign I needed in order to feel an iota of positivity in this era of shadows. No surprise, I suppose: Dennaton Games’ Hotline Miami was one of The Spieler’s earliest subjects, and for good reason. It was and remains one of the finest top-down shooters ever made, and its greatness shines through almost fifteen years of iterations and improvements upon its formula. For those of you unfamiliar with Hotline Miami’s conceit, I’ll explain it in two sentences: anonymous, drug-addicted mental case is wracked with guilt and trauma. Go murder a bunch of Russian mobsters about it.

It’s a simple, effective premise, and it’s supported by some kickass primary gameplay. Plenty of games released since then have refined various aspects of the core mechanics to a mirror sheen — OTXO, Intravenous, and the forthcoming Kusan: City of Wolves all come immediately to mind. HLM had plenty of rough edges and commensurate room for improvement, and these are just a few of the titles that’ve managed to essentially perfect its more underrealized aspects. Thing is, not one game released since Hotline Miami has credibly reproduced the aura that made it so popular in the first place, even including its own 2015 sequel.1 I wrote a whole-ass essay on the subject well over a year ago, and I’ll explain precisely what I believe contributed to that aura later on.

For now, suffice it to say that Hotline Miami was a product of its creators’ all-consuming commitment to their vision even while under tremendous pressure, and the result was a legendary artifact of modern gaming history that continues to heavily influence action games to this very day. Not unlike Morrowind, it continues to benefit from an active fanbase that may be smaller in number than it once was, but is nevertheless much greater in devotion. In the interest of contextualizing that devotion, let me give you a quick overview of what Hotline Miami development looks like all these years later.

HOTLINE MIAMI IN 2026

Several years ago, Hotline Miami’s original source code appeared on the Internet, alongside Dennaton Games’ informal blessing to use it for noncommercial purposes. A community fork of that code is presently maintained by an Uruguayan indie developer called Pi0h1, whose portfolio website was a real shot in the arm. “I believe that games are more than just entertainment,” reports a blurb on the About page. “[T]hey’re a form of art born from the unique and meaningful dialogue that occurs between the player and the game designer each time a game is played.”

God, is it ever refreshing to hear game developers say that out loud. Pi0h1 is an avowed Hotline superfan and purports to have begun an ambitious modding project awhile after HLM2 was released. Then aged only sixteen, and alongside a talented and interdisciplinary group of friends, Pi0h1 came up with a novel idea for differentiating their work from other HLM modding projects of the era: actually finishing and releasing the damn thing. This was the origin of Hotline Miami: Redux, which added a bevy of new features, exterminated a swarm of bugs, and appeared on track to march the triumphal 2012 classic into the new decade.

But, as is so often the case in our world of social inequity, Pi0h1’s hobbyist ambitions were checked by the realities of maturity — that is, focus had to shift toward professional work so that food might be kept on the table. So, although development on the Redux project was effectively suspended in 2023, work has continued on improving HLM’s ancient spaghetti-code to produce a more stable foundation for future development. Others took up the mantle, some of whom sought to complete the work that Pi0h1 had started. This bore fruit in late 2023, when a developer called Neon Dimensions released a project fittingly called Hotline Miami: Redux-Redux. It began by fixing a whole nest of bugs left over from Redux, and gradually worked toward completing the whole vision of the project.

Yet somehow, despite my avowed love for the game on which it’s based, I’d never actually tried Redux until very recently. What finally brought me into the light was the announcement of Hotline Miami: Super Redux-Redux, a global modification for R-R that, I believe, represents the current pinnacle of scalp-camera action gaming. I’m going to spend the next several hundred words trying to convince you of that, but you need not take my word for it, since you can play it for free even without a copy of the original. I mean, you really ought to own a copy of Hotline Miami — it’s cheap as shit, after all, and particularly so during the Steam Summer Sale — but Super Redux-Redux can optionally be downloaded as a modded repack of the community-maintained source code.

What follows is much praise of this latest and greatest modpack, but keep in mind that most of the features I discuss below are descended from Pi0h1’s work that predates this release by several years. Let it serve as a reminder that the passionate creatives who support these old games stand not only on the shoulders of the original developers, but also on those of the hardworking fans who came before. And with that little morsel of reverent contemplation out of the way, let’s talk about perpetrating psychotic, drug-addled killing sprees for awhile.

SUPER REDUX-REDUX

Back in April of last year, I wrote a retrospective on the aspects of design I understood as foundational to Hotline Miami’s remarkably endurant appeal. To quickly recap, those were: its addictive, tightly designed gameplay; its brilliant original soundtrack; its steadfast commitment to ludonarrative synchronicity2; and what I termed its “farcical-yet-meaningful” relationship to violence, by which I referred to how HLM uses absurdly over-the-top carnage as an instrument of both catharsis and self-introspection. I believe these are the qualities that keep the game so vertiginously elevated upon the imperial pedestal of indie royalty, and so any attempt at modernizing it for a new decade must enhance or at least retain said qualities. To pull it off would require a deep understanding and thorough (if not downright emotional) appreciation of the game’s underlying design principles.

I’m delighted to report that, for as much as Redux and Redux-Redux already exemplified the necessary pedigree, Super R-R is the most faithful and feature-packed reimagining of Hotline Miami yet made. If not for the fact that the 2012 original remains so valuable as a historical artifact, I’d call this new version the definitive way to experience the game.3 Have a look at the illustrative clip below, and then allow me to explain.

It all begins with a brand-new soundtrack by Russian artist Crypt Voice, which remixes tracks from the original score and contributes a few totally new ones. I’d describe it as the Hotline Miami OST, but with every knob cranked up: the bass is heavier, the synths are sharper, and the general character altogether more unrelenting. In combination with the new weapon sound effects, which aggressively reverberate just as one would expect of an assault weapon discharged in a domestic interior, the eardrums are positively saturated during the action of standard gameplay. Hotline Miami’s OST was, to my mind, already a Top-10 contender among all of video games, which is why I’m both pleased and astonished to find that the Super R-R soundtrack is somehow even better. This is one of those rare cases where I’ll beseech you to listen to the new score even if you have no intention of playing the game. Hell, listen to it even if you don’t play video games at all. It’s on all the digital streaming platforms, and I bet you could grind out some nutty PRs at the gym with this shit in your ears.

So, the game’s soundscape is roundly amplified, and the pattern continues with changes to primary gameplay. In addition to new, punchier sound effects for the weapons already implemented, there are several totally new tools of slaughter at your disposal. Most notable is a Kalashnikov that — and I don’t say this lightly — might be my new favorite AK in all of video gaming, and I must’ve equipped a hundred of the bastards. The roaring growl of its muzzle and the subtle screen-shake effect it produces as each round explodes therefrom produces one of the more violent firearms I’ve ever pretended to operate, and it somehow manages this effect in a pixel-art scalp-camera game built on fourteen-year-old tech.

Rounding out the systemic additions is a new, optional Hard Mode that adds more and/or scarier enemies to each level. Hotline Miami was already an extraordinarily tough customer back in 2012 — the player is vastly outnumbered in every combat encounter, and is killed in one hit from any attack. It was made accessible by the genius addition of instantaneous retries, which both enabled and encouraged players to bang their heads against the brick wall of HLM’s difficulty until, inevitably, its challenges were overcome. Even a player with mediocre reflexes or who’s inexperienced with twitchy action shooters can still beat the unmodded game with enough patience, simply by repeating each encounter and adding entropy to the system until random flailing eventually resolves into victory.

Super R-R, meanwhile, is not dicking around in the slightest. The Hard Mode versions of HLM’s tougher levels are more challenging than any sequences I’ve played in any other top-down action shooters, requiring careful strategization and flawless execution. The linchpin is the introduction of new enemy types: some are immune to melee attacks, others dodge gunfire, and many levels feature both. You’re compelled to vary your approach and are punished for hesitating, and the whole enterprise starts to feel like some kind of ultra-violent puzzle game in which you eventually discover the intended sequences of action. If you have fond memories of the dopamine hits from finally beating tough levels in Hotline Miami, then Super R-R’s Hard Mode should feel absolutely narcotic.

Finally, the Super R-R package contains some ancillary but welcome changes to the game’s presentation. Most immediately visible are unlockable, cosmetic reskins of the masks, all suitably gruesome. Also noteworthy is the addition of an all-new achievement system. Hotline Miami already had a set of official achievements, but the new system fills in some gaps in the old one by adding a robust selection of aspirational challenges. My favorite examples include those awarded for killing three enemies with a single thrown brick, completing a level using nothing but a dart, and completing the entire game without killing any dogs.

Oh, almost forgot: you can now pet the dogs instead of killing them as long as you’re wearing the Border Collie mask. Ten out of ten.

The games industry is in a very strange, uncomfortable place these days. High-level development and publishing were already in the midst of a period of creative degeneracy unprecedented in my lifetime. The corrupt bargains in the greater tech industry that have made hardware so difficult to obtain and which conspire to take personal computing out of the hands of consumers altogether are, of course, making an already bad situation dramatically worse. And, absent robust consumer protections or even the will to manifest them, there’s relatively little recourse available to us as ordinary consumers.

But although resisting the enshittification of the games industry is difficult, it’s by no means futile. I, for one, see no particular reason to meet the forces of avarice on their own cartoonishly lopsided terms — certainly not while talented people who love game design as an art are busying themselves with its defense through avenues that crass industrialism is powerless to frustrate. I reckon the most good we can do at this juncture is to lend our support to independent creatives and what few industry insiders are still defending those creatives, and to withhold it from the actors that seek to profit off of our mistreatment. Hang in there, believe that things will get better, and do what you can to help the folks who are defending what’s good and righteous in game design. And, for the love of God, play Hotline Miami: Super Redux-Redux. I’m sure you could use the catharsis at a moment like this.

Thanks for reading to the end! If you’ve played Super Redux-Redux or any other major modding projects for Hotline Miami (many of which I’ve yet to touch), I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments. Next week’s subject is a work of true outsider art in modern game design — stay tuned, and get yourself subscribed if you aren’t yet!

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Here at The Spieler, we never miss an opportunity to fawn over The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind whenever circumstances conspire to bring it back into the news, no matter how tenuously relevant or esoteric that news may be. Frequent readers are well aware that I consider Morrowind to be, in many respects, a high water mark for open-world RPGs of the Western tradition, and my esteem has only grown over the years as its fans continue to push it toward the original vision of its creators. But aside from love for the art and my inveterate nostalgia, one of the reasons I so like Morrowind as an analytical subject is that its ongoing popularity brings the shortcomings of the modern games industry into sharp relief. That a large, devoted community continues to play — and indeed develop — the game some two-and-a-half decades after its release is testament to the passion it inspires, and to the inability of any subsequent game to convincingly channel it.1

That brings us to the news I want to cover in this edition, which will doubtlessly be crowded out from the popular conscience by the Steam Machine’s disappointing launch price, GTA VI’s disappointing launch price, and whatever ridiculous fucking farce is being perpetrated this week over at Xbox HQ. You see, OpenMW — the fan-developed engine replacement and de-facto means of running Morrowind these days2 — just got a new major release, and it has implications stretching well beyond 2002’s greatest RPG. Consequential though this development is, the specifics are sufficiently mired in nerd-ass software jargon that I expect major publications will give it a pass, and so I might as well be the one to tell you about it. More importantly, though, it gestures at some reasons for optimism with regard to the near- to medium-term future of the games industry, and God knows we could all use some cause for hope in that arena. Let me tell you what’s new, then we’ll go over why I think it bodes well for the medium in this time of strife and horror.

SO WHAT’S NEW?

A lot of the changes are primarily of interest to folks who are actively modding Morrowind, so I’ll restrict myself to the most immediately relevant bullets on the Version 0.51.0 changelog.

The headline feature is direct, runtime access to core game systems through a newly exposed scripting context that enables modders to adjust or replace game data immediately after it’s loaded. Or, in lay terms, core systems previously inaccessible to modders can now be modified, added to, or removed wholesale using the scripting tools with which those modders are already familiar. The most obvious utility this unlocks is the addition of gameplay effects that weren’t already undergirded by existing engine code. As a grossly oversimplified example: it was already possible to create a simple, Skyrim-like physics simulation for moving props, since the engine already knew how to manipulate objects in three-dimensional space and just needed to be told how to apply the relevant procedures to all the loose crap that fills Morrowind’s interiors. But it wasn’t possible to, say, create a custom spell effect, since the engine only knows how to produce those that were already present in the code.

But now, thanks to the addition of this Load context in the scripting API, the code to achieve novel effects can be read into the game at runtime. Hence, modders can now realize visions that previously required extension of the underlying engine. A number of modders have already demonstrated the potential of this expanded scripting context, perhaps most notably by implementing Tamriel Rebuilt’s custom spell effects — previously exclusive to the Morrowind Script Extender version of the mod — in OpenMW.

There have also been significant additions to the OpenMW Construction Set, or OpenMW-CS, the engine’s content editor built in the tradition of the Construction Sets that ship with Bethesda’s modern RPGs. It now supports vertex painting in the terrain editor, which essentially means that users can now modify the superficial appearance of level geometry without needing to draw up flat textures from scratch. This is described by the OpenMW team as “a huge step forward” in the process of eventually running games other than Morrowind on the engine, which transitions us nicely into our next section.

OPENMW AS RPG CANVAS

That OpenMW should one day become a platform for other games has long been a stated goal of the development team. I recognize that there’s a certain cognitive dissonance in the idea of developing an original project using a game engine named for the game it was intended to run, but it makes sense if you think about it: following over eighteen years of near-continuous work, it’s only sensible that all the tireless effort that went into the engine’s creation should pay dividends beyond the relatively narrow scope of running an ancient Bethesda RPG. And, as its scripting API becomes more capable and its editor more versatile, OpenMW is on the precipice of an era in which it could be a compelling engine choice for certain projects and teams. In effect, it’s building toward a state in which it could considerably accelerate the development of independent, budget-constrained games that’re scoped within the contours of Western RPGs.x

Now, I know what you’re thinking: why the hell would someone want to develop a game atop OpenMW-CS instead of, say, a general-purpose engine with a large and active ecosystem of developers like Godot or Unity? The short answer is that, given the right set of design goals, it could be vastly more resource- and labor-efficient to build a game using a suite of existing tools and mechanics rather than implementing it all from scratch. This concept of what are sometimes called “domain-specific” game engines is well precedented throughout the modern industry: RPG Maker remains an excellent choice for top-down, 2D JRPGs; Adventure Game Studio is arguably still unbeatable for point-and-click adventure games; new visual novels developed in Ren’Py are released every month; and, as I’ve explained in the past, there’s even a community of game devs using 1998’s Fallout 2 as an engine for original RPGs that benefit from Interplay’s game-mechanical inventory.

My point is that OpenMW-CS is on track to become a domain-specific engine for the efficient production of Bethesda-inspired RPGs with large, open worlds and deep roleplaying systems. It’s a famously difficult genre in which to develop, and designing such a game from whole cloth requires a deep pool of talent and a vast accumulation of institutional knowledge. Indeed, Bethesda itself built its reputation in the 2000s on the back of that talent and knowledge, pushed it about as far as it could go in the early 2010s, and then pissed it all away in the latter half of that decade when corporate-managerial fuckery drove out all the greybeards.

The promise of a notional domain-specific engine for open-world RPG development is to dramatically reduce the levels of expertise and capital required to ship such a project. With a bit of luck, OpenMW and other software in its vein may one day facilitate a whole crop of ambitious RPGs that push the boundaries of the medium, and do so without need for unobtainably expensive hardware or obeisance to the disinterested corporatism of modern studio design paradigms. I don’t suppose for a moment that the mythical Skyrim-killer will run on OpenMW, but I’m entirely ready to believe that free and accessible game-dev tooling of this sort will tangibly reduce the capabilities gap between ambitious indies and triple-A behemoths. And a good thing too, since those behemoths aren’t looking so hot lately.

TWILIGHT OF THE STUDIO RPG

I generally believe that the future of game design — at least in its capacity as an artform rather than a disposable instrument of shareholder profit — is in the hands of independent creators more so than those of studio-employed professionals. The crux of the matter is the growing misalignment of incentives: the suits who hold decision-making power at major game studios and their publishers are demonstrably disinterested in serving the core gaming audience in any capacity that doesn’t tangibly increase growth projections, while said audience is increasingly indignant about the brazen avarice that led to this state of affairs in the first place. I’ve argued before that the growth-oriented, hyper-corporatized shape of the contemporary triple-A industry, which conceives of video games as products rather than cultural artifacts, is categorically incapable of producing great artwork. So, unless and until priorities change, that responsibility falls to smaller studios and independent creators.

It’s reflective of the advancing trend toward deprofessionalization in popular game design. Major studios and their corporate parents seem to announce a new raft of layoffs practically every week, and the statistics speak for themselves. A job in high-level game development can no longer be considered a stable career even for the highly capable, and so it’s hardly surprising that huge swathes of the talent pool are reconsidering work at the major studios. A position at a Microsoft-owned studio, once a marker of tremendous industry prestige, is now more like a cause for sympathy. It draws eerie parallels with the parallel trend in Big Tech, where engineers who would once have killed for a job at Facebook or Amazon are now scrambling for off-ramps into other industries rather than persist in their literally dystopian work environments.

Now that we’re eight years out from the announcement of The Elder Scrolls VI and still lacking a single frame of gameplay, and further considering the fact that TES VI allegedly entered full production only recently,3 I think it’s fair to say that nothing of which Bethesda Softworks is capable could possibly live up to the expectations of its fans. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that essentially all of the talent responsible for Bethesda’s best work, including Morrowind and Skyrim, left the studio eons ago. There’s an entire confluence of circumstances that lead one to view modern Bethesda as an unworthy steward of its own legacy.

Of course, the Bethesda responsible for the legend-making disappointments of Fallout 76 and Starfield4 is only one data point among a larger industry trend. The seemingly endless cycle of layoffs, project cancellations, and outright closures of beloved studios infecting most of the big-money industry has produced a terrible crisis of institutional knowledge. This, combined with the persistent unavailability of high-spec gaming hardware, renders it hard to imagine an open-world RPG in the tradition of Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim finding a comparable audience. I mean, put it this way: in 2011, a curious onlooker with no gaming hardware could buy a copy of Skyrim and an Xbox to play it for less than $400, and there were plenty of folks who bought into the hype by precisely those means. Now, fifteen years later, you’d expect to pay at least twice that for a full-price game and the necessary hardware, and you couldn’t reasonably expect a top-of-the-line experience for less than four figures. Given all of that, it seems fitting to conclude with a few meditations on the burgeoning class of independent creators that promises to displace the rotund, shambling wraith once known as Western triple-A game development.

If the frontiers of modern game design continue to deprofessionalize — and, by extension, democratize — then the tooling and workflows available to smaller, independent outfits will naturally continue to evolve in capability and versatility. I see the continued evolution of OpenMW as emblematic of this progression, as well as a victory for indie developers its own right. But my excitement goes well beyond the admittedly limited use-cases for its specific innovations of late. What really excites me is the fact that, more than in any previous era, the creatives who are genuinely passionate about the art of game design are taking organized, enthusiastic steps to improve the circumstances underlying their creation.

There’s no particular reason to believe that the supply-side catastrophes by which the hobby’s cutting edge became inaccessibly expensive will abate any time soon. Maybe the speculative bubble propping up the ludicrously overleveraged consumption of computing hardware will one day burst with such spectacular force that the secondary market will flood with RAM sticks and GPUs, and we’ll all join one another in the land of milk and honey where ray-traced 3D graphics are considered an inalienable human right. Fingers crossed, I suppose. But in the meantime, we defenders of game design as an artform that can push the limits of human expression will have to turn elsewhere. We have hardworking and inspired folks like the OpenMW team to thank for giving us an elsewhere toward which to turn.

Thanks for reading to the end! This was definitely one of the more technically inclined newsletters I’ve written in awhile, so I appreciate your sticking it out. I’ve been playing the Super Redux-Redux mod for Hotline Miami lately, so next week’s edition will probably be about that — get yourself subscribed if you’re not already!

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As long-time readers are by now aware, I’m not all that plugged into Nintendo these days. I have neither a Switch 2 nor any near-term plans to get one, and I’ve never had a particularly strong attachment to its intellectual property in the first place beyond nostalgic memories of eras long past. Nonetheless, I maintain a professional curiosity in Nintendo’s output precisely because of its undeniable influence on the creative and practical directions of the broader games industry. And — as I’ve written before — I deeply respect Nintendo’s ongoing commitment to evolving and progressing the medium even as I criticize the nakedly avaricious business practices that’ve long characterized its corporate strategy. So, even though I seldom play the games, I do my best to keep an eye on what the Japanese Juggernaut is developing or publishing at any given time.

Enter this year’s Nintendo Direct, which exhibited a dense field of ports, remakes, and legacy sequelization of the sort we’ve come to expect from the ouroboros of contemporary triple-A publishing. As I review a list of all the announcements, I count somewhere between three and five new IPs (depending on how you define “new”) out of almost four-dozen reveals.1 This trend is no longer surprising to me, and it’s been going on long enough that we may as well call it a status-quo for the high-level games industry. It’s left to me, then, to sift through the latest batch of nostalgic retreads in search of anything that provokes an emotional reaction strong enough to break through the background haze of apathy and dread.

To be frank, I can’t say that any of it moved the needle all that much. In fact, the announcement that most caught my attention wasn’t in the English-language Direct at all, but was exclusive to the Japanese broadcast for reasons unclear. To wit, they announced the elaborately titled Touhou Koumakyou: New Classic – The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, a remake of the sixth official Touhou game from 2002. When I read about it after the fact, I felt a pang of curiosity bordering on excitement that I practically never get from remakes. And, if the price is right and I happen to be in a generous mood on its September 10^th launch date, the Steam version might even be a day-one purchase. I’ve had Touhou on my list of potential Spieler topics since before I even started the publication, and I guess this is the excuse I needed to finally stop putting it off.

Thing is, the Touhou Project is a decades-old titan of grassroots fandom whose reach extends well beyond its already gargantuan library of official game releases. Aside from a staggering thirty-three2 official, first-party games released since 1997 by developer-composer Jun’ya “ZUN” Ōta, there exists a wealth of official works from other media that have explored and developed its fictional setting in obsessive detail. Additionally, thanks to one of the most generous fan content policies known to modern capitalism, there’s also an entire universe of free and commercial third-party content drawing upon the obsessions and creative energy of a nearly three-decade-old fandom.

And I, for my part, have experienced only a vanishingly tiny fraction of it all, hence my reticence to approach the topic thus far. But since they’re remaking Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, the only Touhou game I’ve finished, I figured I might as well analyze the source of my appreciation for the franchise even though I could barely be called so much as a casual fan. Crucially, one doesn’t need to dig very deep into this cartoonishly vast property to appreciate its cultural presence and ongoing impact. All of that is made apparent from outside observation alone, and that limited topic is what I’m interested in considering this week. Besides, it’s an excuse for a shorter installment that I could really use. As I write, I just returned home from an exhausting trip to Chicago for a funeral, and there’s not much left in the tank for careful organization or incisive commentary, so forgive the relative briefness of this edition.

My plan here is to give you a very brief, surface-level overview of the Touhou Project so that we’ll have a shared context for the concept I actually want to address, which is the extraordinary power of its fanbase’s creative freedom. One of these days, I’ll return to analyze the subject of bullet-hell games as a game design phenomenon. For now, though, we’ll keep it simple.

The Touhou Project is, in brief, a massively elaborate multimedia franchise defined above all by its core series of danmaku games. What’s a danmaku game? It’s a subgenre of shoot-’em-up games characterized by a ridiculous density of projectiles that the player is expected to dodge, hence the usual translation of “bullet-hell” that’s become standard among Anglophonic gamers. The sight of these games usually intimidates or terrifies the uninitiated, and for good reason. Look, here’s a clip of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil’s Stage 3 boss fight, which should give you a half-decent impression of both primary gameplay and general aesthetic:

I don’t want to spend too much time talking about bullet-hell gameplay in this particular newsletter, because it characterizes only a portion of the broader Touhou Project (albeit an indispensably significant portion) and I’d instead like to focus on the cultural positioning of the Project writ-large. So, let the following suffice for now: the appeal of a great bullet hell game is that, to play at all successfully, you need to involve your entire brain and dedicate all of your focus such that you fall into a trance-like state of absolute stimulation. While simultaneously pathing between projectiles, planning a path through those not yet arrived, and ensuring that the enemy remains in the path of your own shots, your every neuron feels saturated with activity. I’m not all that good3 at bullet-hell and so can speak only for myself, but I don’t think “addictive” is too strong a word for the effect it all achieves.

But standard-setting bullet-hell gameplay isn’t the only source of Touhou’s enduring popularity or of its audience’s rabid devotion. Of particular note is the music, all lovingly composed by the developer himself. ZUN, in addition to being an accomplished and highly prolific designer and developer of video games, is an extremely talented musician. Indeed, he’s reported in the past that his games were originally conceived as platforms for showing off his compositions. I positively adore this music and have done ever since I first got McRoll’d back in 2008.4 In fact, it’s probably accurate to say that I’ve spent more time listening to Touhou OSTs, fan music, and various remixes thereof than I’ve spent actually playing the damn things. Then, of course, there’s the remarkably elaborate fictional universe upon which the Touhou Project is built. I could spend an entire series of essays explaining the realm of Gensokyo, its history, and the dealings of its inhabitants if only my understanding were more than superficial.

Ultimately, though, what most interests me about Touhou is the intensity of its fandom. As I mentioned above, the Project is known for having one of the most permissive fan content policies in modern commercial media. In exchange for following a handful of eminently simple guidelines, you’re allowed to create, distribute, and even sell derivative works without so much as asking permission first. Over the decades, this has produced an immense body of fan-created art in almost every medium. There are games, of course — literally hundreds of them on Steam alone, including an extremely popular and successful metroidvania that’s made its creators an absolute packet. Beyond that, there’s 2D artwork, music, animation, physical craftwork, and enough literature to fill an entire library. Oh, and a great deal of hentai and miscellaneous pornography, but that’s neither here nor there.

I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds, so let me wrap up for this week by saying that I wish more franchises would use Touhou’s exceptional generosity as a model for how to manage an intellectual property. The creative and commercial freedom afforded to the fanbase has led to varied and tremendous upsides for the Project. There’s the free advertising, of course — I myself learned about Touhou from a YouTube video almost twenty years ago, and that’s what eventually led me to give the games a try. Then there’s the practically autonomous community-building that this model facilitates, since it encourages the free transfer of ideas and cooperation between fans. And, perhaps most notably, it brings about contributions to the wider culture that extend well beyond the games and the other official media. Every so often, Touhou produces a cultural phenomenon like Bad Apple! or the aforementioned McRoll, capturing the attention of folks with no attachment to or awareness of the Touhou Project. Inevitably, many of them end up as fans themselves, and the cycle continues to propagate at an ever-increasing rate of growth.

Meanwhile, I can only come up with two downsides off the top of my head. The first is obvious: an IP that affords its fans this much creative freedom with its copyrighted material can’t possibly capture the maximum possible revenue from its exploitation, which is why I don’t expect we’ll ever see anything approaching this level of permission from the halls of modern, corporate game development. The second is even more obvious: if you forbid only “excessive sexual content that is considered unlawful” (as does the Touhou Project), then you’re inevitably going to end up with terabytes worth of Rule 34 content floating around the Internet, much of it grotesque. But that’s hardly unique to Touhou, now is it?

I don’t suppose that the forthcoming remake, or indeed the series of remakes that it doubtlessly portends, will dramatically change the character of the early-2000s games in question. But I do await with keen interest the effect they’ll have on the surrounding community once the Project’s most famous installments find their way into the hands of a new audience. It presents an opportunity for a glut of ambitious creatives to make names for themselves, and that would represent a welcome victory for the wider gaming culture. Fingers crossed.

Alright, that’s about all the bandwidth I’ve got for this week. Appreciate your reading to the end, and thanks for your patience with this abbreviated issue. If you’re interested in trying Touhou for yourself, I’ll echo the advice I was given and tell you to start with one of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Perfect Cherry Blossom, or Imperishable Night, respectively the sixth, seventh, and eighth official installments. Patched executables with English translations and modern quality-of-life features are easy to find if you look for them. And, if it matters to you, it’s my experience that they all work on Linux without significant friction if run through Wine.

At some point, I’ll want to return to the subject of Touhou and to the bullet-hell genre in general to more deeply explore what it can teach us about game design. In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for next week’s edition, and thanks again for bearing with me through this shorter one. Have you played any Touhou games, or can you offer recommendations for relative newcomers? Let me know downstairs. I’d be particularly interested to hear from any of you who’ve played any of the fan games, and about your experiences with them — I really ought to get around to trying some for myself, and I have only the vaguest ideas of where to start. I’ll see ya next week.

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Our subject for this week is somewhat more depraved than usual, so let me ease you into it with a benign anecdote. See, a few weekends ago, my wife and I took a train up to Philadelphia to celebrate our wedding anniversary. I’d never been, and my impression was largely positive: the place has developed a whole bunch of quality attractions over 350-some-odd years. What’s more, the food is terrific in both senses of the word, i.e., “extremely good” and “causing terror.” I thought I knew what to expect from cheesesteak, but I seriously underestimated the endocrine brutality of which shaved ribeye and processed cheese were capable. Maybe the sandwich weakened my immune system, or maybe Philadelphia incubates some exotic rhinoviruses to which I was previously naïve. In either case, I returned home with an absolute monster of a cold.

At times like those, when my sinuses are packed and over-the-counter cold remedies impair my consciousness, I prefer to lie in bed and while away my convalescence with a video game that requires as little higher logic as possible. That’s what led me, scrolling idly through my expansive Steam library, to install a 2016 beat-’em-up called Mother Russia Bleeds. It’s one of those games that seems to spontaneously appear in the collection of one who’s been playing PC games for the better part of three decades. I certainly don’t remember buying it. Whether it was a gift, a part of some ancient bundle, or a divinely manifested artifact that appeared before me when I most needed an idle distraction, there it sat in a list of long-neglected games.

I whipped through the whole thing in a single sitting — or, more accurately, a single splaying — and was pleasantly surprised by what I found. You see, with the prominent exception of the legendary Simpsons arcade cabinet from the early nineties, I’ve never really been drawn to the sidescrolling beat-’em-up genre. I find that almost every one of them I’ve played suffers from the same aggravations that artificially limit my ability to get into the flow-state upon which their gameplay loops essentially rely, and so I’ve seldom invested much time into them. Call it a skill issue if you must, but I can’t stand how often these games go from high-octane action to plodding slog whenever you’re waiting for a knocked-down enemy to wander back into your reach from off-screen, or when you get booted into a group of toughs and beaten to death without any recourse.

Now, Mother Russia Bleeds suffers from every single one of those aggravations, which we’ll talk about later. Crucially, though, it set itself apart from genre peers by virtue of a unique permutation of the beat-’em-up formula — that of augmenting your combat abilities through narcotic abuse — and the exceptional presentation that supports it. These kept me interested enough to keep playing even as the unremarkable story and the regularly frustrating gameplay kept gnawing at my patience. I think we can learn from the design choices that kept me playing Mother Russia Bleeds all the way through credits, so that’ll be our subject for this week. I’ll start with the game’s premise, then we’ll talk gameplay and presentation, and I’ll close out with some criticisms and pertinent reflections. The story isn’t really the core of the experience, but I’ll refrain from spoiling any major plot details.

Before we get stuck in, a polite notice: the thematic core of this game is chemical addiction, and its portrayals thereof are strikingly grounded. I’ll do my best to be tactful in discussing it, but there’ll be no hard feelings if you prefer to give this subject a miss. Now, then:

THE PREMISE

The year is nineteen-eighty-something. Somewhere in a visually recognizable but temporally distinct vision of the USSR, a camp of North Russian Romani earn a hardscrabble living through violent, no-holds-barred street fighting. Their ranks populate the list of four playable characters from whom you select as the game begins — I select the impulsive and moderately built Sergei, whose jack-of-all-trades combat stats radiate first-playthrough energy. The game tutorializes its genre-standard combat mechanics by having you savagely beat a couple dozen disheveled tramps, which is postured as some kind of high-stakes prize fight.

But the day’s wholesome event calendar is suddenly interrupted when a platoon of heavily armed soldiers raid the camp, incapacitating and kidnapping the player characters.1 You come to in a dank, filthy cell, and swiftly learn that you’ve been chemically enslaved by a mysterious faction of maniacs clad in hazmat suits. The reasons behind your kidnapping are never explicitly spelled out, so I gather that this setup is largely intended to cultivate a suitably hateable antagonist. It’s pretty effective in that regard, and I had an accordingly cathartic go of slaughtering my way out of the prison-lab complex as I discovered the nature and limits of this new chemical dependency.

The substance in question is an enigmatic drug called “Nekro,” postured in gameplay as some kind of profoundly addictive stimulant-analgesic whose effects are indispensable in combat. Indeed, a significant proportion of your foes bear the outwardly visible signs of prolonged abuse, which is gameplay-relevant for reasons we’ll discuss shortly. The impetus for the sudden outbreak is a mysterious conspiracy between the government and the Bratva, and your character resolves to take the fight directly to those at the top, consequences be damned. Meanwhile, a faction of revolutionary Bolsheviks seeks its own revenge against the decadent state that enabled such oppression, and your extraordinary capacity for deadly violence proves crucial to their designs. What follows is a few hours of brutal revenge, appalling squalor, and a trip to a Bratva fetish club where you’re aided by a friendly gimp.

But, as with most sidescrolling brawlers, the story is not the main attraction in Mother Russia Bleeds. Its basic narrative architecture is a fairly insipid and predictable revenge thriller, but there are a couple of relatively effective plot developments that turn the proverbial screw and keep it just interesting enough that I’d say it’s worth experiencing. Keep in mind that, insofar as I recommend this game, I do so almost strictly for its cathartic primary gameplay and for the overall theming as it exists independent of the story. With that in mind, let me tell you about the experience of actually playing this game.

GAMEPLAY AND PRESENTATION

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: if you’ve ever played a sidescrolling beat-’em-up before, then Mother Russia Bleeds will feel very familiar in most respects. You have a variety of attacks, movement abilities, and combos at your disposal for beating up the aforesaid ‘em, and can take up various environmental objects or dropped weapons to give yourself a temporary advantage over the legions of addled fiends. The moment-to-moment combat is unremarkable in game-mechanical terms, but the way it’s presented is one of MRB’s major highlights. Each hit lands with a satisfying, punchy sound effect and a gout of pixelated blood, and just about every enemy type has several variants of its sprite that reflect increasingly gruesome injury. Even better are the charged strikes, which require good positioning and timing to pull off. If you manage it, you’re rewarded with the percussive, eardrum-saturating sound of bones crunching under the force of your blow, and the hapless enemy is sent flying across the screen along with a liter or two of their spilled blood.

Relatedly, I think it’s probably accurate to call this one of the more violent games I’ve ever completed. You might think that low-res pixel art would set a fairly low ceiling for what magnitude of carnage could reasonably be represented, but I found that not to be the case. The action is vicious and occasionally downright harrowing, and the balance it strikes is one of the game’s more interesting aspects. Where a game like Hotline Miami — another pixel-art-based title about slaughtering Soviet gangsters — often trends closer to a sophomoric, Adult Swim-esque goofiness in its depictions of violence before reverting to a dissociated haze in the cold aftermath of each massacre, Mother Russia Bleeds has practically no interest in levity of any sort.

As it happens, MRB actively invites the comparison to Hotline Miami in its Steam store page description, but rather specifically to HLM’s bleakest aspects: “...somewhere between the classic style of Streets of Rage and the ultra-violence of Hotline Miami… Mother Russia Bleeds aims to conjure up anxiety, unease, and drug-addled frenzy.” Notably absent in that curated list are marketer-friendly terms like “catharsis,” “empowerment,” or indeed “fun.” This is, first and foremost, a game about the institutionally abetted suffering of a socially marginalized people and their grim descent into psychological desolation and disorderly bloodshed. Of course, none of this necessarily precludes a fun and cathartic power fantasy, and Mother Russia Bleeds is all of those things, too — the catch is that one-hundred percent of the enjoyment one gets out of this game is filtered through a dysphoric and oppressive narrative context.2 The result, when it works, is exceptionally effective.

And on that note, let me tell you about the game’s most interesting contribution to the beat-’em-up formula, to wit, helpless drug addiction. Nekro is a soupy, phosphorescent-green chemical administered by jugular injection. Your chosen character takes up a syringe of the stuff as the first chapter begins and is never without it thereafter, despite the obviously destructive effect it has on the mind and the body. In gameplay terms, its effects are twofold: pressing the left trigger rapidly heals a portion of your hitpoints, and the right trigger sends your character into a berserk rage during which attacks are dramatically more powerful. Sometimes, your enemies’ heads just explode.

Both effects are supremely useful throughout most of the game, and your usage is constrained only by the amount of the drug you can keep in your syringe. It stores up to three doses at a time, and your means for replenishing doses is nothing short of gut-wrenching. Sometimes, a defeated enemy will hit the floor and, instead of dying outright, begin uncontrollably convulsing in place for several seconds before expiring. This indicates that the enemy in question was hopped up on Nekro, and that it still courses through their collapsing veins. During that period, you can jam your needle into their flesh and draw their blood to refill your syringe. The macabre implication is that you play through the game regularly injecting yourself with the filthy blood of desperate addicts. The story doesn’t really fixate on this implication, but it nevertheless stands out as one of the single darkest narrative devices I can recall from a video game.

What is fixated upon is your character’s stressful relationship with Nekro. It’s made explicitly apparent right from the beginning of Chapter One that you’re physiologically dependent on it, and that you suffer from withdrawals without it. And, several times throughout the story, the action is interrupted while your character experiences a terrifying, hallucinatory meltdown during which the drug is physically embodied as a skull-faced villain who sits upon a throne of heaving cardiac tissue. Hardly a subtle metaphor for the antagonistic malice of addiction, I’ll grant you. But it’s done effectively, and reads as if written by someone who personally experienced the lowliest agonies of addiction. In particular, there’s a heart-rending reflection on how chemical dependency curtails the ability of its sufferers to express willful agency, which culminates in one of the more symbolically elaborate final boss fights I’ve seen.

So, my overall impression of Mother Russia Bleeds was broadly positive, and it stands out in its field for how effectively it balances fun and engaging gameplay against a brutal and chilling narrative. I do have some criticisms, though.

First, all of the problems inherent to the sidescrolling beat-’em-up genre are present and accounted for in MRB: scoring a hit requires you to line up with an enemy along two axes of movement, which is particularly aggravating in high-pressure scenarios or when using a ranged attack; you’ll repeatedly knock enemies off screen and end up twiddling your thumbs while they stand up and limp back into the playspace3; and you’ll sometimes get into unlucky situations where an enemy knocks you back into a group of his fellows, who proceed to stun-lock you and empty a full healthbar in a couple of seconds. These are issues common to every game of this kind I’ve played, and I don’t know if there’s yet been any that ameliorate all of these pain-points — please do tell me in the comments if you know of any, though. Perhaps I just need to get good at sidescrolling brawlers.

Second, there are some issues more particular to MRB. Enemies with aerial attacks are some of the most annoying I’ve ever experienced in any video game, period. Guns are dramatically more effective than punching people, have no readily apparent trade-offs, and are bizarrely common in certain levels. The story is thematically strong but isn’t exceptionally well structured and never gets around to thoroughly developing any of its characters, so the closures of their arcs are largely unsatisfying. Finally, there are two possible endings — one happy, one sad — and the trigger that determines which you get is very awkwardly integrated into the game’s final moments. Without spoilers: the bad ending makes you wonder why it took so long for the bad events to transpire, and the good ending is strangely at odds with the themes the game introduces up to that point.

FINAL WORD

Mother Russia Bleeds was tremendously divisive at the time of its release in 2016. Some critical outlets (e.g., Destructoid) praised it as an excellent and cathartic brawler supported by a unique and compelling narrative premise, while others (e.g., PC Gamer) ruthlessly panned it as a derivative and boring also-ran weighed down by an underrealized attempt at a story.

I find myself somewhere in the middle. The premise and the story, while indeed disjointed, underwritten, and short of reaching their full potentials, were compelling enough to keep me interested in the narrative’s developments. And, mercifully, the story seldom gets in the way of the action for longer than it absolutely needs, and it never breaks the flow of gameplay. Said gameplay is plagued with predictable issues and often veers into frustrating territory, but the general tenor of the experience is satisfying and cathartic. The game’s lowest moments are aggravating slogs that are likely to disappoint genre veterans, and I bet it could’ve done with another month or three of polish. But when everything comes together — when story and gameplay work in harmony with one another — the effect is close to sublime.

MRB has a lot going for it in spite of its many problems. I’d only call it a must-play for completionists of the beat-’em-up genre, but I’d recommend it to just about anybody whose stomach isn’t too sensitive. And, if ever you’re laid out in bed with nose stuffed and sinuses pounding, I can tell you from experience that you could do a lot worse to pass the time.

Thanks for reading to the end! Playing Mother Russia Bleeds got me interested in exploring its genre in greater depth, so I welcome any recommendations for relatively accessible beat-’em-ups (beat-’ems-up?) if you have any — let me know in the comments. I’d also love to hear about your own experiences with this game, whether you loved it, hated it, or merely tolerated it throughout its three-hour runtime.

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“We have a direct, unbroken link to the teachings of Jesus Christ, through the apostolic revelations dating back two millenia, the periodic emanations of Christ in the fabric of our being, solid messianic energy calcified in our very bones,” explains the archbishop when I arrive at the ALEPH Church in the Fiume Special Economic Zone. “We have an esteemed guest staying here at the church.”

I guess the rumors were true. The psychohazards have taken over the churches less than three-hundred miles from the Holy See, and the psycho-orgonic stability of all Pan-Europa is threatened. Sounds like a job for the Europan Federal Police.

On the ninth of May — Europe Day, for those keeping track — the much-awaited Chapter 2 content update dropped for Psycho Patrol R. If you’re new around here, PPR is the spiritual successor and pseudo-prequel to my favorite video game of this decade and one of the most singularly unique gaming experiences presently available on the market. Released into Early Access over a year ago, developer Ville Kallio has been diligently (if very gradually) working toward its eventual completion, and I’ve lately had the distinct pleasure of playing through the second act of its story-in-progress. Interested parties can find my first impressions writeup and my analysis of the game’s narrative design elsewhere on the publication — if you end up wanting more context into this game’s absurdist veneer or the incisive wit beneath it, give those articles a read. That said, I imagine that neophytes to Consumer Softproducts’ design language will get a kick out of experiencing it cold.

In this installment, we’ll recap the events of this new story and occasionally gush over Consumer Softproducts’ utterly unique design and writing. I know most of you are never going to play this game, more’s the pity, so there will be significant and dramatic plot spoilers in the final section. I’ll keep everything before then spoiler-light, though, and I’ll warn you before we get to the heavy stuff.

THE TITANIUM PRINCESS

Thanks to interference on the part of anti-animalization¹ terrorist cells, the airspace between the European Federal Police headquarters and the Adriatic is a no-fly zone, and the most practical alternative is to take the regularly scheduled cruise line to arrive there by sea. The cruise ship Titanium Princess is docked at the Versten Harbor, a major artery of global trade at which no other vessel ever seems to dock. Her enormously elaborate, multi-deck panoply of delirious excess is the first new area introduced to the game with this Chapter Two update.

1Animalization is a process of forced gene-modification used to turn human beings into lesser animals — such as dogs and horses — as a means of punishment. It’s extremely controversial among the Pan-Europan Volk, but one can’t deny its efficacy.

If you’ve ever journeyed on a modern cruise line, then you’ll have a pretty good idea of what to expect from that excess. When Bataille wrote on man’s historical pattern whereby he gloriously wastes what yields of his cannot be recuperated as profit — which long-time readers will remember as the thematic foundation of the generationally excellent Cruelty Squad — his fantasies can’t possibly have strayed far from the reality of the twenty-first century cruise ship. Here we find a series of monuments to consumerism at its most crassly intemperate: duty-free stores packed with megaliters of expensive spirits; a pitch-dark casino in which you’re expected to become lost; and, as is tradition on these vessels, a means of accessing the Internet for an exorbitant fee.

The central conflict on the Princess is a murder mystery, one of those classic tropes of detective work made conspicuous by its absence in Psycho Patrol R until now. The ship’s captain, whom we find standing alongside a flayed and decapitated cadaver in a vulgar luxury suite, explains that the ship cannot proceed on its route until there’s assurance that the murderer is no longer at large. Solving the crime and apprehending the perpetrator is worth a couple hours of self-guided exploration. This is how I came across the casino, where I accidentally lost twenty minutes and several thousand euros to the slot machine mini-game. Long-time readers may further recall that I wrote an entire article anticipating this mini-game, fascinated as I was by developer Ville Kallio’s stated intention to simulate the “machine zone” described by severe gambling addicts. The result is, in my opinion, frighteningly close to realizing that vision. Here, have a look:

I believe this is the first time I’ve ever encountered a slot machine minigame that didn’t bore me into a coma, largely because some serious effort went into designing a unique gameplay conceit.1 It doesn’t have a significant role to play in the game’s progression — at least, none that I’ve yet ascertained — but it’s a remarkably faithful realization of the thoroughly heterodox vision its creator had for it. I could talk about it at length and may well do so eventually. But for now, let’s talk about why we’re really here.

FIUME, THE SIXTH CIRCLE

Chapter Two’s main event is the explosive growth of a strange heresy, whose adherents have suddenly come to believe that Jesus has returned as promised by Christian scripture. The Holy See in Rome is, unsurprisingly, dead-set against this sudden outgrowth of apocalyptic praxis. Meanwhile, the Europan Federal Police (our employer) has a vested stake in silencing it as soon as possible — God forbid the heresy were to spread beyond the Fiume Special Economic Zone, the entire continental economy could be put at risk. Investigation leads us to an enormous cathedral operated by the enigmatic ALEPH Church, whose archbishop is surprisingly forthcoming when we ask about the Second Coming. In fact, he purports to personally host the living Christ in the church’s basement.

But there’s a problem: the hungry savior insists upon a regular diet of the finest Wagyu steaks, which must be cooked all the way through to satisfy his exacting specifications. The local Michelin-starred restaurant has cut the church off for its blasphemous insistence that such fine beef be prepared to such a plebeian standard, so we must either negotiate with the chef or else surreptitiously obtain an overcooked steak by stealthy means. Once we do so, the archbishop invites us down into the church basement to meet our ostensible messiah. We’ll talk about that meeting in the next section after a thorough spoiler warning.

For the remainder of our spoiler-light time together, I want to draw attention to Psycho Patrol R’s most interesting narrative flourish since its handling of Reichian analysis, and it has to do with this investigation’s setting in the Fiume Special Economic Zone. You see, Fiume is the Italian name for what’s now the Croatian city of Rijeka. It’s been an independent free state at a few points since the early eighteenth century, which I imagine is the inspiration for its redesignation as a Special Economic Zone in Psycho Patrol R. But the particularly interesting question is why it was chosen as the setting for this investigation in the first place, and my interpretation is surprisingly Dantean. Indulge me for a moment as I reproduce a selection from Canto IX of the Inferno, in which Dante and Virgil encounter the damned of Hell’s sixth circle:

As at Arles where the Rhone sinks into stagnant marshes,

as at Pola by the Quarnaro Gulf, whose waters

close Italy and wash her farthest reaches,

the uneven tombs cover the even plain—

such fields I saw here, spread in all directions,

except that here the tombs were chests of pain…

And I: “Master, what shades are these who lie

buried in these chests and fill the air

with such a painful and unending cry?”

“These are the arch-heretics of all cults,

with all their followers,” he replied. “Far more

than you would think lie stuffed into these vaults.

Like lies with like in every heresy,

and the monuments are fired, some more, some less,

to each depravity its own degree.”2

In literal terms, Dante describes the endless field of open tombs before him, each imprisoning a large number of heretics who burn in agony for all eternity. He compares it to the vast necropoli that once characterized Arles and Pola, the latter of which shares the coastline of the Quarnaro Gulf with Fiume. That Psycho Patrol R postures the Gulf as epicenter of a vast heresy that challenges the authority of Rome is, I think, too tantalizing a connection to be a coincidence. The archbishop-come-arch-heretic of the ALEPH church has his own subterranean vault from which pain and depravity emanate, and I’m convinced that this Dantean link is further reinforced at the very end of this second act’s story content.

So, keep all of that in mind if you choose to join me over the threshold of spoilers, which lies just beyond this paragraph. If you’re getting off here, let me leave you with my take on this new content update. I like the mystery of the Second Coming even better than the Sodium Lauryl Sulfate Panic, which was already really good. The events immediately following the new case’s resolution set up an even more gonzo third chapter, which I tentatively anticipate will be the game’s final act. Above all, what most impresses me is the tact and intelligence with which Chapter Two’s superficially ludicrous story is told. This brand of deep-fried sociopolitical critique is entirely specific to Consumer Softproducts’ oeuvre, and I think it’s one of the most fascinating experiments going on in indie development right now. If you’re interested in exploring the frontiers of game design and the limits of its expressive capabilities, I urge you to give Psycho Patrol R a try. Also, subscribe to The Spieler if you haven’t already!

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As for the rest of you, read on to discover the unexpected secret of the Second Coming.

SECOND COMING OF TROUBLE

The church basement is mazelike and almost pitch-dark. It takes a bit of wandering before we encounter the lone figure down here with us, and I must admit that I felt genuine tension at the prospect of meeting the most famous member of the tribe. But the man we encounter, clad from head to toe in raiments of bright pink, is certainly no Nazarene. Quite the opposite, actually.

“I’m the CEO of the Supreme Truth beverage company and Jesus Christ reincarnate,” explains the bearded Japanese man before us. “I’m currently in hiding from the authorities because of a little thing I supposedly did in Japan. They have no proof of course, it’s all bullshit bro. We’re going to cause some havoc, but it’s all for the greater good. Don’t get on my bad side bro.”

The man responsible for igniting the heresy of Fiume is none other than Asahara Shoko, who in life was the Supreme Leader of the Aum Shinrikyu doomsday cult and the architect of the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo Subway. Ostensibly executed by the Japanese state in 2018, he now stands before us with a plan to remake society toward his mysterious ends. Specifically, he intends to physically destroy the Vatican by detonating an orgone-based weapon of mass destruction, and he wants us to help him pull it off. The famously charismatic Asahara has no trouble convincing the player character to do so — our job is to break into the heavily guarded power plant on the city’s outskirts and steal the orgone crystal at its core. This leads to what’s probably the second-most challenging sequence in this surprisingly difficult game, which I’ll gloss over for now. I don’t want to spoil every surprise this second act has in store.

After succeeding and returning the crystal to Asahara, he explains that he’ll carry out his plot come midnight. And as soon as the clock strikes thus, we’re shown one of the more shocking cutscenes I’ve ever witnessed. Let me give you just a taste:

Fortunately for the player character, who wakes up hungover in a cave the following morning, nobody has any reason to suspect his involvement in the Vatican’s wholesale annihilation. The Europan Federal Police is quick to seize control of the narrative surrounding the catastrophe, framing it not as a terrorist attack but as a natural disaster caused by psychohazardous religiosity. Cowed by the prospect that such a thing could happen anywhere and at any time without proper intervention, the terrified populace stands by as the EFP assumes near-universal powers of repressive surveillance.

If that strikes you as allegorical, you’re obviously not alone. As I explicated several months ago, Consumer Softproducts has a knack for leveraging its medium to critique the excesses of the Information Age without devolving into toothless political messaging. For a game so quick to reference Wilhelm Reich, R. D. Laing, and Dante Alighieri, there’s a remarkable absence of the pretentious navel-gazing to which online intellectualism — what passes for it, anyway — has conditioned us. Instead, there’s a consistent abundance of incisive humor and thought-provoking commentary, all paced out with periodic outbursts of extraordinary depravity. This is roughly how I imagine it’d feel to play a video game adaptation of Caligula, and I mean that as high praise indeed.

That’ll be all for this edition. Expect more from me on Psycho Patrol R as it continues to evolve. If you’ve found time to try it yourself, or if you’d like to share your impressions from reading about it, tell me all about it in the comments! Thanks very much for reading all the way through, by the way — I tried to keep this one shorter in keeping with my ongoing experiment into a more manageable writing schedule, but then I started gushing about this crazy-ass game and the length began to balloon. I’ll see ya next week for something terser and more broadly accessible.

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STRIKE UP THE WARBAND

I remember the Summer of 2012 with a great, intoxicating fondness. In particular, I remember leisure time well spent — I became proficient with weapons of all sorts, traveled the countryside in search of mercantile opportunity and martial glory, and ordered the grizzled footpads at my command to hack down restive peasants in their dozens whenever they insolently resisted my band’s expropriation of their silver and livestock. Truly, those two months at debate camp were some of the finest of my youth.

But aside from the scholastic routine, I also spent a great deal of my freetime playing Mount & Blade: Warband, in which I did much of the same. A noted exemplar of the experimental spirit that characterized the RPG revival of the 2010s, the Mount & Blade franchise is practically unequaled as an innovator and standard-bearer of the form. It’s an unimpeachable triumph of RPG design and one of my very favorite games of all time, and it’s grown an enormous base of creative devotees over its lifespan. Their work continues to draw attention even as its most celebrated installment is now sixteen years old. This week, we’re going to have a look at some of the most noteworthy projects in that vein.

But first, a quick foreword on the game for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure. Mount & Blade: Warband, first released in 2010, is a standalone expansion pack to the 2008 medieval roleplaying game Mount & Blade. The series’ premise is as follows: you create a character, choose from among a wide variety of skills in which to specialize them, and are then loosed into an open world of feudal intrigue and ceaseless conflict. You build your wealth and reputation by traveling around and solving local problems — or exacerbating them — and cultivate the titular warband, a personal retinue of irregulars whom you can eventually grow into a proper army at your command. The Mount & Blade series features an essentially unique amalgamation of open-world roleplaying and tense field battles, and its habit-forming systems have rendered it one of modern gaming’s most celebrated RPGs. Its sequel, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, was announced in 2012 and finally released a decade later to jeering confusion, although popular opinion seems to be gradually consolidating in its favor as the years go on.1 Meanwhile, 2010’s Warband retains a large and devoted playerbase to this very day.

If you ask me, the substantial and enduring popularity of the Mount & Blade formula is not at all surprising. It gives voice to the hunger for power and solidity that grows to fill in the vacuum left behind by the recession of wages and social cohesion. As our hateful world of shadows continues to fracture into disorganized cliques of brainrotted discontent, who among us has not dreamed of gathering unto ourselves a band of fearsome belligerents to do our bidding and to die at our whims? To hear the wailing lamentations of the foe as his wattle burns and his cattle are harried away? To barge uninvited into the monarch’s halls and avail ourselves of his drink while ineptly declaiming flirtatious poetry to his daughter? All this and more is to be found in the core experience of Mount & Blade: Warband, and nobody save the well adjusted and temporally fulfilled is liable to resist its pull.

I return to Warband every so often to drink in its charming aura and to bask in the warm, soothing radiance of late-2000s nostalgia. The vanilla experience, in which you gallivant around the fictional land of Calradia in search of fame and fortune, still holds up very well. I almost never bother, though, because Warband is one of the most modded video games of all time, and its modding community counts among its numbers some of the most obsessive and dedicated creatives known to modern gaming. Despite the popularity of its (also highly moddable) sequel, Warband is still being actively modded even in 2026, and there are some genuinely astonishing feats of effort and passion among its archives. Some of these are astounding works of heavily researched historical fiction that leverage the game’s systems to enable fulfilling personal narratives. Others are so singularly deliberate in manifesting the visions and desires of their creators that they border on a kind of outsider art whose medium is the game’s roleplaying engine. More still are some combination of the two.

One of the great, underappreciated virtues of modding is how it lowers the barrier to entry for artistic expression through the medium of game design. Given a preexisting engine, a suite of interrelated gameplay mechanics, and an aesthetic upon which to build, a modder can ideate and create a holistic experience with a fraction of the time and effort required of making a game from whole cloth. Naturally, one’s latitude for deviation from the source material varies based on the nature of the game in question. Mount & Blade: Warband has both first-class modding support and a straightforward conceit that can map onto any number of reimaginings, and so it’s no wonder that its modding community exhibits some of the most varied and adventurous projects in all of modern gaming. I’m going to highlight four of them this week, which I list in ascending order of deviation from Mount & Blade’s original premise. And, of course, I welcome your input in the comments if you have any others to share.

Anno Domini 1257 (Various developers) | ModDB

The core of the Mount & Blade franchise is a highly interactive simulation of feudal society, set on a fictional2 continent where various factions vie for dominance. It’s the sort of medieval fantasy setting in which a kingdom of vikings might prosecute a war against a desert sultanate. Accordingly, the groundedness of the game’s systems and simulations doesn’t really extend into the narratives that emerge through gameplay. So, one of the most obvious directions one could take in modding it would be to replace the fictionalized land and polities with examples from real history.

Somewhat less obvious would be to recreate the entire landmass of thirteenth-century Europe and to populate it with every major polity that was historically attested in the era. But that’s precisely what the developers of Anno Domini 1257 set out to accomplish, and the result is one of the most ambitious total conversions ever completed. The stated intention of the mod’s team was a maximally accurate representation of Europe and its surroundings as they existed at this point in the high middle ages, and only the Crusader Kings franchise has definitively exceeded their efforts in that regard. The in-game map spans everything from the Holy Land to the Hebrides, all populated with on-map factions reflecting the historical nations of the period. There are hundreds of historical characters with whom to interact, and dozens of culturally appropriate unit types from which to assemble an international warband.

If you caught me at a jog, I might call AD 1257 my very favorite Warband mod. Regular readers know how much I value games that foreground player-driven storytelling as a central feature of gameplay, and few sandboxes create as much opportunity for versatile narrativization as this one. In my most memorable campaign from around a decade ago, I grew a reputation as a warlord in the British Isles, established an independent kingdom in Wales, then rode all the way to the Holy Land and seized Jerusalem as the new realm’s crown jewel. The only other game I can think of that facilitates anything remotely similar is Crusader Kings 3 with the 2024 Roads to Power expansion, but even that takes place entirely at the strategic level and lacks the third-person battles that draw one so deeply into the story. There’s nothing quite like AD 1257, and it’s the mod on this list that I’d most strongly recommend you actually download and play.

1860s Old America (Gabrilduro) | ModDB

As I mentioned earlier, Mount & Blade’s simple conceit of freely adventuring around an open world in search of glory is tremendously adaptable. Indeed, it’s one of the most common premises not only in roleplaying games but in human cultural expression more generally. So, where AD 1257 replaced the medieval-fantasy setting with medieval history, 1860s Old America replaces it with a more recent example of frontier adventure, i.e., America’s westward expansion in the mid-nineteenth century. The historical ubiquity of firearms is seamlessly integrated via the inheritance of mechanics from Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword, and everything else is left up to the astounding devotion of the mod’s creator.

The enigmatic Gabrilduro, near enough the sole developer of 1860s Old America, is an extraordinary character whose consuming obsession with the American Old West is evident from the mod’s homepage alone. Once you actually download and play it, the sheer effort on display is absolutely staggering. Warband’s feudal fiefdoms and their staid environs are replaced altogether by gold-rush boomtowns, dusty pueblos, and towering mesas overlooking the westernmost battlegrounds of the American Civil War. The work that went into creating assets to reflect all of this — buildings, weapon models, clothing textures, and so on — quite possibly exceeds the work that went into assets for Mount & Blade itself. I can say with some confidence that the only Old West-themed game with greater scope was Red Dead Redempton. And until Rockstar finally released an official port of RDR in 2024, 1860s Old America was the most engrossing representation of the setting available to the PC gamer.

That comparison aside, 1860s Old America exhibits only incidental similarities to its fanciest peer in the stable of games about the Old West — the core experience is unmistakably Mount & Bladian. You’ll still traipse about a large open world, getting into scrapes with the locals and gradually accumulating resources and manpower as your reputation grows. But you’ll do so against a gorgeously realized backdrop of America’s Western Frontier, and this particular vision is remarkably effective at tempering our broadly idealized conception thereof with historically grounded portrayals of the lawless violence that characterized the Old West in reality. It’s one of the most beloved Warband total conversions for good reason, and the only caveat to my recommendation is that it’s rather notoriously unpolished where writing and technical stability are concerned. Nevertheless, all Warband veterans owe it to themselves to give it a try at least once.

Gangs of Glasgow (Mr Pibb) | ModDB

Alright, enough with these celebrations of attestable history. We’re about to depart quite substantially from the realms of historical verisimilitude, so I think it’s best that I introduce Gangs of Glasgow as it introduces itself when a new game begins.

“You are in Glasgow, Scotland, a city divided by age-old sectarian hatreds and territorial gang violence. In the last few days the city has entered an even more noticeable downward spiral than usual, with all-out warfare breaking out between the various gangs, and unprecedented levels of brutality being shown by the Polis...

The State has responded with its customary tact and intelligence to the demands of the people by filling the city centre with lawless Snatch Squads in blacked out Police vans, and breaking out the firearms from their vaults. But who gives a fuck about any of that shite, eh. It’ll only be a couple of hours till the pubs open again!”

Originally a mod for the OG Mount & Blade from 2008, Gangs of Glasgow was ported to Warband several years ago and thus brought a new audience of gawking onlookers (myself included) to its interactive commentary on modern Scotland as the nation was perceived by its creator circa 2008. Like AD 1257 and 1860s Old America, it features some remarkably high-effort original assets that translate Warband’s medieval-fantasy aesthetic into an entirely distinct vision: undeveloped forests are replaced with concrete cityscapes; swords and shields give way to improvised armaments like broomsticks and streetsigns; bread and beer become tinned pies and Buckfast Tonic Wine; and instead of calling upon monarchs in their castles, you’ll travel between pubs and conduct diplomacy with their landlords.

Unlike either of the two aforementioned projects, however, GoG is more of a playable social commentary than an RPG to be enjoyed for its emergent narrativization. Its vision of a modern community deprived and depraved by the chaos of the global financial crisis is, while unflinchingly sardonic, clearly from a place of sincere affection. There’s a certain poignancy to the replication of massed melee combat, fought not by honor-bound vassals in service of feudal ideals but by gaggles of ordinary folk without much to look forward to. The impact is deliberately softened by the mod’s ceaseless stream of in-jokey humor, but the sum of its parts is eerily faithful to the psychology of its depicted era if not its precise realities.

Another standout aspect of GoG’s creation is that, more than any other project on this list, it exemplifies the point I made earlier about how modding reduces the barrier to entry for expressing oneself through game design. In a 2023 post on ModDB, its creator purported to have never learned how to script Mount & Blade: Warband or even how to properly operate its module system.3 Instead, GoG was put together almost exclusively with third-party tools from the late 2000s, and it all goes to show how games-modding and the communities that form around it can facilitate the realization of complex and expressive visions without the need for industry expertise or even robust technical know-how. There are caveats, of course — Gangs of Glasgow is one of the buggiest and most crash-prone mods I’ve ever played — but they don’t diminish the effect of a dedicated creator’s vision if said vision is pursued with sincerity and devotion.

And, speaking of...

Paradigm Worlds (Karol Grodecki) | ModDB

Every time I try to summarize Paradigm Worlds, I’m overcome by the unaccountable notion that something important has been left out. Indeed, accurately and tersely summarizing the experience is probably impossible. Even the summary given by the developer on the ModDB page leaves one with far more questions than answers:

“Imagine Star Wars fighting with Sauron, Steampunk conspiring against [fifteenth] century Europe, Aliens fighting Djiniis, Orc fighting Morloks, Uruks fighting agains Alien Pirates! Swords, Axes, Lightsabers, Flintlock, Laser Cannons, Plasma Blasters, Arqebusiers, Blunderbuses, Antique Shields and Energy Fields, Crossbows, Magic Staves and Bows, Arrows, whatever you can imagine - now in one, huge mod with exceptional mechanics.”

That’s already a premise and a half, but I’d say it articulates less than one percent of the experience of playing Paradigm Worlds. God forbid you should find your way to the officially endorsed fan-site, you’ll put your very sanity at risk as you peruse the alternative history of the mod’s expansive fiction. It begins with the genetic enhancement of Generalissimus Vladimir Putin into a state of cybernetic immortality, followed by several centuries of near-omnicidal war that extinguishes almost all of humankind. Some kind of weaponized super-virus causes accelerated evolution that gives rise to a host of new para-human genotypes, and the events that follow span some eight-thousand years of delirious canon that the mod’s creator affectionately describes as “a cosmogenic tower of babel.”

The game itself is about as overscoped as a mod can possibly get, which I don’t necessarily intend as a criticism. Paradigm Worlds retains the core mechanics of Warband, but expands upon them with a mind-boggling horde of new systems, most of which are exhaustively justified by in-universe lore. Mutations, nanotechnological augmentations, and an astonishingly detailed simulation of individual characters’ psychologies are some of the most noteworthy, alongside the block-capitalized DOOMSDAY CLOCK that threatens to unleash a terrible army of hell upon the Paradigm Worlds that seeks the annihilation of all life. Said army’s leader, the Dark Motherwhore of Chaos and Despair, is — I think — the game’s principal antagonist, and preventing her (?) rise is the central objective of a PW campaign.

To be perfectly frank, my own experience playing Paradigm Worlds was an exercise in bottomless confusion. I chose to play as an Alien, a race so named for its bizarre appearance rather than any extraterrestrial origin whose society is organized around a facsimile of Edo-period Bushido. I got into a fight with a band of cybernetic monstrosities flayed bare of skin, and eventually mutated into an ambulatory skeleton for reasons that I never quite figured out. The closest comparison I can give is to playing Cruelty Squad, which similarly overwhelms the senses in an effort to cajole you into a reflective journey over the shoreless sea of imagination. The major difference from Cruelty Squad is that I have no idea what messages — if any — Paradigm Worlds intends to communicate to its player.

As I say, summarizing Paradigm Worlds is effectively impossible. The mod exhibits the tell-tale characteristics of the neurodivergent art project, alongside signs of a frenzied mania that the developer enthusiastically embraced for inspiration and motivation. In the decade since its release, PW has grown into a multidisciplinary universe of prosaic fiction and spin-off games. And, at the end of 2024, its creator announced an ambitious project to fully realize the universe in a series of standalone, Unreal Engine-powered games yet to come. Given all of this, I’m confident in my assessment that Paradigm Worlds represents the furthest extent of unbridled creativity in the Warband modding scene, and it’s certainly a candidate for the most expansive fan project in contemporary gaming at large. Check it out if you’re an experienced Warband player, but be sure to set aside an hour or so to learn the ropes on the abovementioned fansite, and brace yourself for a veritable assault of auteur game design.

And there you have four of what I’d consider the most noteworthy modding projects for a game absolutely inundated with noteworthy modding projects over its sixteen-year lifespan. Mount & Blade: Warband is still getting new mods and new updates to old mods, and it’s all a testament to the expansive versatility and storytelling potential of its systems and mechanics. Naturally, in discussing just four fan projects, I could barely scratch the surface of the creative energy that exudes from this property. I may well return to the subject some day — we didn’t even touch on fantasy epics like Prophecy of Pendor or the one about nationalism and revolution circa 1923.

I’ve been meaning to write about Mount & Blade: Warband for ages, and I figured the best way to express my admiration for the game and its community was to showcase a handful of said community’s most stand-out work. I would, of course, be delighted to hear from you in the comments if you have any memories to share about Warband, or if you have any other mods to suggest for this game or its fellows in the M&B franchise.

Next week, assuming all goes to plan, we’ll take a look at the new content update for what may be the most abstract game of the 2020s thus far. See ya then!

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“Nobreans are proving more resistant to the present SNC economic restructuring than expected,” euphemizes the mission briefing in its characteristically portentous manner. “The SNC has selected four statues of Great Leader for removal from the Vorobey Necropolis for its potentially heightened psychological effect on the local population.” Leaving aside the proliferation of city-sized boneyards, it’s a tale as old as time.

The Solo Nobre Concern, my employer, has designs on the planet’s foremost memorial complex. The Necropolis bustles with activity. Much more so than one would expect of a graveyard. Maybe it’s because almost everyone on the planet knows somebody who’s buried here, or perhaps it’s because the native ivy winding throughout the district is so powerfully narcotic. The Nobreans — those native to the sprawling city-state of Solo Nobre — have much they’d like to forget. Many have found their way here as tourists-come-pilgrims, all seeking the soothing repose offered by the Necropolis’ tranquil environs and its intoxicating flora. Many of them are on the streets even now, desperately running for what little cover I haven’t yet atomized. Now and then, one of them wanders under the towering actuators of my mech’s legs and bursts into a crimson mist of blood and viscera as the foot comes down.

Much more formidable than the raincoat-clad noncombatants are the forces of the populist resistance that currently occupy the Necropolis. Their vehicles are built for function over form, as attested by their tanks whose armor is composed from a stack of derelict sedans that towers several dozen feet into the air. Their great height enables them to fire salvos over top of multi-story cover when they spot me, for which my preferred recourse is to fire my directed energy weapons into said cover until it’s level with the ground. I proceed in this manner until all four statues of Solo Nobre’s recently deceased Great Leader are toppled. What few civilians remain seem more terrified than grateful, which is perhaps rightfully so. With Great Leader out of the way, my employer’s primary interest is in redeveloping Solo Nobre in its own corporatist image. Accordingly, it pays generous bonuses for collateral damage.

This past week, I played the new demo for Brigador Killers, a forthcoming project from indie studio Stellar Jockeys. It’s billed as an “isometric insurgent simulator” on its Steam page, which is surely one of the more eye-catching marketing blurbs I can recall from the gaming industry’s recent past. In essence, it’s an isometric shooter set in a cyberpunk dystopia that inherits the style and fiction of its 2016 predecessor while considerably reshaping its core gameplay. As I understand it, its central premise is that you play as the folks who were displaced and brutalized by your actions in the first game, seeking revenge for the injustices of the past. The demo left me hungry for more, and I couldn’t help but reinstall said first game. That’ll be our subject for this week.

A Brief Review of Brigador (2016)

Where even to begin with Brigador? I suppose it’d be instructive to start with the vision of its creators. Stellar Jockeys, the brainchild of brothers Hugh and Jack Monahan, “endeavor[s] to give to players the sort of lovingly detailed and hand-crafted game experiences they grew up with in the golden era of PC gaming,” according to the studio’s official website. “Their goal is nothing less than total domination of dark science-fiction action games with too much lore in them.”

This goal was achieved in spades by their debut title, as long as one uses a metric other than sales or media attention. Brigador is a vehicular combat game that, despite its legendarily excellent gameplay and presentation, went miserably underappreciated in its day on account of the studio’s difficulties with generating awareness. Luckily for us, the folks at Stellar Jockeys knew they had something special on their hands and continued to support the project for years afterward. Getting to the bottom of what makes this game special turns out to be pretty complicated, because there’s a lot that sets Brigador apart.

Might as well begin with the title and the premise. In the game’s thoroughly realized fictional universe, a Brigador is a mercenary who performs contract work for the Solo Nobre Concern, a shell corporation of a vast interstellar conglomorate that seeks to establish political dominion over the enormous colonial city-state of Solo Nobre. The city was until recently under the exclusive control of the Novo Exército do Povo, itself an appendage of the enigmatic Great Leader, who is freshly dead as the game begins. Like many post-colonial successor states, the NEP invested profligately in military infrastructure, and its many surface-to-space artillery installations render a full-scale invasion impractical. That’s where the Brigadors come in: already on the planet for other reasons and enthusiastic to get off of it, they take contracts from the SNC to facilitate its forthcoming corporate restructuring of the planet and its denizens.

There’s a lot that separates the universe of Brigador from your average cyberpunk dystopia, and it means to communicate as much of that as possible right from its first impression. Readers with a flair for the Lusophonic may already have noticed the unusual density of Portuguese in my brief explanation of the premise above. According to Jack Monahan, this is done for want of creating a more textured and distinct backdrop than is typical of sci-fi games with space-colonial settings. The implication that Portugal and/or Brazil and/or their descendants were major players in space colonization is (as far as I’m aware) unique to this setting, and it creates opportunities for storytelling unreliant upon the overworked tropes of contemporary sci-fi.1

“Brigador,” meanwhile, is Portuguese for “fighter,” and the fighting in this game is some of the most destructive and high-octane on the market. From the cockpits of mechs, tanks, and various flavors of anti-gravity conveyance, you’re to carry on the speculative legacy of Brazilian/Portuguese space colonization. Your means for so doing are the violent annihilation of any being or construction that stands in your path.

But before you fire a shot, Brigador has one hell of a first impression to deliver. The first thing you’ll notice is the music composed by Makeup and Vanity Set, which oscillates between melodic synths during moments of calm and crushing bass when the action picks up — it was so well received that the OST is now sold in two full volumes and two additional bonus EPs. Then there’s the 2D artwork, which is extraordinary. Your first exposure to it is in the portraits of the playable pilots, each instantly evocative and absolutely sodden with personality. They combine to give a strong intuition for the larger-than-life characters that interplanetary mercenary work tends to draw.

Once you find your way into a mission, you’re met with a similarly impressive triumph of 2D artwork as you navigate the cosmopolitan streets of Solo Nobre and its surroundings. Every vehicle in Brigador — and there are dozens of them — began as a detailed 3D model that was then baked into a collection of 2D sprites that represent it from many different angles, and so they all blend perfectly into the isometric, 2D spritework that makes up the environmental artwork. I’ve written before about my enduring admiration for great isometric game art, and the effort on display in this game stands alongside the form’s very greatest. Then there’s the gameplay. Good God, the gameplay. Here, just have a look at this fifteen-second sample:

Brigador is fundamentally a game about destruction, both literal and metaphorical. Mostly literal, though — every mission requires you to destroy military infrastructure, enemy vehicles, or both, and nearly the entirety of every single map is destructible. Most campaign missions offer you a selection of pilots to choose from, and their various loadouts come with bespoke tactical considerations that add a palpable depth and richness to the game’s progression. It supports a variety of gameplay styles: some pilots favor tiny, stealthy vehicles that’re well suited to hit-and-run tactics; some command gigantic monstrosities that can flatten entire neighborhoods; still others have entirely unique playstyles all their own. No matter what, though, you’ll spend hours gallivanting across the planet of Novo Solo, destroying everything that would obstruct your fell and terrible mission. With the money you earn from so doing, you can buy permanent access to your favorite vehicles and weapons for use in the Freelance missions later on.

This is the sort of game whose primary gameplay is so addictive and cathartic that it could’ve gotten away without any kind of story context at all. However, recall from above Stellar Jockeys’ stated intention: “total domination of dark science-fiction action games with too much lore in them.” This game comes with exhaustive story context, drip-fed throughout the campaign and purchased in bulk through the Acquisitions interface. Alongside equipping yourself for Freelance missions, purchasing lore documents is among the major uses of the money you earn for playing. Every named character, every weapon, every location, and more besides are catalogued, and they even produced a goddamn audio book whose in-universe story further expands on the game’s elaborate canon. Stellar Jockeys could easily have foregone all of these additional details, but chose instead to make them a core part of the game’s progression. It reflects a dedication to the vision for Brigador, and the finished product is triumphant in its glorious excess.

A LESSON IN PASSION

So, it should go without saying that Brigador gets my enthusiastic recommendation. Note well, however, that it has a bit of a learning curve. Controlling a gigantic vehicle in an isometric 2D game is a hard problem to solve from a design perspective, and this is probably where the average player will encounter the most friction. It’s playable with a controller, but I strongly recommend you use a mouse and keyboard — contrary to the impression one might get from watching gameplay footage, this is decidedly not a twin-stick shooter, and playing it as if it were is asking for trouble when the challenge ramps up. This is a tank game at its core, and you’ll have the smoothest experience if you configure it to play as such. To do so, go into the options menu and change the control paradigm from “Screen Absolute” to “Relative.”

I’d like to close on a valuable lesson in creative persistence as exemplified by Brigador’s development. See, this game took around five years to make and was completely self-funded by its team. Stellar Jockeys’ co-founder Hugh Monahan purported to have gained thirty pounds, a vitamin D deficiency, and a panic disorder over the course of developing the project on which he and his team effectively staked their professional futures.2 Imagine, then, how crushing it must have been when Brigador flopped harder than an NBA player on barbiturates. Sales were marginal, and media coverage was so thin on the ground that it didn’t even get a Metacritic score at first. Results that dismal have often been the death-knell for otherwise promising new studios, and most indie developers quit after debuting to crickets. Even in the higher echelons of professional game development, there are new examples every year of expensive projects that’re unceremoniously killed off after failing to meet lofty expectations.

Not so for Stellar Jockeys, who put far too much of themselves into the game to give up on it. They kept working on Brigador post-launch and released the acclaimed Up-Armored Edition a year later, which made strides in accessibility and polish. The game saw dramatically improved sales thereafter, and eventually made enough of a cushion to justify the announcement of a direct sequel in 2019. We’re finally getting it in Brigador Killers, and I cannot overstate my excitement to see what the lessons of the past decade have wrought for this excellent and still-underrated studio. The story of Brigador is one of a dedication to artistic integrity and creative passion, and I can’t wait to see what comes next for its team.

Thanks for reading to the end? Have you played Brigador or the demo for Brigador Killers? Tell me about your impressions in the comments!

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Regular readers know that wargames of various flavors have historically occupied a lot of the free time I could’ve spent on studying or other kinds of tangible self-improvement. There’s an irreplicable satisfaction to be had from getting one’s head around the deeply complex and baroquely interwoven systems that tend to characterize these games, and the experience of playing them can reach remarkable heights of exhilaration after one develops the requisite mastery of the mechanics. My favorite wargames and wargame-adjacent strategy titles, including such like as Shadow Empire and Europa Universalis, feature densely stat-driven combat supported by intricate simulations of economy and politics.

For the longest time, I assumed that the appeal at the heart of these military strategy games had less to do with winning engagements and everything to do with wrangling their simulations to produce desirable states in line with one’s crude fantasies of dominion. In short, my theory stipulates that, although primary gameplay revolves mostly around managing the operational tactics of your units, it’s given meaning and depth by the context surrounding it. That is, the sources of engagement in these games are the actions you take and the decisions you make that set up the circumstances under which you actually do the tactical management. Total War wouldn’t be half as engaging without the empire management to undergird and contextualize its battles, and Hearts of Iron would be thin indeed if all you did was micromanage your units along a front… right?

Perhaps, but now I’ve been given pause for thought about what martial strategy games truly need in order to create lasting player engagement. This past week, I played a pair of games that constrain themselves to comparatively meager systemic inventories: Sophie Games’ Lines of Battle, and TeaAndPython’s War of Dots. Each goes for a synthesis of engrossing and addictive core gameplay centered wholly around large-scale operational tactics, all while employing the bare minima of the genre’s base elements. Both are capable of producing transient flow states not unlike those to which EU4 et al. have accustomed me, and, most remarkably of all, the strength of those states seems inversely proportional to the mechanical complexity of the games themselves. This week, we’re going to have a look at these two ultra-streamlined wargames and see if we can’t isolate the source of their appeal.

LINES OF BATTLE (2024)

Lines of Battle by Sophie Games is a thoroughly researched and deeply tactical battle simulator with historical grounding in the Napoleonic era and a mechanical foundation with much of the Total War franchise about it. Its uniqueness lies in its stripped-back approach to presenting its tactical gameplay, which features a strictly symbolic representation of the men at your command. Representing a hundred-man unit of line infantry as a small rectangle may lack the visceral turmoil you’d get from a clash between individually modeled soldiers in a Total War game, but this means the designer’s focus can shift toward the combat simulation itself. There’s a remarkable depth to the titular battles in Lines of Battle, and an accordingly significant verisimilitude to its engagements. It’s also very easy to pick up and play, not least because its current incarnation is completely free and playable in-browser.

What really separates Lines of Battle from its game-mechanical peers in the Total War franchise, aside from the minimal presentation, is the total abdication of secondary gameplay beyond the battles themselves. There’s no campaign map, no economy, no unit recruitment, and no international diplomacy that doesn’t involve shooting notional Prussians in their notional guts. You set up individual battles and the relative strength of each side, then get thrown right in to manage your units’ movement and battlefield tactics until a victor is decided. That’s really all there is to it, and the elimination of ancillary systems means that all of the developer’s focus can be dedicated to making a great combat simulation.

The implementation thereof is built around simultaneous turns, and it works quite well. You individually assign orders to your units — various UI shortcuts make this quite efficient once you figure them out — and then press a button to confirm. Then the simulation runs for a few seconds, during which each side’s units simultaneously execute their orders. Then the simulation is again paused, and you have an opportunity to react to the evolving battlefield before running the next turn. The usual effect of this arrangement is as follows: the first few turns are very quiet and tense as your units approach the center of the field, not yet able to detect the enemy; then a couple turns will pass during which skirmishers clash with their counterparts; then you’ll hear the booming of artillery pieces as they come within range of the enemy; and finally, the infantry lines will make it to the frontline, begin firing, and turn the entire field into a chaotic, gunsmoke-blanketed hell.

On broad analysis, what Lines of Battle lacks in visceral imagery is mostly made up for by the strategic depth of the simulation. I keep comparing its battle mechanics to Total War, but the truth is that its simulation is actually deeper than what you’d find in several of those titles. That’s probably why it ultimately failed to hold my attention for very long. I eventually ran into the same psychological barrier that’s always kept me from getting properly stuck into the Total War games: I find myself managing twenty-odd individual units, each with their own individually tracked statistics, and each of those interacting with one another in frequently unintuitive ways, and the cognitive burden of accounting for all of this at the level of individual unit tactics overwhelms my desire to press on. I tend to prefer wargames that abstract away the management of individual ranks within an army, and it begs the question of how much I’d like a game in which high-level army tactics were the only thing going.

WAR OF DOTS (2026)

Then I played the matter-of-factly titled War of Dots by TeaAndPython, and that question was answered: quite a lot, actually.

War of Dots is, to put it diplomatically, one of the most unpretentiously presented games upon which I have ever laid eyes. Here, just have a look:

What you see in War of Dots is precisely what you get. In essence, the game revolves around managing a frontline by strategically pinning, encircling, and overwhelming enemy armies with your own. In service of this are exactly two unit types: infantry (a dot) and armor (a dot with a circle in the middle). The enemy — either other human players or a fairly capable computer opponent — will take advantage of any undefended pathway to your cities, so you’re to block their means of ingress with the bodies of your men. Attacking into a defended position is a losing proposition unless you have some kind of tactical ace up your sleeve, which causes the natural emergence of a frontline that dynamically updates as units make progress or are forced to fall back. Well-placed armor divisions can punch through infantry, which creates opportunities for encirclements that grant local superiority to the clever tactician. Any experienced player of Hearts of Iron will be familiar with the core mechanism here, and with the rush one gets from pulling it off.

What may surprise said HoI player, though, is the extent to which tactical positioning of units is foregrounded at the expense of practically every other system. Creating new units, for example, is almost entirely out of the player’s hands: you generate funds every second based on a simple formula, and new units are automatically fielded when you reach a certain threshold. Common wargaming systems such as air support, resource management, and technological progression are entirely absent. There are naval mechanics, sort of — any unit can simply move into water, and will then transform into a boat after a few seconds of uninterrupted preparation. It can then turn back into its corresponding land unit after a three-second disembarkment, opening up naval invasion as a tactical option in your arsenal without the added complexity of shipbuilding or sea-zone control.

And, I must say, the effect it achieves through this aggressive distillation of established wargaming mechanics is incredibly stimulating. Free from all ancillary considerations of economy, politics, and indeed most warmaking strategy, War of Dots brings you straight to the most dopaminergic part of an operational tactics game and lets that alone carry the entire experience. I wouldn’t have thought such a thing would work if you pitched it to me in a vacuum, but I can’t deny that it does. Startlingly, the feeling of perverse glee I feel after completing a nutty encirclement doesn’t seem appreciably dampened by the lack of broader strategic context around it. This realization forced me to reconsider what exactly draws me to wargames in the first place, and that’s what I’d like to think over for the rest of this installment.

THE LIZARD-BRAIN APPEAL OF WARGAMING

Wargames certainly support a power fantasy of sorts, but they’re distinct from the workaday power fantasies to which popular media has acclimated us. It’s not like Gears of War or Doom or Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, in which you enjoy the fantasy of embodying a single warrior who can individually slaughter hundreds of foes. Instead, one enjoys the fantasy of sending very ordinary people to die in their thousands in service of one’s whims, however arbitrary those may or may not be.

No, these games are power fantasies in the Machiavellian sense of “power.” They might be more accurately termed something like “control fantasies” in which you’re given a fanciful degree of influence over the wills of your subjects and can shape whole societies in accordance with your desires. Some games of this ilk, perhaps most notably Hearts of Iron IV, are all but constructed around that fanciful influence — you can decide, essentially by fiat, to install a fascist regime in Canada or a democratic republic in Nazi Germany, and the game will not only accommodate you but give you tools to directly facilitate it. It might even offer to sell you a DLC flavor-pack to lend the fantasy a veneer of groundedness. Of course, these mechanics are ultimately secondary to the large-scale combat simulations that give the wargaming genre its name and its core identity, and the real control fantasy is in commanding men and resources in the theater of battle.

After all, what greater power fantasy could there be than that of commanding hundreds of thousands of men to march into the line of enemy fire and have them obey without hesitation? The Doomslayer might kill a few thousand demons of hell throughout the campaign of a given Doom sequel, but that pales in comparison to the blood spilt at the command of an empowered military strategist. It’s the manipulation of wills not in service of constructive, political ends, but toward the deconstruction of an order that would impede those ends. It operates on a cathartic principle of dominance and is enhanced by the satisfaction inherent to overcoming an intellectual challenge. It just so happens that the intellectual challenge in question is that of maximally efficient slaughter.

Of course, there’s a balance to be struck. To inure oneself to killing is bad for the soul, and, in my opinion, the best wargames don’t allow the player to lose sight of the human cost of their actions. Shadow Empire is my favorite in the genre precisely because every casualty is reflected not just in his unit’s reduced combat readiness stats, but also in the attitudes of your non-combatant citizens back home. Even War of Dots, for all its presentational streamlining, will still play the sound of a man screaming in agony from time to time as the battle rages. A minor flourish, to be sure, but it’s enough to keep one’s experience from degenerating into a thoughtless exercise of limitless power. The most empowering wargaming fantasy of all is also the most empowering fantasy in real-life warmaking, i.e., to realize peace while spilling as little blood as possible.

Thanks so much for reading to the end. If you’re a fan of strategy games where operational tactics are paramount, then the two games we discussed this week are easy recommendations. Both are free. Lines of Battle is playable in-browser with a Steam version forthcoming, and War of Dots is a free download on Steam. If you’ve only got time for one, make it War of Dots — I think it exhibits the better ratio of complexity to enjoyability. Let me know in the comments if you give or have given either of these a try.

Before we close out, a quick update on the publication. First, the good news: at over 200 Subscribers, The Spieler continues its trend of steady growth, and my confidence in our shared project — that of enhancing the dignity of game design as a modern artform — remains high. Now, the other news: between looking for work in a dreadfully shitty job market and scraping together a few dozen billable hours in contract work here and there, I’ve got less time than ever to invest back into the publication and growth has palpably slowed relative to past trends.

This is obviously a consequence of how little time I’ve spent on self-promotion and engagement with the broader games-writing ecosystem, and getting a handle on that is a near-term priority of mine. I considered dropping back to a bi-weekly publishing cadence, but I’ve really come to value the structure I get from putting these newsletters out each week. On the other hand, I think the average quality of my work over the past several weeks has suffered somewhat from my petty insistence on dropping a 2,500-word essay each week even while my time for doing so is limited. A compromise, then: going forward, I’m going to publish longer-form work every other week and shorter-form musings on individual games in between. It’ll be a great excuse to finally begin working through my veritable CVS receipt of games I’ve been meaning to write about.

Looking forward to the next chapter! Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see ya next week.

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It’s hard to write effective horror these days for the same reason it’s hard to write effective satire. Just as The Onion struggles lately to invent headlines more asinine or ribald than the world it satirizes, it takes real skill to invent a horror scenario that breaks through the nightmarish discontent to which we’ve all been forcibly inured. I suppose that goes some way toward explaining the state of horror cinema, and why horror films that aren’t legacy IP reboots or gimmicky trash produced for D-tier streaming services are pretty thin on the ground.

Video games, meanwhile, have exhibited the opposite problem for years now. Since anybody with a hundred bucks and a tax ID can list a game on Steam, and because horror games require little in the way of mechanical sophistication relative to most other genres, the market is absolutely sodden with low-effort dreck that takes “horror” to mean “waving a spindly 3D model in your face while saturating your eardrums with shrieking noises.” I guess this was the natural destination for the genre after Five Nights at Freddy’s transitioned from plucky experiment to billion-dollar multimedia franchise, thereby spawning an entire generation of slop-raking Unity neophytes who considered their shameless rip-offs worthy of comparable adulation.

Actually, let me dwell on FNAF for a moment. If you ask me, the scariest part of the original game from 2014 (the only one I’ve played) is neither the ShowBiz Pizza Place mascots nor the gritty hovel through which they roam. Instead, I’m most frightened by the implications of the employment on which the game is premised. As a quick refresher:

• It’s 1993, and you take a job as a night guard at a family pizza restaurant

• You have to ration power in order to keep your safety equipment operational

• In exchange for five shifts of six hours each, you’re paid $120, or about $4/hour, or about $0.25/hour less than the federal minimum wage in 1993

• If you complete the optional sixth night, you’re paid $0.50 in overtime

It makes the pay schedule at the Amazon warehouse look like utopian socialism. And yet, I almost never hear people talking about the elements of social horror that undergird FNAF and its setting. Exactly what kind of notional dystopia produced the material conditions necessary for this kind of pizza-centric exploitation of labor? Or, is the implication supposed to be that rapacious family entertainment kingpins pillage vulnerable young men under the very noses of polite society, and are continuing to do so even as we speak?

Perhaps FNAF was simply ahead of its time. It wasn’t until two-and-a-half years after its release that Jordan Peele’s Get Out and the driving hype around it brought “social thriller” back into the media lexicon. Horror like this, grounded in the cruel excesses of society and/or man’s inhumanity to man, has remained a persistent fascination of the popular culture since then. And rightfully so, I reckon. When recalling the period through which we’re now living, future generations will speak of a grand and all-encompassing conflict between the fearsome apparatus of technofeudal repression and us, its malcontented subjects. Assuming we’re not all vaporized in nuclear fire or nerve-stapled by malevolent language models before producing those future generations, anyway.

In my opinion, the most effective horror is that which holds a dim and flickering light up to our subconscious insecurities. Those can be primal and visceral in nature (e.g., getting chased around a claustrophobic space station by a xenomorph), or socially conditioned by the exigencies of a given era (e.g., getting your body stolen by a family of white suburbanites). Of course, there’s nothing stopping one from doing both.

And what better medium to capture the essence of subconscious insecurity or to interrogate our response to it than game design? To give an audience control over a protagonist in a horror game is, in effect, the assignation of the human player’s agency onto the circumstances of the game’s events. It provides a degree of tangible ownership over the emotional response to those events, and it’s a straightforward means of encouraging a player to project their own sensibilities onto the experience. Besides, the relative ease of creating and distributing video games these days gives the auteur designer a pathway to an audience that doesn’t run through the very hypercorporate machinery they so often seek to analyze or critique. So, I can hardly stay mad at the Steam Direct shit-mongers — at least trudging through that swampy mire can be counted on to bring the good stuff into sharper relief.

And speaking of swimming through effluent, this week’s subject is the 2022 horror game in which you must navigate a submersible through an ocean of human blood. It’s a game about isolation, hope in the face of despair, and claustrophobia of the highest degree. Above all, I’m not sure I can name a horror game from recent memory that gets this much mileage out of so small a budget. Let me tell you more.

IRON LUNG (2022)

In case you haven’t been keeping up with the meager handful of solo-developed horror games that’re actually worth talking about, allow me to quickly explain the premise of the cheap-ass Unity project that spawned a rabid following and several “scariest game of all time” plaudits, not to mention a 2026 film adaptation that grossed over fifty million dollars at the box office.

It’s sometime in the distant future, and a spacefaring humanity has charted the observable universe. Awhile back, every star and habitable planet known to man suddenly vanished without a trace. So too did all of humanity, save what few individuals were aboard space stations or spaceworthy vessels at the time of the so-called “Quiet Rapture.” You are one of them, a member of a militant faction of humanity’s remnants now captured and held by some other militant faction thereof. Your captors offer you your freedom in exchange for your help with a scientific endeavor: they have discovered an isolated moon, its surface entirely covered by an ocean of human blood, and they believe it may hide resources or secrets that could lead to humanity’s restoration. You’re to be sent to the bottom in a rickety submersible and there perform reconnaissance. Cross-reference an orbital scan of the ocean floor’s trench network against your instruments to navigate, and photograph each point of interest. If you capture an image of them all, you’ll earn your freedom. Supposedly.

David Szymanski’s 2022 opus is by no means the most elaborate horror game ever made, but it might very well be the most efficient. That is, the effect that Iron Lung achieves on the newly exposed player is a sum dramatically greater than its parts. It’s an extremely low-tech game for 2022: aside from its scant handful of scuffed, low-fidelity assets, there’s very little going on from a standpoint of primary gameplay. Your vessel is equipped with directional controls, a simple radar system to track walls and points of interest, and a low-resolution camera that can capture monochrome images of whatever the ship is pointed at. That last bit is the lynchpin of Iron Lung’s moment-to-moment tension — your porthole is welded shut in order to better resist the high pressure, so it’s your only means of seeing outside the submersible. You press a button to take a photograph, then have to sit there for a few seconds as it renders onto a display in front of you. No spoilers just yet, but what you see in these photographs can be quite startling indeed.

But what truly separates Iron Lung from the titanic library of one-off horror games is the atmosphere around its primary gameplay, which permeates your vessel as surely as the human blood that leaks in through its quaking hull. Most notable from a presentational standpoint is the excellent and economical use of sound. As the game begins, for example, you’re given updates on your descent by a friendly voice on the radio, which fades into static as you reach cruising depth, and you’re thereafter left alone with your thoughts. The lack of music during gameplay produces an eerie, oppressive silence that hangs over the entire runtime, except during the moments when it’s punctuated by groaning steel or sparking electronics. And, shit — did something just knock against the hull from outside?

The most interesting things about the game are, I think, the story it tells to justify its premise and the parallels we can draw with our own experiences as non-space-faring folk who haven’t (yet) been raptured into the vengeful aether. Moderate spoilers ahead — if you’re into horror games but haven’t tried Iron Lung yet, go pick it up on Steam. It costs a few dollars and you can finish it in less than an hour.

For the rest of you, let’s break down the game’s true monster. My sources are the events that the game directly portrays, and the information terminal that Szymanski patched into the game to cater to sickos like me after the game exploded in popularity.

Let’s begin with the premise as it’s established when the game begins. All the universe’s stars and planets have been AWOL for decades. In the absence of planetside support, supplies are hopelessly limited and critical infrastructure is unrepairable. Even the light is running out, with only the photons still in transit from the extinguished stars left to illuminate space. All that remains of humankind are two major factions, each formed from among unraptured spaceships and a pair of stations. It does rather beg the question of why the fractional remnants of humanity should split into factions rather than unite when circumstances became so desperate, but I suspect we all know the answer already. More on that shortly.

Second, we have the narrative as it emerges in gameplay. Nearly every player will chance upon a hastily scrawled note stuffed into a corner as they wander the tiny walkable area of the submersible. Let me reproduce its most substantive portion for you:

“When they put you in here, they don’t want you to return. And even if you do, and even if they keep their promises... what freedom waits for you? A few dying ships in a sea of dead stars?

If there is still hope, it lies beyond the veil. Hope in this void is as illusionary as the starlight. I will choose to breathe my last here at the bottom of an ocean, unseen, unheard, and uncontrolled.”

Right, well, I guess it would’ve been naïve to assume generosity or magnanimity of an organization that welded us into a hunk of scrap metal and then sent us to the bottom of a blood ocean. But the most interesting part is the very end, when the note’s anonymous author makes the fateful decision to express what little agency they have left by dying of their own volition.

Hope — or lack thereof — is heavily centralized as a theme. The note above, written from the perspective of a convict who may or may not have participated in a violent attack on the expedition’s organizers, expounds the author’s absence of hope from their prison at the bottom of the sanguinary depths. What seems to push them over the edge is the realization that, even if they’re successful and subsequently freed, only misery and hardship await. It’s a coldly logical way of looking at the situation — what would lead a reasonable person to believe that any future was possible on this side of eternity?

Well, strictly speaking, nothing at all. Another major theme is isolation, and the sense of hopeless fatalism that often accompanies it. Iron Lung feels very much like a game of the pandemic era, and I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to read its fiction as a metaphor for the deleterious effects that isolation had on us as individuals and our broader communities and societies, many left unprocessed and unresolved to this day.

Overcoming the despair of isolation at its darkest depths calls for radical volition and resolve, and we get a last-ditch manifestation of that from the expedition’s organizers themselves, in whose voice the text crawl at the end is written. Again, I’ll reproduce the important part without spoiling the whole-ass ending:

“The stars shine pale as bones. The moon is a lifeless corpse, its ocean a gaping wound. The universe… what’s left of it… is dying.

But somewhere in the void, there must be hope…”

Note well the verbiage in that final line. There must be hope, but it’s not to be obtained from any of the usual sources. In desperate situations, human beings have traditionally turned to faith in one another as the principal driver of precious hope: solidarity from mutual struggles; communitarianism; shared belief in better circumstances; and so on. In Iron Lung, however, any possibility of such anthropogenic optimism is entirely discounted. Where must there be hope? Somewhere in the void. “Void,” of course, implies a total lack of any material thing, so this obstinate declaration doesn’t exactly hold water as a logical argument for hope. Maybe that angry prisoner was onto something.

And this is where I’ll once again turn to the deep-lore terminal that Szymanski saw fit to add to the game. As mentioned above, the remaining extent of humanity is ostensibly restricted to two factions. The one from which the player character is heavily implied to originate has an extant population of at most 468, and the one now detaining the player has at most 257. That’s a total of 725 humans still known to be capable of direct contact. According to the most optimistic estimates of conservational biology, there must exist a minimum of 500 “effective” (i.e., fertile, fecund, and available) individuals in a population to prevent gradual extinction caused by birth-rate depressions associated with inbreeding.

Now, I hesitate to identify subtle brilliance on the part of David Szymanski’s storycraft where none may exist. This is, after all, the man whose next high-profile project was Squirrel Stapler, a game about stapling squirrels to a human cadaver in anticipation of physically encountering God.1 But if I were to stretch my analysis just a little, I’d suggest that the two factions’ populations — each individually less than 500, but greater in sum — was a deliberate choice. It implies that, insofar as hope for humanity’s continued existence does still exist, it exists strictly in the possibility of unification and cooperation, i.e., in a rejection of isolation. So, it’s a bearish sign indeed that our knowledge of the two factions’ relationship is characterized by mortal enmity. “[We] consider [them] a threat to all collective well-being after their attack on [our] station,” reads a foreboding entry on the lore terminal. Well, shit.

As regular readers are well aware, I’m a major proponent of the artistic potential of game design and want nothing more than for video games to be understood as art objects on the level of other popular media. Accordingly, I’ve been wanting to write about Iron Lung ever since that Markiplier flick suddenly brought in a whole new audience that was happy to shell out for it. David Szymanski’s is a worthy success story — the medium grows stronger by the efforts of hardworking creatives whose work resonates with our lived experience, and Iron Lung is like a template for how to adapt horror to the insecurities of an age.2

Now, before we close out, a quick word on the film adaptation. I haven’t seen the movie yet and I’m not in any tremendous hurry to do so, but I do think it’s worth taking a look at how it was received. Like many films adapted from niche artifacts of non-cinematic media, it was a big hit with its core audience while sharply polarizing critics. Tellingly, reviews to the effect of “it’s slow-paced and more atmospheric than thrilling” recur over and over again as both praise and criticism. It’s a sign of a production that sought fidelity to the aura of its source material over wider accessibility, and that’s worth celebrating in contrast to the throwaway cash-grabs that have so often characterized video game movie adaptations.3 Compare, if you like, Five Nights at Freddy’s (film) and Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (film), which made practically no effort to translate the ethos of the games onto the screen even as they made shitloads of money at the box office. Pushing digestible trash into theaters isn’t a viable path for improving the esteem of game design beyond the existing audience of regular gamers — that demands artistic integrity, so big shout-out to Szymanski and Markiplier for making an earnest go of it.

Alright, that’ll be it for this week. Have you played Iron Lung or any games like it that scratch a similar itch? Let me know downstairs, and I’ll see ya next week.

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Man, whatever happened to sports games? That is, video games designed around the joyful exuberance of participating in an athletic pursuit, and particularly those sports from which the core gaming audience is traditionally excluded. Once upon a time, those of us picked last for kickball at least had the likes of Backyard Sports by which to emulate the wholesome, human connections we so craved. And when we grew into adolescence, there were entire shelves of quality video games that gave us a taste of the subcultures that wanted nothing to do with us in meatspace. The Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater remasters just weren’t it, and those were only one symptom of a far more systemic condition.

For years now, the market has been saturated by two much narrower categories: yearly franchise installments featuring expensive licenses from national leagues that notably don’t feature much in the way of gameplay innovation from year to year; and occasional Nintendo offerings where you pay eighty dollars for the privilege of watching their squat, pudgy mascot play tennis like Novak Djakovic off a case of ephedrine.1 I suppose it may just be a reflection of how sports are now broadly understood in the popular consciousness, i.e., as niche concerns for hobbyists on one end and as elaborate platforms for advertising on the other. As whatever meager remnants remain of the mass culture continue to wither, it’s become exceptionally rare for the culture around a particular sport to transcend its immediate fandom. Video games were once a core part of that interchange between subcultures and the general public, but that no longer seems to be the case.

My take is that modern sports games have missed the forest for the trees, seeking to emulate the real-world activities to an obsessive standard of fidelity while deemphasizing fun and accessibility. Nobody ever said “I’m too slow, clumsy, and uncoordinated to play gridiron football, but that’s okay — I’ll just buy the latest installment of Madden NFL!” Compare it to, say, 2001’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, one of my favorite games of all time. I knew dozens of people who owned and adored that game, and almost every single one of them was both physically and temperamentally unfit for real-life skateboarding. We enjoyed the fantasy of hanging with the cool kids, of course — THPS3 and its ilk were remarkably faithful to the subcultures they portrayed. But more than that, we loved these games because they were exhilarating to play, and they paid only as much obeisance to reality as was necessary to sell their premises.2

This week, I thought we’d have ourselves a little thought experiment and see whether applying game design principles to less-followed sports might produce a compelling gameplay premise or two. As always, I welcome your ideas in the comments if you can think of any sports underrepresented in video games that have similar potential. We’ll begin with what might as well be my favorite professional sport.

BODYBUILDING

Thanks to the combined effects of private equity and deregulation, it’s now all but impossible to watch a major-league matchup without paying an extortionate subscription fee and having three different gambling platforms waved in your face like so many car keys before the world’s most degenerate infant. Accordingly, the sport I follow more than any other these days is Federation Bodybuilding. The repellently freakish forms of its athletes and the undisguised endorsement of performance-enhancing drugs3 have thus far kept hyperreality’s worst excesses at arm’s length, and I can keep up with it for free on YouTube.

Freakishness and substance abuse aside, bodybuilding is actually a deeply strategic and athletic pursuit at its highest levels. Given that, I picture two layers of primary gameplay in our adaptation: one management-focused, and the other active and tangible. In the Management Layer, you adjust your diet, exercise regimen, PED stack, and so on in order to optimize your figure. So, a bit like Oregon Trail, but you manage flesh instead of wagon trains. And instead of capsizing while irresponsibly fording a charging rapid, you have to balance your cardio and nutrition so that you maximize gains without giving yourself heart or kidney disease.

Then, in the more active Competition Layer, you get on stage and work through a posing routine alongside your fellow mass-monsters. Posing on a competitive stage is all about finding a sweet-spot for each muscular contraction, and about holding it tense over extended periods without prematurely exhausting oneself. I imagine a sort of QWOP­-like interface in which different button- or key-presses contract different muscle groups, and fine adjustment is done by moving the mouse or adjusting an analog stick. Some UI element indicates whether you’re balancing it properly or pushing it too hard to one side or another. In essence, it’s like grinding a rail or holding a manual in a skateboarding game. If you fail, your pose weakens, your limbs begin to shake, and your midsection distends. Then the judges mark you down as a bunch of pitiful wretches on social media excoriate you. I bet it would go hard as fuck on a controller with well-manufactured haptic feedback.

As for secondary and tertiary gameplay, it’s all about elevating your career. Since prize pools are either low, extremely competitive, or both, most professional bodybuilders make the lion’s share of their money from sponsorships. Your goal in medium-term progression, then, is to align yourself with the most popular and least controversial corporate partners you can find. Supplement manufacturers, apparel companies, plastic surgeons, etc. all need a face for their brands, and various approaches will maximize your appeal with a particular subset thereof. Larger payouts get you better coaching, more diverse training equipment, and larger quantities of anabolic steroids.

Finally, juggling your drug stack is a major source of the game’s strategic depth. Trenbolone gets you big in a hurry, but nandrolone decanoate will preserve your hairline for longer and make you a more attractive sponsorship partner. Both will shrink your gonads and alienate your loved ones, of course — how much will you sacrifice to achieve the ultimate physique?

BIATHLON

I only just learned about this sport during the Winter Olympics, so I beg the patience of long-term biathlon fans as I tell you about that first exposure. I was at a party at which the games were playing on TV, and I saw “UP NEXT: BIATHLON” scroll past on the chyron. “Biathlon? Must be, like, bicycling and swimming,” thought I. Hardly seemed fit for the 2026 games’ chilly Lombard climate, but I didn’t know any better.

Of course, biathlon turns out to be a combination of cross-country skiing and rifle marksmanship. Ostensibly rooted in the martial traditions of Scandinavia, the sport has competitors ski long distances between ranges, whereupon they’re to nail targets with a .22 LR rifle. Why it’s not called something more descriptive like “winter biathlon” or “kickass biathlon” is beyond me, but I hope you’re with me in discerning some obvious potential for action-packed gameplay.

I figure the optimal design strategy is to follow the example of Tony Hawk’s Underground and exaggerate the sport in its every aspect. The skiing portion should take place not on relatively flat topography but on steep, rocky slopes amid howling winds. The playspace should be scattered with half-pipes, rails, and gorges to facilitate stunts, and additional points should be awarded for nailing wicked tricks. Points are deducted for shouldering your rifle and firing at other competitors, since that’d be poor sportsmanship. But skilled players can gain an edge by using their weapons to damage snow fences, causing avalanches and burying careless opponents.

The shooting sections begin by emulating the Olympic competition, in which competitors fire small-caliber, subsonic ammunition at targets around fifty meters downrange. But as the game progresses, distances get significantly longer, and athletes are equipped with more powerful weapons. .22 rifles are replaced with high-caliber service weapons, then designated marksman rifles, then sniper rifles, and at last man-portable, anti-materiel platforms. Shooting mechanics evolve from a straightforward point-and-click interface to an elaborate, systems-dense simulation in the vein of Sniper: Ghost Warrior or that one mission from Call of Duty 4 that millennial gamers remember so fondly. Your targets will eventually be obscured by the curvature of the Earth, and a Sniper Elite-like camera will follow your fired rounds as they whip through different biomes and timezones.

In the final level, some dastardly agency of conformity and decorum tries to bring an end to the competition, and you’re chased down the mountain by goons on snowmobiles and narcs in helicopters. Bonus points are now awarded for clotheslining the former and for comboing over the latter. If you’ve ever seen any of the James Bond films where he has to evade or pursue someone on a snowy mountainside — and there are, what, nine of them or something? — then you’ve already got a sense of the vibe I’m going for.

ORIENTEERING

There are tons of games whose core gameplay is based around navigating an unfamiliar environment, and much has been done with that premise: landmarks as navigational aids as in Miasmata; environment as means of survival as in The Forest; unfamiliarity as a source of terror as in Slender: The Eight Pages and umpteen other shitty horror games; and so on. The gameplay utility of unfamiliarity and the satisfaction of overcoming it effectively gave birth to the discipline of procedural generation, and entire genres have formed around it. It’s a very common conceit, and relatively little ground is yet to be covered.

What I’ve never seen, however, is a game in which navigating the playspace constitutes the core appeal in and of itself. I suppose there’s GeoGuessr, but people seem to have the most fun with that game when they need to do as little navigation as possible. The closest example I can think of is Outer Wilds, which is fundamentally about uncovering the nature of a time-loop by investigating clues found among the game’s mysterious environs. But even that game locates its appeal in the thrill of discovery more so than the satisfaction of navigating between said discoveries, and I have something more primal in mind. Why not a grounded and relatively unremarkable environment — a dense forest, an uneven heathland, what have you — in which the challenge is to find your way around without any explicit direction, as games have conditioned us to expect?

By my understanding, this kind of navigation is the essence of orienteering. You go someplace unfamiliar, somebody hands you a detailed map and a compass, and you visit each in a series of control points, ideally completing the entire course as quickly as possible without losing your way. In the absence of directions or digital positioning technology, you’re expected to orient yourself by compass and establish your position using local topography and nearby landmarks. It’s a well defined and goal-oriented competition, so it frankly mystifies me that there’s never been a popular video game that tries to capture it.4

As any veteran of Morrowind will tell you, there’s a certain thrill in the simple act of finding your way through a rich world without the aid of non-diegetic navigational aids. Hence, I have an inkling that a straight-up orienteering simulator — in which gameplay progression is based on completing increasingly larger courses — could probably be a hit without any further complication. Of course, the idea certainly invites itself to complications. Maybe Bigfoot is pursuing you throughout the forest, or perhaps each control point reveals a piece of some eldritch phenomenon that has claimed the life of each orienteerist5 who came before you.

Okay, your turn. First of all, have you played any sports games from the past few years that put lie to my contention that the genre’s in decline? If so, I’d love to check them out. I’d also love to hear about some of your favorites from earlier in gaming history, and about your memories with them.

Finally, bonus points for other ideas that graft primary gameplay onto a lesser-known sport. Or, hell, let me know if you can think of an exciting twist on something well-trodden. You know, like Madden NFL by way of Earth Defense Force in which you alternate between playing football and slaughtering extraterrestrial invaders.

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Apologies for my tardiness this week, folks. It’s been a busier one than usual, split between appointments and a welcome but sudden influx of contract work. This edition is therefore being written in the small pockets of free time I can find between long phone calls. Relatedly, our subject is adapted from a thread that I’ve occasionally pulled but not yet fully processed over the past half-year.

See, it’s well and good that the means of producing and distributing artwork are considerably more democratized these days, and I for one am thankful that folks with ideas no longer need to bend and scrape before a narrow caste of tastemakers to make their voices heard. But just as Gutenberg’s press reduced the minimum standard of publishable material from “monastic hypervigilance” to “anybody with an ideological preoccupation and a few groschen in their hose,” one no longer requires exceptional talent or connections to manifest their most depraved and incongruous fantasies as products.

Accordingly, insane ideas that made it to print (or whichever medium’s distributional equivalent) used to be a lot rarer and, by extension, more valuable. Such like was the domain of daring creatives who had not only talent and connections but also the brash obsessiveness by which those could be leveraged toward the realization of an obsession. This is what led me down a rabbit-hole that somehow connected Wagnerian opera to the 2000s-era games industry, and there’s one common figure that ties the story together.

The main character of said story is the French comics artist and multidisciplinary designer Philippe Druillet, with whom I suspect most of you aren’t familiar. Frustratingly, given his centrality to this narrative, I’m not quite sure how to introduce the man. I guess I could follow the lead of his Wikipedia page and call him a cartoonist whose portfolio intersects with architecture, rock opera, painting, sculpture, and digital art. But he’s had a hand in so many different things over his eighty-one years that his work is basically impossible to summarize. He’s most famous for his comics, but my fixation has to do with his peculiar credits in the video game industry. The two games with which he’s been involved, while ranging from mediocre to garbage in gameplay terms, are among the more creatively daring game concepts I’ve personally experienced. And, the circumstances involved in their respective creations are totally unlike anything that could imaginably come to pass nowadays, and I reckon that alone makes them worth studying.

Those games are 1998’s Ring: The Legend of the Nibelungen and 2002’s Salammbo: Battle for Carthage, which together constitute the whole body of Druillet’s ludographic work and which I’ll discuss below. If you’re unacquainted with the Wild West of vintage graphic adventures, now would be a good time to brace yourself.

Ring: The Legend of the Nibelungen

Ring is a cursed artifact of the most esoteric degree. To comprehensively introduce the context of its creation, we’d have to start with the Barbarian Invasions of the Western Roman Empire and conclude sometime in the late 1990s with an examination of Slovenian gamer culture. I’d really rather not, so let’s instead begin with Richard Wagner’s completely forgotten impact on the Western video game canon.

Sometime in late 1997, the Ljubljana-based studio Arxel Tribe was casting about for a new concept following the release of Pilgrim: Faith as a Weapon, their debut adventure game release. Circumstances conspired to bring the studio’s creative leads into the company of Philippe Druillet, who was fondly acquainted with the work of one of their young artists. Druillet showed off some of his older pieces, among them contributions he’d made to Rolf Liebermann’s mobile-theater concept Wagner Space Opera, an avant-garde project so obscure that I can’t find so much as a blurb about its content. I was, however, able to dig up a couple of decade-old auction listings for what appears to be Druillet’s early concept art:

That’s how the leads at Arxel Tribe decided to make a point-and-click adventure game adapting Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen tetralogy by filtering it through a twisted and bizarre sci-fi aesthetic. A space opera in the most literal sense imaginable. Somehow, Executive Producer Guillaume de Fondaumière managed to get a meeting with a major record label on the strength of this premise, whereupon the studio licensed Georg Solti’s legendary recording of Wagner’s fourteen-hour opera. The groundwork was laid, and all that remained was to develop and distribute the thing. Let’s take just a moment now to appreciate the incomprehensible scale of creative risk-taking that brought this about on the consumer market, thoroughly unimaginable in today’s gaming industry, for better or for worse. It was released for a European audience in October of 1998, and an English-language version followed in July of 1999.

So, how does it play? Fucking dreadfully, since you ask. It’s one of those moon-logic adventure games where the challenge isn’t so much intellectual as it is an exercise in guessing what the designers were thinking, and I remind you that said designers were a clique of Francophonic aesthetes who thought it’d be rational to produce and sell a surrealist, sci-fi adaptation of Wagnerian opera as a video game. I struggle to imagine someone completing this crazy bastard of a game from start to finish without a walkthrough. Maybe if it were the only available stimulation while one was bedridden or imprisoned — I’m not sure how else you’d find the patience to struggle through some of these puzzles. Perhaps I’m just too much a casual for Wagnerian adventure-gaming.

The presentation, meanwhile, is remarkable for the breathtaking highs and cavernous lows between which the production value ceaselessly vacillates. Almost every individual aspect is either a marvelously realized feat of creative ability or a laughable catastrophe that makes you wonder how this game sold almost half a million copies worldwide. Philippe Druillet’s art direction and its 3D realization are unlike anything else in popular media. Assuming you’re not put off by the thought of a Wagnerian space opera, then you’ll probably agree that the artistic conceptualization is evocative and impressive. Of course, the nineties-era tech that renders it with a third dimension is inconsistent at best. It goes without saying that the action and dynamism of Druillet’s 2D concept art doesn’t translate whatsoever, and so we’re left with these grandiose, elaborate character models that languidly float around what handful of polygons remained for representing the lush environments of Germanic mythology.

The voice acting, too, is all over the place. David Gasman’s performance as the Dwarf-King Alberich is absorbing and iconic, an underrated video game villain who’d be remembered as a classic under more conventional circumstances. Paul Barrett acquits himself well as both the hero Siegmund and as the God-of-Gods Wotan. They even convinced no less than Charlotte Rampling to do the VO for the earth-goddess Erda, whose role in the game’s central narrative is just about sufficient to keep you interested in whatever batshit nonsense they’re on about. On the other side of the coin, Patrick Albenque’s performance as Alberich’s brother Mime is so bizarre that one can barely even parse the character’s words, and there’s one particularly infamous scene with an incidental character that I might call the absolute worst voice performance in the history of recorded audio.

On broad analysis, Ring is one of those rare specimens that I emphatically recommend against playing even as I urge you to experience it somehow. MandaloreGaming made a ninety-minute review back in 2022 that I consider the authoritative document on the game, and it suffices as a substitute for experiencing the torment of its puzzle design for yourself. And even if you wanted to play it, you’d be hard-pressed to do so. Ring is now first-class abandonware, and what few CD copies are still extant go for triple-A prices online. Plus, you’d still need to figure out how to run it on a modern computer, and God be with you if you make the attempt.

But the most important thing to keep in mind for our purposes here is that, despite the insane premise and substandard execution, Ring was an unqualified success by the commercial standards of its era. The widespread critical panning it received belies the several hundred thousand units it sold, and so it should come as no surprise that the producers and executives of the early-2000s video game industry almost immediately sought to make lightning strike twice.

Now, it was readily apparent to any halfway-serious observer that the two best things about Ring were Georg Solti and Philippe Druillet. I’m sure it was this realization that inspired our next subject, which similarly combined Druillet’s inimitable style with a superficially incongruous orchestral soundtrack — Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, this time around.

Salammbo: Battle for Carthage

If you’ve been reading for awhile, you may recall that I’ve brought up this game a couple of times before. Gustave Flaubert’s 1862 novel Salammbô was possibly my favorite book that I read in all of 2025, and it inspired a far-reaching preoccupation with the artistic potential of historical fiction in video games that I’m still processing all these months later. There seems to be something intrinsic about Flaubert’s prose that inspires this feeling, because I’ve since learned that Philippe Druillet was bitten by a very similar bug in the late seventies.

“[A] heroic endeavor; the book left me with tears in my eyes,” he reflected in 1980. “At the time, I was casting about for a new subject and had, alas, found nothing that satisfied my paranoid delirium… [Salammbô] had hit home; Carthage with its high walls now stood before me. Why Flaubert? — you might ask. I needed a truly great writer for my script and Flaubert was one of the greatest!”

Flaubert’s Salammbô, for its part, is a work of historical fiction about the conflict between Carthage and its former mercenary allies after the First Punic War. The title character is a temple priestess whose beauty and splendor inflame the passions of the war’s principal beligerants, which is fodder for some absolutely delightful conflict and intrigue against a captivating and believable historical backdrop. There we had the genesis of Philippe Druillet’s take on Salammbô, a three-part graphic novel that — surprise of all surprises — adapted the legendary nineteenth-century fiction in the aesthetic language of space-opera.

A couple months ago, I got a 2018 compilation edition from Titan Comics for a song on the internet. I was never too big a reader of comics or graphic novels, but this book made a significant and immediate impression on me.

I’m not exaggerating one bit when I tell you that I spent ten or fifteen minutes on almost every single page just soaking each illustration’s fine details. I imagine that, in trying to recapture the spark that caused Ring to so dramatically exceed expectations, some executive or another decided that it’d be far more efficient to dump German opera and simply adapt one of Druillet’s own works. Perhaps someone saw the two-page spread above and figured that laser-elephants would make for a good video game, which is fair enough. Of course, it begs the daunting question of how one adapts such baroquely detailed portrayals into a video game format, and with 2000s-era 3D rendering technology, no less.

The answer, of course, is that one does not.

Salammbo: Battle for Carthage was a production of Cryo Interactive, a long-defunct development studio and publisher whose catalog includes all manner of full-motion video abominations, licensed shovelware dreck, and a small handful of genuinely interesting graphic adventure games (perhaps most notably Ring, which they published for Arxel Tribe). The game was announced in July of 2002, just as Cryo’s lengthy procession of commercial debacles was finally catching up to them. The studio went bankrupt that same month, and Salammbo was left incomplete. The Canada-based DreamCatcher Games then bought up many of Cryo’s assets and contributed as little capital as was strictly necessary to get the unfinished project over the finish line before Christmas. Unsurprisingly, the latter third of Salammbo feels rushed to hell, reusing whole environments and whipping through the narrative at breakneck pace before suddenly concluding with a damp squib of an ending.

Sadly and unsurprisingly, it was a commercial failure that led DreamCatcher to at last eviscerate the shambling corpse of Cryo Interactive. DreamCatcher stuck around another several years before going bust in 2011, but its brand is still owned by a subsidiary of the Embracer Group, and so there’s money yet to be made from selling its back-catalog. As a result, you can still pick up Battle for Carthage for as little as fifty cents on Steam, a price at which I can actually recommend it to a certain kind of gamer. If you’re nostalgic for the distinct aura of graphic adventure games from the turn of the millennium, then you’ll almost definitely get something out of it. It’s short, too — you can finish it in about four hours, or perhaps much less if you’ve got a honed instinct for adventure game puzzle-solving. Incidentally, it ran on my Linux installation through Proton with absolutely zero tweaking or configuration.1

Ultimately, what most recommends Salammbo: The Game is how utterly unique it is from a presentational standpoint. The only game that looks or sounds even remotely like it is Ring, and even that feels like a completely different experience. Actually, it even feels distinct from its own source materials in spite of its being an adaptation. The art style is recognizably but loosely adapted from Druillet’s Salammbo, landing on something altogether its own. The writing follows the structure of Flaubert but takes considerable departures such that it ends up telling its own story by the end. It’s not particular successful as an adaptation or as a game in its own right, but by God, is it ever refreshingly different. To my mind, that alone is worth celebrating and emulating.

Gosh, I’m glad I finally got all that off my chest. Thanks a bundle for reading to the end of this particularly left-field installment. I’ve been turning these games over in my head for around six months now, so writing this was cathartic indeed. In its aftermath, I have two questions for you lot:

1. Existing fans of Philippe Druillet’s oeuvre: which of his works should I check out next? I’d buy up his whole catalog, but graphic novels are pretty expensive and I’ve got to be judicious.

2. Everyone else: what other video games do you know that feature uncommon intersections with other media? I’m practically certain that the confluence of adventure gaming and opera is neither the only such example, nor the strangest. Think less in terms of “H.R. Geiger’s art style in an FPS” and more like “Vivaldi’s Four Seasons as an FPS.”

Back to a subject with broader appeal next week, and I’ll do my best to get back on schedule.

Lately, the phrase “game industry price hike” is as common a feature in the popular lexicon as “oil shock.” As if the AI-driven shortage of GPUs wasn’t galling enough, random-access memory is now as rare and valuable as enriched uranium. There’s even speculation that CPUs are due for a significant price increase, and it’s almost as though the industrial concerns responsible for these shortages are deliberately trying to align consumer sentiment against them. It’d hardly be the dumbest thing Big Tech has done this year, I suppose.

I hardly need to remind readers of this publication about the unignorable downstream effects of computing hardware shortages. Even the giants can’t build an affordable piece of consumer tech: the forthcoming Steam Machine is delayed, and God only knows how (or whether) Valve will optimize the price curve; Sony has abandoned whatever pretense of relative affordability remained and is charging nearly a grand for the Pro version of its ninth-generation console hardware; and just days ago, the PC manufacturer Framework said the quiet part out loud and warned of a speculative future in which consumers don’t own their own hardware at all. Instead, I gather, we’re to rent virtualized infrastructure from a technofeudalist idiot god — some drunken apparatus of cabling and teraflops, kept in a perpetual state of intoxication by the noxious fumes of power and subscription revenue.

And, of course, the games themselves aren’t getting any cheaper. The $70 standard for full-priced, premium launches met with enough success to normalize it in the halls of big gaming’s marketing departments. We may well see an even deeper gouging come the release of GTA VI this year, assuming it’s not delayed further still. If not, smart money is on Rockstar attempting to claw back the game’s freakishly profligate production budget with a pricetag up to three figures. This is all set against a backdrop of a professional industry in chaos as it hemorrhages money, talent, and paying consumers at rates practically unseen since E.T. for the Atari 2600. It all paints a portrait of a hobby trending toward luxury status in service of a crassly privileged few, and the painter is Francisco Goya. His subject is the saturnine games industry in agonized throes as it devours its own mainstream credibility.

But lay aside the doomer shit for a moment. I’m warmed by an acute sense of optimism that I’d like to break down for you this week.

See, around ten months ago, as the discourse around the greater price of games was reaching a fever pitch, I wrote an article about the future of affordable gaming. It seemed apparent at the time that the high-level industry, desperate to recuperate its Scrooge McDuckesque capital expenditures, was experimenting with a pivot toward a strategy by which a much smaller segment of the gaming public would pay much larger amounts of money for the same absolute quantity of games.

The reality that’s borne out since then isn’t quite as bad as I feared. Nintendo’s had its fun with $80 launch prices on a select handful of first-party titles — and, more confusingly, on a few Switch 2 ports of games from years ago — but remains an outlier in that respect for now. Shortly after I published the aforementioned article, Microsoft announced a backtrack from charging $80 for The Outer Worlds 2, and the industry at large seems broadly content with maintaining the status quo for now. More importantly, though, the past year has repeatedly elevated consumer-minded studios with smaller budgets. I need hardly mention the astonishing success of Expedition 33: Clair Obscur, nor the warehouse that Sandfall Interactive presumably had to rent in order to store all the cash and awards it brought in. A proudly double-A outing with a production budget in the low eight-figure range, it was 2025’s most unmistakable evidence that games don’t require 3,000 full-time developers or a half-trillion dollar investment to see dramatic profit margins.

And, as I wrote back in June, the sector below them on the hierarchy of resource consumption — the so-called “triple-i” independent studios — were starting to have a moment of their own. I admit that, at the time, I wasn’t really sure what (if anything) the term “triple-i” meant. Something to the effect of “independent studios with particularly standout talent and ambition despite lacking major publisher support,” but that’s about all I had to go on. Then, around a week ago, I noticed a live showcase hosted by an organization called the triple-i initiative (lowercasing theirs) on Steam and realized that there may be some philosophical coherence to the concept after all.

A SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF “triple-i” GAMING

I mean, one still has to search for it. The FAQs page on the initiative’s website is very little help: “We’re simply a bunch of studios banding together to share exciting news to our players,” begins an almost farcically anodyne response to the well justified question, “what is the triple-i initiative?” Fortunately, I was able to extract some more information from the Steam page for the showcase. Here, look:

“A video game showcase for Triple-i games, made by studios, for the players.

No hosts, no ads, no extra fluff — just games.”

Allow me to treat you to the analytical process I went through after reading that.

First, there’s “Triple-i” itself. The persistent lowercasing in their branding is worth mentioning on its own. The lowercased “i” is diminutive, but in the grammatical sense that denotes the affectionate familiarity associated with smallness as in “pig” to “piglet” or such like. It’s a marked contrast to the authoritarian block-capitalization of “AAA,” which instead evokes a kind of detached, imperial grandeur. Three “i”s standing alongside one another are as a group of ordinary folk gathered in mutual solidarity, smaller in magnitude than the monolithic obelisks of the well-moneyed industry but by no means in their shadow. If I wanted to be maximally pretentious — and here, I can’t help myself — I’d note that lowercasing the “i” stands in opposition to the individualism associated with the traditionally capitalized first-person singular pronoun. “We’re simply a bunch of studios,” insists the initiative, signifying itself as a pluralized, collective entity rather than a single, vast gestalt of alienated industrial concerns.

But I can almost hear Baudrillard’s cadaver gyrating with shame all the way over in Paris, so let me come off it and move onto the concrete and tangible signs. In reading the phrase “made by studios, for the players,” the initiative rejects the corporatism upon which the triple-A paradigm is constructed. I suppose you’re meant to read it as “for the players as opposed to the accountants, the shareholders, the Saudi royal family, etc.” It’s no secret, after all, that the people who make the most money off of video game production generally don’t even play the fucking things. To the conglomerated industry, video games are — like any reified product of artistic media — assets by which to generate profit rather than to be enjoyed on the strength of their intrinsic value as art pieces. The players, meanwhile, have a vested stake in the actual quality and enjoyability of the product. Also, most players of video games react poorly to being openly exploited for the sake of some non-gamers’ year-end bonuses.

Finally, we have the rejection of hosts, ads, and “extra fluff.” Taking a stance against advertisement is straightforward enough, since ads are at-best ancillary to the objectives of a showcase and would betray a motivation external to the direct service of gamers. In a similar vein, foregoing hosts reflects a disinterest in cultivating the image of televisual legitimacy by which industry showcases have often performed Awards Season glamor. As for “extra fluff,” I guess they just want to reassure us that none of the runtime features any thematically disconnected musical performances or corporate mascot cameos that make you cringe yourself inside-out.

So, come to think of it, perhaps “we’re simply a bunch of studios banding together to share exciting news to our players” isn’t quite as meaningless as it appears at first blush. The key word is “simply.” If the triple-i initiative is to be believed, then there’s no agenda at work beyond supporting and showcasing the medium of game design as practiced by its most intrinsically passionate practitioners. What an invigorating tonic for this alienating era of mass-cultural degeneration.

As for the showcase itself, I’m happy to report that a lot of these games genuinely come across like worthy ambassadors for the shared concept of a heavy-hitter indie title. Alkahest, Valor Mortis, and SpaceCraft stuck out for extraordinary levels of graphical polish that we’re still not accustomed to seeing outside the high-level, professional industry. Long Gone, Frostrail, and Dead as Disco all feature stand-out aesthetics that I can’t recall seeing elsewhere, embodying the creative risk-taking that’s been all but excised from high-level commercial development. Compared to recent misfortunes like Highguard and its stablemates in the triple-A abattoir of live-service humiliation, pretty much all of the three-dozen-odd games in this showcase demonstrate a positively inspirational commitment to thoughtful design and artistic vision.1

You know, my PC is still running a GTX 1080 graphics card from the pre-raytracing era, which is now the better part of a decade behind us. It may well continue to do so for another year or two. And, to be frank, I’m pretty much over the sense of helpless frustration that the hardware market was inflicting around this time last year.

Aged hardware has hardly got in my way at all, and not only because I can’t presently afford to throw $70 at video games. More importantly, it’s because the vast majority of games — including most of the greatest — don’t require cutting-edge hardware at all. As a particularly resonant personal example, the most resource-intensive game I’ve played in the past year is S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: GAMMA. I’ll grant that it chugged and spluttered like a tuberculotic steam engine at first, but then I kicked the renderer down to DirectX 9, and the thing ran smooth as butter through several dozen hours of obsessive mercenary tradesmanship. All it cost me was some god-rays and some surface refraction. Aside from the many other reasons I’m so enamored of that game, its commitment to accommodating a wide range of hardware is laudable to the point where I wonder why more games with actual production budgets don’t do the same.

If there’s a central point I’m trying to argue with all of this, it’s that we need not resign ourselves to a future of rented computing resources and exploitative gaming-as-a-service models just because history’s most fiscally vulgar corporations insist upon it. None of this horseshit is inevitable unless we collectively agree to believe in it, and I, for one, have no inclinations in that direction. Maybe I’ll start drawing a decent paycheck this Spring, upgrade my gaming rig to a post-neolithic standard, and finally see what all the fuss around ray-tracing is about. Or, maybe the quasi-oligarchic tech giants will keep throwing good money after bad and worsen the supply chain crisis, rendering that aspiration impractical for another year or three. In the latter case, at least I’ve still got decades worth of excellent gaming media at my fingertips and under my personal ownership. Silver lining in every cloud service, right?

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Well, shucks. Between the rigamarole of taking a certification exam, hosting a Passover Seder, and getting almost all my carbs from egg-and-onion matzos, time and mental clarity were more precious than diesel this past week. Aside from several hours spent reading The Brothers Karamazov to put my own misfortunes into perspective, I managed to find some time to veg out in front of Songs of Syx, which has swiftly climbed my list of favorites since I wrote about it back in February. I don’t have much in the way of topical reflections for this week, so I figured we could spend this edition on some deeper meditations that didn’t make it into that review. More specifically, I want to talk about the role of imaginative expression in shaping the narrative direction of these simulation-based video games.

Nearly a year ago, as long-time readers may hazily recall, I penned some thoughts about the commonalities between the games that’ve captured my attention for over a hundred hours. To recap: all but one1 of these games featured some kind of strategic management, lacked traditional storytelling, and were built around the systems-driven emergence of narrative. I came up with a few half-formed ideas to justify why I found these things so compelling, eventually landing on the explanation that I most valued how open-ended psychosensory experiences like these reliably stimulate the emotions and the intellect. I was busy as hell that week and didn’t explain much beyond that. So, since I’m back in the thrall of an addictive and eminently stimulating colony sim, why not use it as an excuse to pick up where I left off?

First, a practically self-evident observation about colony sims in particular: the act of conquering nature and transforming it into an instrument of progress is, as far as I’m concerned, an inherently compelling premise. There’s presumably something evolutionary and instinctual about it. One suspects that, when some Promethean troglodytes domesticated fire around a million years ago, it can’t have been long after the first taste of char-broiled mammoth that their thoughts turned to industry and conquest. Every good colony sim I’ve played takes pains to emulate this progression somehow, and to truncate its ordinarily vast timeline into a fraction of a human lifespan. A game of RimWorld, for example, can see a gaggle of tribal hunter-gatherers progress from weaving baskets to assembling nuclear reactors within a couple dozen hours of concerted play. It requires a suspension of disbelief, to be sure, but one can hardly deny the satisfaction intrinsic to clear-cutting a forest from whence the wolves once prowled. Don’t even trip about the environmental considerations — there are plenty more rim-worlds where this came from.

Actually, that leads us to another cleverly realized emotional-intellectual flourish of the colony sim: replicating the adventurous fantasy of colonization, but subtracting the baggage one associates with the cruel and violent displacement of those who haven’t the Maxim gun. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any colony sims where your game starts in a location already populated by anything sapient.2 The only creatures one displaces in the average game of Dwarf Fortress are the giant honey badgers, and they can go fuck themselves. The fantasy of taming a wild frontier and carving our mark upon it appeals to our evolutionary desires, and it’s right and proper to indulge that fantasy without the psychological friction that can get in the way during, say, a colonization-focused campaign of Europa Universalis.

But those are largely superficial aspects of these games’ design, and there’s something deeper and more structural that lends them this appeal. Nebulous and representational genre commonalities aside, the principal aspect that connects games as otherwise mechanically distinct as Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, and Songs of Syx is how they use their mechanical inventories as the machinery behind a systems-driven emergence of narrative. To play one of these games is to be the architect of a story mirroring one’s own anthropological inheritance, the precise contours of which are shaped by your imagination. RimWorld creator Tynan Sylvester even went as far as to deny that he’d made a game at all, calling it a “story generator” instead. A pretentious-bordering-on-cringeworthy abuse of semantics, to be sure, but there’s undoubtedly a kernel of truth behind the sentiment. To tease it out a little further, let’s skip to the exciting part and consider how an emergent narrative meets its end.

EMBRACING THE FAILURE STATE

“Losing is fun!” So proclaims the Dwarf Fortress wiki, foregrounding the statement even at the very top of the Fortress Mode quickstart guide. There’s a curious logic to the idea: since the game was programmed without any singular player goal, deterministic victory condition, or scripted denouement of any kind, the only way to finish a game of DF other than abandoning it is to lose. The only fortresses that don’t fail, argues the wiki, “tend to be very conservative and very boring — and what fun is that?” Dwarf Fortress equals fun and Dwarf Fortress equals losing, producing the legendary formulation that, by the transitive property, losing equals fun.

And it’s the truth! It’s unintuitive, but losing an eighty-hour fortress after making a single mistake is some of the most fun I’ve had with a video game. I dominated the harsh mistress of nature, dug secure lodgings within the earth, and created a bustling hub of industry in the middle of nowhere to which caravans of merchants and immigrants flocked. Even those goddamn giant honey badgers were neutralized, now confined in gilded, jewel-encrusted cages and kept as living ornamentation for the common areas. My legendarily skilled, steel-clad hammerdwarves repelled a legion of goblins, cutting down their leadership before casting the prisoners into a hundred-meter pit. I began to feel invincible, and this bred overconfidence. I dug too deep. The miners greedily penetrated an ancient column of adamantine, whereupon something happened that DF players famously hate to spoil.3 The military was eviscerated in a minute, alongside ninety-five percent of the civilian population. The dozen shaken survivors who managed to seal themselves behind a wall tried desperately to dig for fresh water and mushrooms, but all were taken by insanity and struck one another down long before there was even a glimmer of hope. The last one perished of his wounds, and a solitary textbox announced my failure.

Fucking genius.

I had a similar experience with Songs of Syx just this past week. About fifteen hours into a campaign in which I’d developed a fairly advanced society of humans, complete with centralized administration and an enforceable code of laws, an emissary from a foreign trading partner arrived at my throne. They’d come as a mediator from a notorious bandit lord, who coveted my wealth and demanded ludicrous tribute in exchange for peace. I sent the emissary away empty-handed, confident in my burgeoning industrial base that produced enough weapons and armor to fully equip fifty men. As expected, the bandits were unimpressed by my intransigence and formed up at the outskirts of my city. My militia outnumbered them three-to-one, and I was supremely confident as they formed into a tight phalanx and marched toward the foe. I clicked the “Charge” button, and felt an almost narcotic rush of excitement as they ran at the enemy’s shield wall. Then the bandits cut them down to a man without taking a scratch, and I realized to my immense consternation that, though I’d fully equipped my soldiers, I’d somehow neglected to assign them any melee training. “We must beg for mercy,” reported a textbox afterwards. None came. It was goddamn terrific.

If you’re sat there wondering how on earth I could be so casually indifferent to — or, indeed, actively excited about — losing games like these into which I’d sunk dozens of hours, I can assure you that the appeal lies in much more than the simple dopamine rewards associated with progress. If that’s all I wanted, I’d download one of those insufferable gacha games on my iPhone and fall, slackjawed, onto my mattress to piss away the hours opening lootboxes and watching advertisements. What makes these failure states so exhilarating is the same sensation one gets from the final pages of a great novel or during the last minutes of an excellent TV series. They’re the conclusions of stories into which you’ve invested yourself for a long time, and so an intoxicating sense of closure is to be expected. But more than that, the failure state resolves a story of which you were the primary author, so that investment is even more personal. Paradoxically, to fail in-game constitutes a victory of the imagination. It’s a sensation that no medium can produce as reliably or as profoundly as can game design, and I wish more folks would give it a chance.

Now, I hope you’ll forgive me for presuming to quote Dostoevsky in my seat-of-the-pants essay about video game design, but I read the following exchange while I was mulling over this topic and decided I had to share it with you. It’s not every day that a nineteenth-century novel suddenly gives voice to a foundational aspect of my own beliefs about creativity.

“[T]here’s a libelous story going about me, that last week I played robbers with the preparatory boys… I wasn’t playing for my own amusement, it was for the sake of the children,” explains the thirteen-year-old Kolya Krassotkin to the grown-ass Alyosha Karamazov, a respectable mensch before whom Kolya fears appearing juvenile.

“But what if you had been playing for your own amusement, what’s the harm?” responds the cherubic Karamazov.

“[F]or my own amusement! You don’t play horses, do you?”

“But you must look at it like this. Grown-up people go to the theatre and there the adventures of all sorts of heroes are represented—sometimes there are robbers and battles, too—and isn’t that just the same thing, in a different form, of course? And young people’s games of soldiers or robbers in their play-time are also art in its first stage. You know, they spring from the growing artistic instincts of the young… the only difference is that people go [to the theatre] to look at actors, while in these games the young people are the actors themselves.”4

“Emergent narrative” isn’t just a pseudo-profound catchphrase employed by pretentious jackasses of my ilk who want more respect for game design as an artistic medium. More than that, it describes the form of play in its natural evolution, familiar to anyone who ever used their imagination for fun — one’s “artistic instincts,” if you will. This is one of those manifestations of engagement that games are uniquely well positioned to exploit: becoming a participatory agent in a story as it unfolds, and guiding that story’s emergence through active expressions of said agency. It’s an instinctual itch for catharsis, and scratching it is good for the mind. We do this all the time without really thinking about it. It takes place whenever we’re engrossed in a story, and doubly so when that story is of our own making.

This is why I look to vast, intricate simulations like Dwarf Fortress and Songs of Syx as profound works of art. And, as I’ve said before, embracing players’ imaginations and facilitating the expression thereof is a much more reliable strategy for ensuring a game’s success than plastering it with the shiniest possible graphics or chasing this-or-that genre trend. This, I gather, is why the likes of Roblox can have 380 million monthly active users while the average triple-A open-world RPG these days launches to consumer apathy and a thousand layoffs.

And that, good people, is just about everything I wanted to say about colony sims that escaped my conscience back in February while I was busy gushing about how great the shader-work is in Songs of Syx. Of course, it can go almost without saying that my observations here aren’t wholly unique to this particular subgenre of strategy gaming. If you’re curious about how else video games have effectively leveraged the human imagination as a primary driver of gameplay, check out my review of Kenshi from last year. Also, please do share your thoughts in the comments below. While you do that, I’m going to play some more of this damn game while I count down the minutes until I can eat bread and pasta again. See ya next week.

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Happy Wednesday, friends! Chag Pesach Sameach to those who celebrate Passover, and a most kosher April Fools’ Day to the rest of you. I believe it’s been almost forty years since these two holidays last began on the same day, so it seems fitting to mark the occasion somehow. How about we review a game about a man who wrestles with the apparently willful cruelty of his Creator while his computer disgorges an endless stream of Jewish jokes?

So, back in January of last year, I was putting together concepts for The Spieler’s inaugural editions. I thought to write an essay about the history and status of video games in which Judaism plays a prominent role, since, after all, that intersection falls squarely within my remit. I got to making a list of every game I could think of that fit the bill. Let’s see… Wolfenstein: The New Order; The Last of Us Part II, kind of; that one detective adventure from 2006 that no goy has ever heard of… shit, is that really all of them?

Unless you count some very low-key, experimental, and noncommercial examples to be found in the depths of itch.io, then, yeah, that’s about the lot of them. I shelved the idea and pretty much forgot about it until the end of February, when a terrific video by Jacob Geller landed in my feed and reignited my curiosity. The most commonly cited example of a Jewish video game he could find in his research? A detective adventure from 2006 upon whose visage few gentile eyes have gazed.

Enter The Shivah, the first commercial project made by Dave Gilbert under his now-venerable Wadjet Eye Games label. Described as “perhaps the most Jewish game ever” by one Jewish publication, it features a rabbi protagonist who uses a Shivah1 call as a pretense to conduct a murder investigation and is indeed the most Jewish game I have ever played. I figured that the start of Passover would make for a convenient excuse to talk about it, so I bought the highly affordable Steam version last week and gave it a go. I expected an amusing, in-jokey adventure that’d make for a worthy distraction, but it ended up giving me a lot to think about with regard to the nature of how faith is portrayed in video games. This week, we’ll mark the occasion by discussing the game and what it reveals about the role of faith and religiosity in secular game design.

First, though, a word on who we’re dealing with. Those of you with a strong connection to point-and-click adventure games will probably remember Wadjet Eye as the studio behind 2018’s Unavowed, a paranormal investigation that was remarkably well received for a LucasArts-esque adventure game made in the past decade. About the only thing it has in common with today’s subject is its engine, Adventure Game Studio, which remains a standby for the creation of this sort of slow-paced investigate-’em-up almost thirty years after its original release. And not unlike AGS — or, indeed, Judaism itself — The Shivah has maintained a relatively small but nevertheless devoted following into the modern age in spite of its many fashionable alternatives. It was remastered in 2013 and now features professional-quality artwork, a dynamite original soundtrack, and fully redone voice-acting. You can still dig up the original version if you’re of an archeological persuasion, but the so-called Kosher Edition available on Steam is what I’d recommend if you’re actually interested in playing it.

Let’s begin with a largely spoiler-free introduction to its premise and the circumstances behind its creation. I’ll warn you before we get into important plot details.

PREMISE AND BACKGROUND

“Today in my sermon, I’d like to discuss suffering,” begins Rabbi Russell Stone after the singing of a hymn heard by no one.

“Why do bad things happen to good people? Wherever there is pain, or oppression, or poverty, the question is always, ‘how could God let this happen?’ Is God as good as we think? Can he, in fact, do evil? Maybe, on occasion, he even enjoys inflicting pain?”

A loud snore echoes through the tiny sanctuary, honked through the sinuses of the only congregant present at the service. Rabbi Stone, overwhelmed by the cruel irony, cannot go on. Over the objections of the cantor,2 he prematurely ends the service and retreats into his office. Surrounded by overdue bills, boxes of unused kiddush wine, and painful memories, he decides to give up. Then, a knock at the door.

A police detective has arrived to inform Rabbi Stone that a former congregant of his, one Jack Lauder, has been gruesomely murdered. Almost a decade ago, Stone kicked him out of the congregation for marrying a non-Jewish woman, and much simmering hatred ensued. The detective looks around at the peeling wallpaper and unpaid debts, and reckons it suspicious that the dead man left the rabbi a cool $10,000 in his will. Haunted by the memory of the man whom he failed, Stone resolves to get to the bottom of the murder, clear his name, and perhaps do something to earn the sudden windfall that promises to rescue his life’s work.

That’s when you’re given control of the man, whereupon The Shivah becomes the only game I know of in which the player embodies a New York rabbi. It’s a bold move: Russell Stone is a miserable prick whose tribulations are easily traceable to a bad habit of projecting his woes and insecurities onto the people around him, hardly a quality one looks for in a spiritual leader. As you wander the office in search of a lead, framed photographs of happier times past contrast against angry emails from disaffected congregants. The home of the deceased is your first lead. Lacking official authority, you can’t just barge in. But you can do as any rabbi ought to do under the circumstances and pay a Shivah call. As the investigation proceeds, you’ll get to decide whether Rabbi Stone recuperates his faith to find some shred of redemption or else explodes in one final crash-out against a world and a God that have shown him so little mercy.

In a moment, we’ll move on to discussing The Shivah as a commercial adventure game. I have a feeling that most of you won’t end up playing it yourselves, so the forthcoming section will be replete with major plot spoilers and puzzle solutions. If you’re on the fence as you read this paragraph, I encourage you to pause here for the time being and go play the game real quick. It’s dirt-cheap on Steam and should take less than two hours to complete, so it’ll be a small thing to set this review aside for a bit while you go experience it on your own. Otherwise, read on for a tale of a twenty-year-old game that really gave me something to think about in the week before Passover.

SO, HOW’S THE GAME?

Well, let’s start with a topline summary: as a point-and-click adventure game from 2006, independent of its greater context, The Shivah is a solidly B-tier offering. It’s charmingly presented and features a handful of intellectually stimulating puzzles — at least one of which I’d call absolutely inspired — but its brief runtime and broadly linear structure can’t make the most of its mechanical inventory, which feels overwrought for how simple of a game this is to play. The writing, meanwhile, is terrific while it’s interrogating the nature of morality or man’s responsibility within it, but the nuts and bolts of the mystery and its participants are pretty inconsistent for what is ostensibly a game about investigating a murder.

And, make no mistake: this game certainly wants you to feel like a detective on a murder investigation who also happens to be a rabbi. The presentation does a lot to sell it, too. The music in the Kosher Edition, composed by Peter Gresser, incorporates klezmer-adjacent horns and woodwinds into a hardboiled noir soundtrack to surprisingly great effect. Abe Goldfarb’s performance as Rabbi Stone, a highlight of the voiceover, nails the confluence between grizzled Private Eye and sardonic rabbi from the Lower East Side. The pixel art, while hardly jaw-dropping, runs the spectrum of genre evocation. The dusty, decaying B’nei Ben-Zion synagogue interior gives way to the uncannily refined Temple Beth Tikvah, which then leads you to a grimy, dimly lit alleyway in which a chain-smoking Humphrey Bogart would seem right at home. Instead, your exhausted protagonist, resplendent in his tasteless street clothes and dull-brown kippah, ambles into a filthy dive bar for the first time in his life. As a disheveled woman carries on an animated conversation with an invisible partner, the bartender shrugs at your questions with an impatient glare.

So, the presentation is broadly successful at achieving a noir aesthetic as filtered through Ashkenazic Judaism, which is no small feat. There are a few stumbles: the voice direction is inconsistent, often producing stilted dialogues with mismatched paces; one repeatedly visited interior in the Kosher Edition is copied from a previous Wadjet Eye project and so feels out of place; and I’d be remiss not to mention that Ruth Weber wasn’t a great choice to portray a South-Asian woman. Other than that, though, my only significant complaints about the game are to do with how its brevity gets in the way of its ambitions.

For presentation alone does not a point-and-click adventure game make, so let’s talk puzzle design. It’s no Secret of Monkey Island,3 but it never sinks anywhere close to the illogical nadir occupied by, e.g., the crappier entries in Sierra’s catalogue. You have a small inventory of crucial documents, but there’s no inventory-puzzling as such — pure deduction is your bread and butter. In that vein, there’s a curious reliance on guessing people’s e-mail passwords, which you’ll do thrice in the game’s roughly 100-minute runtime. In the commentary track, Gilbert explains that he likes this sort of puzzle because it’s grounded in reality and it compels the player to uncover information about the associated characters. That’s well and good, but the three such instances in The Shivah don’t reveal much of anything aside from the fact that the main antagonist openly conspires with twisted criminals through unencrypted email. Still, I can’t deny that, for 2006, this was oddly prescient in terms of its grounding in reality.

Aside from password-guessing, there’s also a system where you accumulate clues and can drag and drop them atop one another to combine related clues into insights, an interesting concept that’s used about twice in the entire game. This idea must have played a bigger role in the game’s early design before getting substantially trimmed in the interest of time. Much more satisfying are the logic challenges built into dialogue. Stone’s rabbinical training left him an effective communicator, but it’s up to you to properly apply it. You’re rarely offered a choice between strings of literal dialogue, instead selecting between terse objectives like “direct approach” or “incredulous response.” Always available when you’re asked a question is “rabbinical response,” which unfailingly answers with another question. It’s great for deflecting attention when used properly, and for inflaming tensions when misused. Hilarious, and it forms the basis of the game’s best and final puzzle in which, wounded and barely standing, you win a fist-fight with your evil rabbi counterpart by throwing him off his game in a liturgical duel. I’m basically certain that this is the only video game ever made featuring a rooftop fist-fight between rabbis, and I’m glad to report that The Shivah manages to earn it.

After defeating the man responsible for your benefactor’s death, the game ends with Rabbi Stone reflecting on faith and fulfillment.4 This is where the game is at its most Jewish, and I suspect it’s why so many of those who’ve played The Shivah confidently call it the most significant representative of Judaism in the extant gaming canon. We’ll talk details and about whether or not I agree in the next section. But, to conclude the review portion: as an adventure game, The Shivah is decent but not great. Ultimately, the things that make it special and worth talking about have relatively little to do with the gameplay itself. Maximum spoilers ahead.

ON GAMES ABOUT FAITH

“Your people are in this very, very deep,” barks the knife-wielding assassin after cornering Rabbi Stone on a deserted subway platform.

“My people? You mean the Jews?” responds the latter. It unfolds that Jack Lauder was murdered after failing to pay his debts to the mob, which he incurred after his new rabbi set him up under the pretense of helping with Lauder’s struggling business. The rabbi earned a tidy commission while his victims languished under mounting debts that they could never pay, and he periodically had them murdered whenever they grew suspicious of his involvement.

One thing leads to another, and Rabbi Stone confronts his counterpart on the balcony of the latter’s opulent penthouse apartment. This begins the abovementioned rabbi-on-rabbi violence, in which your opponent becomes vulnerable whenever you goad him into declaratively answering your questions instead of responding with another question. Great joke, but it’s also where we find the game’s writing at its most poignant. We’ll conclude with that in a bit.

First, let’s consider the question this all begs: why are there so few games like this? By “like this,” I don’t just mean games that centrally feature Judaism, but games that wrestle with questions of faith more generally, and that do so without detouring into moralizing condescension or overbearing evangelism.

It might just be that games about faith and games with religious theming are two entirely different categories. There’s an argument to be made that The Shivah is itself not all that Jewish, at least from a religious perspective. Dave Gilbert himself is open about his lack of personal attachment to the religious side of Judaism and his consternation over how the game has evolved into something of a standard-bearer for authentic Jewish representation in video game design. From the commentary track, I get the impression that he mostly just wanted to develop a detective adventure whose protagonist was a non-detective with a personal attachment to the investigation (as opposed to a professional investigator who gets paid to do it). He’s basically said as much in interviews, too. “[A]nyone looking to The Shivah as a way to learn about Jewish culture should probably look somewhere else,” he declares.5

The Judaism-inflected theming in The Shivah is, in that case, ultimately a reflection of Gilbert’s culturally Jewish identity rather than a sincere meditation on the Jewish faith. A Youth Group reference here, a bit of Yiddish phraseology there… write what you know, yeah?

But perhaps it’s not quite that simple. There are good reasons why video games with openly religious foundations are almost never published: for one, if you’re motivated to spread a sincere message of faith, then developing and distributing a commercial video game is about the least efficient way you could possibly go about doing it; for another, who on earth would spend their money and free time on such a thing unless they were already sold on the message in question? I mean, unless of course it was to openly mock the project and perhaps drive some traffic to a YouTube channel, as a growing number of largely AI-generated games about Jesus can attest.

Point is, if you’re going to design a video game that’s principally about faith, you either preach to the choir or somehow project a universally resonant message for which religious practice is a framing device rather than a fundament of the message itself. Games of that variety, while still quite rare, do exist and are occasionally excellent. Here I might shout out FAITH: The Unholy Trinity, a game from a few years back where you play as a young priest who exorcises demons both figurative and literal. That game’s great because it leverages a believable (and, I think, broadly authentic) portrayal of Catholic practice to tell a story not about Catholicism but about the nature of evil and humankind’s struggle against it, hence why a gamer of decidedly non-Catholic persuasion like myself can enjoy it so thoroughly. Ultimately, I think The Shivah delivers a very similar experience. Let’s return to the battle of the rabbis.

“How can you live with yourself?” asks Stone of the man who betrays his congregants in exchange for money.

“God knows more than anyone how the world works,” comes the response. “I’m sure he understands.”

“You really think God will understand your actions?”

“God knows what is necessary… this is how the world is. Get used to it!” No question mark — the fight is ours.

Rabbi Stone knocks the fucker’s lights out, and he tumbles to the floor. The police take him away and Stone’s name is cleared. Lauder’s bequest comes through, and B’nei Ben-Zion’s debts are paid… for the time being, anyway. Weeks pass, and nothing else really changes. Come Shabbat services, the sanctuary remains empty and the sermon is heard by no one.

“Battling for goodness is how we give our lives meaning,” says Rabbi Stone as he concludes. “Maybe there are no answers… Yet ultimately, we may find something else: meaning, significance, and fulfillment. If so, that may be enough.”

“Dear God, I hope that’s enough,” replies his internal monologue. Gosh, me too.

So, do I recommend The Shivah? This is another one of those cases where the answer depends largely on you. If you’re an old hat with AGS games and appreciate the particular aura that tends to accompany them, you’ll find that here and probably get a kick out of it. If you’re Jewish and play video games, it’ll undoubtedly feel at turns both hilarious and poignant, and you’ll get to appreciate some of the more subtle humor at work. Otherwise? Check it out if it sounds interesting. It’s less than two hours long, so, if nothing else, it certainly doesn’t waste your time. If you’re interested in exploring how the modalities of engagement unique to game design can explore faith but don’t care to play a twenty-year-old AGS game, I’d recommend FAITH instead. Please do let me know in the comments if you have experiences to share about either game, or about games like them.

Alright, that should do for this week. As I publish this edition, it’ll be sundown in a few hours and I’ve got to go enjoy some leavened bread while I still can. Happy Passover, friends.

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