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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Okay, one more New Vegas newsletter, and then I promise it’s out of my system for the foreseeable future. In the spirit of finality, we’re talking about ending slides this week.

Quick recap for those of you who aren’t sure what I’m on about: back in the mid-nineties, Interplay was balls-deep in ludonarrative innovation as it developed Fallout: A Post-Nuclear Roleplaying Game. The first Fallout game was rightfully lauded for how frequently and how deeply the player could fork the story, according it a sprawling graph of variable game states and a commensurately large number of narrative permutations. Realizing that representing all these permutations in game-space would take more man-hours than the life of the universe, some enterprising design leads came up with the idea of just showing players a literal slideshow that listed off all the impacts their actions had on the world. You’d get different slides depending on whom you saved, whom you left to perish, which communities you elevated and which you consigned to annihilation, and so on. Thus was the ending slide paradigm born, and it was a hit with the gaming public. No surprise, then, that it’s to be found in every mainline Fallout game and in other big-money RPGs like The Outer Worlds and Avowed. It’s even been adopted by smaller, independently developed genre entries like Underrail and ATOM RPG. These days, ending slides are an indelible part of the medium’s creative language.

Still, a curious paradox emerges in the context of this CRPG narrative design style in which the player’s decisions directly influence the contours of the story. In conspicuous contrast to the player-driven events that characterize primary gameplay, ending slides are essentially the dictionary definition of telling rather than showing. You get them after your role as player is concluded, and you generally have no ability to witness or explore the events they portray. Their foremost role is to remind you, in terse prose, that your actions had weight beyond whatever immediately observable impact you saw during your journey. A fine way to color a player’s final impression of a game, but it’s strange that a genre so utterly reliant on the unique audience engagement made available by game design should conclude with a non-interactive, post-facto lore dump, isn’t it?

Well, perhaps not. There have certainly been games with shitty ending slides that exist only to project the illusion of player agency over a broadly immutable narrative — Deus Ex: Human Revolution comes to mind — but when they’re done well, ending slides are more like a reward for active engagement than a departure from it. They’re also by far the most resource-efficient means of conveying the consequences of players’ decision-making when those consequences are widely distributed over time or geography. Lots of games have done this well. But for my money, it’s hard to beat the ending slides from Fallout: New Vegas even fifteen-plus years after its release. There are exceptions, but most of these slides are good at creating the sensation that your actions were of enduring importance. Some of them are very effectively dramatic. There’s also sufficiently many unique slides that every playthrough ought to have a fairly distinct tranche.

But if there’s one major shortcoming I can identify with New Vegas’s endings, it’s to do with how they handle the player character. Every playthrough will include one of fifteen possible ending slides about what became of the Courier, and every single one of them assumes a strange passivity of the mailman-turned-mercenary you control. If you cooperate with an existing faction, you’ll end up celebrated by but servile to its leadership. If you go your own path and fight for an independent New Vegas, you’ll be recognized as responsible for pushing out the other factions, but don’t learn a thing about what role — if any — you end up playing afterwards. See, the protagonist of New Vegas rose from the grave, hunted down the man who tried to kill them, and then became instrumental in determining the political future of the entire region. You’d think this would all reflect some kind of unquenchable ambition, or at least a restlessness for action.

With all that in mind, I figured I’d spend a little time this week exercising the creative-writing muscles that I’ve allowed to atrophy since high school and share with you a few ending slides I wish New Vegas had. You’ll find that the Courier going mad with power is a recurring theme, but, hey, we’ve all got to cope with our lack of control over the world somehow. Please do share your own notional New Vegas ending slides in the comments if you’d like — it’s remarkably cathartic, and I’d love to see how your own imaginations engage with this game.

Oh, and just in case it needs to be said: you should read the italicized narrations in the voice of Ron Perlman, as is the franchise custom.

LAND OF THE FREE

Conditions: kill Mr. House and complete No Gods, No Masters after finishing the Old World Blues expansion.

Inspired by Mr. House’s project but disgusted by its inefficiency, the Courier reforged New Vegas into a living panopticon. The Securitron army became the cybernetic organs of a terrible surveillance apparatus, weaponizing paranoia against the malcontents who, in their ignorance, would impede the city’s growth. Like an idiot god, the technocapital singularity of New Vegas ruthlessly devoured the wasteland and all who stood in the path of its radical transformation.

You know, despite the fact that Mr. House made enthusiastic use of hyper-advanced technology to prolong his life by centuries, field an army of robots, and build a functioning vice economy in the middle of a nuclear wasteland, he always struck me as remarkably unambitious. If the player character presses him on his future agenda, he’ll optimistically declare his intentions to “reignite the high technology sector” in twenty years and to have people in orbit after fifty. For a man of his capabilities, his goals come across as uncharacteristically conservative and his timelines as strangely cautious.

For, while House is busy paying delivery boys to run the breadth of the Mojave in furtherance of his long-term economic agenda, the Think Tank over at the Big MT facility has operationalized weaponry that acts on the protonic scale and motherfucking handheld teleportation devices. The player will unavoidably encounter the astounding technological capacity of the post-nuclear Southwest simply by playing the Old World Blues expansion, where you explore a hidden research facility at which nearly every room contains some world-changing innovation. I’m not aware of any special interactions with Mr. House that become available after visiting the Big MT or otherwise encountering extraordinary technology, and this leads me to believe that the Courier is deliberately hiding it for use as leverage.

So, I’d have an ending where the Courier is on board with Mr. House’s plan to reawaken human civilization through the unrestricted exploitation of technology and capital, but opposed to House’s caution. Why spend twenty years gradually reestablishing an advanced research sector when there’s a perfectly good one ripe for the conquest? Maybe the Courier believes that the best hope of preventing mankind from again destroying itself is to divest humanity of its natural will altogether. Just as Caesar was inspired to found the Legion after chancing across Commentarii de Bello Gallico, perhaps the Courier borrowed a dog-eared copy of Fanged Noumena from a Brotherhood scribe and became a Landian accelerationist.

EVERY MAN A KING

Conditions: complete No Gods, No Masters after killing Kimball, Caesar, and House; maintain Idolized reputation with Freeside and the Kings.

The Courier’s ascendancy was enthusiastically welcomed by the grateful citizenry of Freeside. The Kings dedicated themselves to the Courier’s service and, casting off House’s tyrannical yoke, they worked tirelessly to transform New Vegas into a militarized commune without masters or hierarchies. Mounting machine guns atop their brahmin-drawn carts, the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of New Vegas brought terror and death to enemies of freedom throughout the Mojave and beyond.

It’s often said that the distinctly left-inflected Followers of the Apocalypse ought to have had an ending all to themselves that established them as the foremost political agent in the Mojave. I’m sympathetic to the idea if only because, as we discussed last week, the anti-authoritarian left is the only quadrant of the political compass that doesn’t get much of a shot at outright dominance in New Vegas. The problem with slotting in the Followers for this purpose, of course, is that they’re not really a cogent political faction so much as a hopelessly overstretched humanitarian organization. To quote game director Josh Sawyer, “[the Followers] tend so much toward anti-authoritarianism that they have weak internal hierarchies and a lack of clear or unified direction.”1 This, I gather, is why every ending slide involving the Followers portrays them as either hopelessly out of their depth, dispersed, or completely annihilated unless they end up collaborating with a victorious NCR.

So, I’d have the notional left-coded ending abandon any pretense of peaceful transition and really lean into the insurrectionary spirit that one might reasonably expect of anti-hierarchical leftist ascendancy in the midst of a social collapse as in, e.g., a nuclear post-apocalypse. Leave scientific communism to ATOM RPG, and let Fallout take the more thematically appropriate path of a Nestor Makhno-inspired revolution against the vestiges of oppression.

LONE WANDERER II

Conditions: in dialogue with Oliver, Lanius, or House after completing their endgame mission, rebuff their congratulations and express your disinterest in their plans.

The Courier, who had so quickly risen to play a decisive role in the victory of [faction], disappeared just as suddenly into the wastes. Seeking neither wealth nor adulation, they journeyed beyond the Mojave, searching for a challenge worthy of the wanderer who conquered New Vegas.

Finally, in a departure from the above, I wish the player character could just throw up their hands, tell all of the competing factions to go fuck themselves, and pursue their own interests in peace. After all, it’s basically how Fallouts 1 and 2 end: the Vault Dweller from the first game is cast out of Vault 13 and settles into a provincial lifestyle among a village of outcasts, and the Chosen One from the second game becomes Elder of the same village. I think the Courier probably had too cataclysmic an effect on the world and made too many enemies to settle down quietly, so why not throw up one’s hands and return to doing what one does best, i.e., mail delivery and mass murder? Certainly a more edifying fate than resting on your laurels.

Thanks for reading, folks. Hope you’ve enjoyed this three-week immersion into one of the better RPGs ever made and one of my favorite games of all time. It’s definitely time to move on, though, so next week’s subject is about as far from New Vegas as it’s possible to get. Brace yourself for a 2006 point-and-click adventure game with a protagonist well suited to the events of next Wednesday.

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Last week, our focus was dominated by an apocalyptic environmental catastrophe, endemic crises of mass psychosis, and the incipient normalization of cannibalism. But forget about the news for a moment — we also reviewed Fallout: DUST, which must be Fallout: New Vegas’s most brutally cunning mod project. And we did it on Linux, no less! As recently as February, I worried that an inability to play modded New Vegas campaigns would be an incurable side-effect of my zero-Windows diet, and I’ve never been more delighted to have been proven completely wrong. I’m stuck right back into New Vegas, and it’s both relieving and inspiring to see how well it holds up after all these years. Last week’s review argued that its core design is still wholly capable of delivering a memorable survival experience. This week, after reexposing myself to the original campaign, I’d like to talk about the strength of its writing.

New Vegas is broadly remembered as a sort of return-to-form for the franchise after Bethesda’s Fallout 3. To put it charitably, FO3 sought a much wider audience than its classic, Interplay-developed predecessors from the nineties, and so backpedaled on the more contemplative, political, and philosophical elements of their narrative presentation (among many other compromises beyond the scope of this tirade). New Vegas, for its part, leapt right back into the searing crucible of ideological warfare into which Fallouts 1 and 2 dipped their toes. After a first-act tour through the Mojave Wasteland introduces the player to the factions competing for dominance, the game becomes a political thriller in whose resolution the player character has a decisive role. Almost the whole political compass is represented: a bloated, corruptible liberal democracy with a progressive core; a quasi-fascistic, hypertraditionalist dictatorship; a right-libertarian autocracy very much in its Singapore era; and, of course, a friendly robot who will gleefully bring about chaotic, masterless anarchy at your behest. All that’s missing is a faction of left-wing dialectical materialists. But cut them a break — it got harder to advance a critique of labor economics after all the factories were bathed in nuclear fire.

And yet, New Vegas is by no means devoid of a dialectical approach to post-nuclear politics. On the contrary, the Hegelian dialectic is explicitly name-checked during the main quest. The only wrinkle is that it comes from a fairly nontraditional source, i.e., Caesar, Son of Mars, dictator of the Legion and sworn enemy of New-Californian republicanism. His “Hegelian” approach to pacifying the wasteland and ensuring man’s survival in the Great War’s aftermath is fairly well known these days. Experiencing it anew after several years, I’m reminded not only of why Caesar is probably my favorite villain in the entire franchise but of why (most of) Fallout’s villains are as memorable as they are. This week’s installment is basically my post-hoc analysis of that experience.

But first, what exactly is the Hegelian dialectic? Well, every serious thinker these days knows that truly understanding Hegel is a game for the kind of gauche poindexter who makes other philosophy nerds look like John Wayne, so I would explain it to you in the same way that Caesar explains it to the player character in New Vegas. That is, incorrectly. Accordingly, we’re going to sidestep an earnest discussion of what Hegel “really” meant, since I’m more likely to embarrass myself than to come up with any cogent exposition. Besides, Hegel himself is ancillary to Caesar’s character and his motivations at most. What’s really fascinating about the man is how his obviously and deliberately repugnant ideology is given strength and narrative weight by the context in which it emerged.

So, the plan is this: we’ll start by digging beneath the surface of Caesar’s character as it’s presented in New Vegas’s main quest, then we’ll have a more comprehensive look at his vision for the wasteland, and we’ll build up to how it exemplifies the narrative process that makes these games so enduringly cherished. Let’s begin with a look at the twenty-something dweeb who became, arguably, Fallout’s most interesting villain.

RED-PILLED ED: AN UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY

Oh, right, little-known fact: Caesar’s real name is fucking Edward. Edward Sallow, to be exact, presumably so named for what the scorching Nevadan climate did to his complexion. But I digress.

Fifty-some-odd years before the events of New Vegas, the man who would become Caesar was born someplace near the ruins of Los Angeles. His father was slain when he was two, and he grew up under the protection of the vaguely anarcho-syndicalist-coded Followers of the Apocalypse. By the age of twenty, he’d become a capable linguist and keen anthropologist. The Followers, seeking to advance their twin causes of equality and voluntary association, sent him on expedition to the Grand Canyon to study the dialects of the isolated tribes who lived thereabouts.

“What a fucking waste of time,” reflects a regretful Caesar if you happen to ask him about his journey from Follower to imperator.

For, far from a mutually uplifiting cultural exchange, young Edward found instead a band of tribal warmongers who captured him and his associates with the presumptive intent of holding them for ransom. Being taken captive by roving marauders is never great news, but this particular incident was made worse by the tribe’s exceptionally weak diplomatic situation. At simultaneous war with seven other tribes, the gestating Son of Mars realized that his captors would be defeated and that he would go down with them unless dramatic and decisive action were taken. He took it upon himself to instruct his tormentors in the use and care of firearms, the manufacture of ammunition and explosives, and tactical organization, among other post-liberal arts. He was made war chief by an impressed tribal leadership, whereupon he marched on and subsequently exterminated every man, woman, and child allegiant to the weakest foe. The remaining six tribes surrendered without a fuss after bearing witness to the devastation and were folded into the burgeoning imperium, and Caesar’s Legion began to grow.

A tale as old as time. But it does beg the question of how a linguistic anthropologist working for an anti-expansionist humanitarian organization came to embrace the divide-and-conquer ethos of imperial Rome. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not exactly surprising that a gigantic nerd should develop a performative obsession with the Roman Empire. But it’s curious that he did so centuries after doing so carried even the most remote possibility of advancing one’s social cachet. What’s going on here?

As it turns out, Edward and his companions chanced upon a cache of pre-war books during their journey to the Grand Canyon, among them Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico. These clearly had a big impression on the twenty-year-old nerd from what was once southern California, and it extends well beyond the plumed helmets, Latinate phraseology, and aquiline nose.

CAESAR’S DIALECTIC

“In Rome I found a template for a society equal to the challenges of the post-apocalyptic world — a society that could and would survive,” explains an ascendant Edward when we ask him about his Legion’s curious aesthetic. “A society that could prevent mankind from fracturing and destroying itself in this new world, by establishing a new Pax Romana.”

Aww, shit. Here we go again.

One of the things I most love about New Vegas is that, in a departure from its immediate predecessor, the designers figured their players had some stake in narrative cohesion and might want to explore the story’s characters beyond their most superficial motivations. “What does ‘Pax Romana’ mean?” asks my character, who, after all, is educated in little beyond murder and mail delivery.

“It means a nationalist, imperialist, totalitarian, homogenous culture that obliterates the identity of every group it conquers,” replies the Son of Mars. “Long-term stability at all costs. The individual has no value beyond his utility to the state, whether as an instrument of war, or production.” As a political project, it’s about as uncompromisingly opposed to the classically liberal ideals of the New California Republic as it’s possible to be.

“So you’ll destroy the NCR because you hate its inefficiencies?” asks my character, unable to grasp the sheer heft of Caesarian thought.

“No, I’ll destroy it because it’s inevitable that it be destroyed,” replies the august dictator. “It’s Hegelian Dialectics, not personal animosity… Just as with the ancient Republic, it is natural that a military force should conquer and transform the NCR into a military dictatorship. Thesis and antithesis… the resolution of the conflict yields something new — a synthesis — eliminating the flaws in each, leaving behind common elements and ideas.”

Now, this is where a certain kind of analyst would point out that, in his invocation of the “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” triad, Caesar is parroting a Kantianism expounded by Johann Fichte rather than an authentically Hegelian dialectical procedure. I’ll refrain from digging into that for two reasons: first, because I hardly understand Hegel any better than Caesar; and second, because I’m not trying to get beat up for my lunch money. So instead of poking holes in the man’s process, let’s consider the product at which he arrives.

“...the new synthesis will change the Legion as well: from a basically nomadic army to a standing military force that protects its citizens, and the power of its dictator.”

That Caesar misappropriates the language of German idealism in order to advance a cause in direct opposition of its liberatory ends is, of course, part of the joke. What distinguishes it from outright satire (as we get in, e.g., Psycho Patrol R) is that there’s a kernel of efficacy behind his designs. The writers of New Vegas gave themselves a difficult task: portray a grotesquely evil faction of hateful monsters who delight in their cruelty, and then situate it in a context that makes the player earnestly consider the potential merits of its approach. Striking that balance is where New Vegas triumphs, but it’s all part of a narrative legacy that began way back in 1997.

ANSWERING FALLOUT’S BIG QUESTION

Every Fallout game — or, at least, every Fallout game that earnestly attempts a coherent narrative — is ultimately about the conflict between practically incompatible strategies for preventing humankind from destroying itself. Those of you with several of the games under your belt know what I’m talking about: in Fallout 1, ought we biochemically erase that which divides us or embrace those divisions as greater than the sum of their parts? In Fallout 2, ought we recapture the utopian spirit of pre-war liberalism or shall we simply annihilate all those who are not like us? In Fallout 3, ought we retread the central conflict of Fallout 2 without an ounce of its wit, or shall we do so without even the pretense of respect for the player’s intellect? Finally, in Fallout: New Vegas, we have ourselves a soothing, old-fashioned conflict between political ideologies.

It’s often asserted — erroneously, in my opinion — that the development team had some kind of personal or emotional bias toward the NCR and its liberal-democratic ethos. I don’t think the evidence presented in the game quite bears that out. Instead, I get the impression that the writers were, if anything, critical of that ethos and sought to give the player opportunities to redress some of the contradictions that infected both the NCR’s republicanism and the actually existing liberal democracy in which they lived. Authorities in the Republic are all too eager to extort their agrarian constituencies, torture prisoners of war, and even perpetrate a straight-up massacre whose similarities to Wounded Knee cannot possibly be a coincidence. It takes the player’s direct, conscious intervention to prevent the NCR from casually engaging in atrocity.

Meanwhile, the Legion does actually present a coherent alternative, and the curious player of New Vegas will find plenty of evidence that Caesar’s approach is largely effective at accomplishing his stated goal of stability at all costs. Of particular note is that the caravaneers who form the backbone of the wasteland economy are practically universal in their acknowledgement of what we may as well call Caesar’s Pax Mojave. It’s not bumbling ineptitude or ideological incoherency that’s meant to sway the player away from the Legion approach. Instead, it’s the reckless personality cult, the institutionalized misogyny, the chattel slavery, and one final, inescapable weakness that dooms the whole project.

For you see, it’s also the case that every Fallout villain’s ideology is skewered by some grand contradiction that renders it unworkable and unsympathetic. In Fallout 1, the Master’s plan to turn everyone into a mutant is let down by the mutants’ sterility, assuring that his vision would cause mankind’s extinction. In Fallout 2, the Enclave’s plot to restore American democracy by murdering everyone else is let down by the NCR’s living example of liberal democracy sans genocide. In Fallout 3, Colonel Autumn’s plot to do... something, I think... is let down by how utterly it failed to make an impression on my memory. And in New Vegas, Caesar’s undeniable success at pacifying the territory under his control is let down not only by the wretchedness of his methods but by its sheer transience. He’s an old, sick man whose self-obsessed and uncompromising nature has foreclosed the possibility of the Legion’s continuity after his forthcoming death. None are fit to take his place, so chaos will reign after he’s gone. All that can remain of the Legion afterwards is the wretchedness.

New Vegas is, without question, a game about politics. But is it trying to make a political statement in and of itself? Something braver than “autocratic slave-states are bad,” I mean. And, if so, is it a successful model for how to broach the increasingly fraught subject of political organization through the medium of game design? If not, what can we learn from its shortcomings? These are all loaded questions that deserve a more complete answer than I’m prepared to give at this very moment. Do let me know in the comments if you have any thoughts you’d like to share on the matter. For now, I’d like to end on some wisdom from New Vegas project director Joshua Sawyer, who, after all, came up with the idea(archive.is/kZfc1) to make Caesar a performative Hegel-worshipper in the first place.

“[W]hile you are not necessarily supposed to DISlike Caesar, it was not our intention to make Caesar someone who is easy to like, nor his autocratic rule something that you react to by saying, “Oh, well it’s totally justified.” … Ultimately, Caesar is an educated tyrant living in an echo-chamber of his own creation. Despite having a long-term vision for the future, he is quite short-sighted. If you were expecting Caesar to be grey and found him to be black, I’d argue that he’s still grey, but he’s intentionally a very dark grey. Tamerlane and Charles Taylor also had reasons for doing the things they did, but it doesn’t make the things they did any less terrible.”1

See ya next week <3

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There’s something different about the charmingly quaint town of Goodsprings when I arrive. Though my character probably doesn’t know it, I can’t help but recall that this place was once of immense consequence to the future of the Mojave Wasteland. Two decades ago, a local Securitron pulled a moribund courier from a hastily dug grave and brought them to Goodsprings’ foremost physician, whose success in saving their life had a decisive effect on the Second Battle of Hoover Dam. So too did the hospitality and grace of the town’s other residents. Their good faith is, quite famously, the player’s first experience of Obsidian Entertainment’s momentous take on the post-apocalypse of Fallout. It’s no wonder that Goodsprings is remembered as one of the great starting locations in CRPG history. I wonder if Doc Mitchell, Trudy the matronly barkeep, and Sunny Smiles the tutorializing trapper are still around.

...evidently not. The first red flag is that, as I approach the town’s border and unlock the fast-travel location, my Pip-Boy marks it as “Ghost Town” rather than “Goodsprings.” The second is that I encounter not an amiable crowd of helpful townsfolk but a pack of emaciated dogs that hungrily regard me as they would a walking trough of Snausages. Forced to cut them down one by one as they charge, I come to the startling realization that the poor creatures are now the biggest stroke of luck I’ve had yet as I pull out my hot plate. Now awash in dog steaks, I can fill my stomach and defer the lurid temptation of cannibalism for at least another couple of days.

My satisfaction, if you could call it that, doesn’t last long. The Ghost Town isn’t devoid of people, just of the living. Scattered throughout the streets, sheds, and backrooms of the once-proud mining settlement are piles of decomposing cadavers, many hastily wrapped in filthy linens. Those not so embalmed bear the signs of some terrible affliction. On one of them, I find what appears to be a journaled reflection scrawled on a bit of paper.

“Jesus, there’s not even enough of us left to properly wrap the corpses,” it reads. “Trudy said ‘screw it’ and to ‘just throw the bodies in the cart anyways,’ but if we don’t wrap ‘em, flies’ll come and the damn thing’ll just spread even more.”

Haunting. But I’ll tell you what: the plague-ridden specter of what was once Goodsprings isn’t even in the top ten most dreadful scenes I encountered in my week with Fallout: DUST. This one is something special, folks.

THE PREMISE

Fallout: New Vegas, I assume, needs no introduction. In the event that I’m wrong, now would be a good time to brace yourself for a cluster of buzzwords and nerd jargon as I briefly explain the premise of this astounding mod project.

Twenty years have passed since Courier Six walked the Mojave, traversed the Divide, and effectuated the New California Republic’s victory1 at the Second Battle of Hoover Dam. Sadly, any hope of stability or progress in the wake of Caesar’s defeat is now thoroughly dashed. The post-apocalyptic Mojave Wasteland has reverted to an intra-apocalyptic state following a series of catastrophes, each a manifestation of the worst possible future envisioned by the events of New Vegas. The fell and terrible Cloud that once blanketed the Sierra Madre has, by nefarious means, journeyed West in a new and more dangerous form. Behind it came a dust storm of biblical proportions, daubing the region with suffocating, radioactive soot and blotting out the Sun. Welcomed by the shroud of eternal twilight, the Tunnelers of the Divide realized Ulysses’ dark premonitions and migrated to the desert. They now roam the open sands in flesh-hungry packs. So too do the splintered factions of cannibals, fiends, and other desperate survivors as years of heinous misfortune wreak cruel havoc on what little remains of their sanity and their selves. All hope is forsaken. It’s a gruesome vision of the future that I’m sure we’ll all get to experience for ourselves in, like, six months at the most.

Fallout: DUST is a fan game set in the worst imaginable aftermath of New Vegas. It is, above all else, a hardcore survival RPG set in the Fallout universe that recontextualizes the series’ premise of post-apocalyptic roleplaying through what I can best describe as a Hobbesian state of nature. Where survival mechanics were a very light touch in the original games, they become the driving force of primary gameplay in DUST and are, by means of clever design, effectively insurmountable. The only hope of enduring security is to flee in search of pastures new. “Escape the Mojave,” reads the quest objective given you as the game begins. It’s the only quest you’ll get in all of DUST, and it’s far easier said than done.

DUST begins as it means to go on, i.e., forebodingly. After you select “New Game,” you create a character through the ordinary New Vegas interface before fading in on a dark, fetid corridor with vision blurred and eardrums shrieking. One gathers from the atmosphere and the spooky background track that this is meant to be either a fever dream, a narcotic-induced delirium, or some jolly combination of both. Here, you’re to select a door from one of nine options, each of which will teleport you to a unique starting location with its own set of initial loot, threats, and environmental storytelling. This is what passes for difficulty selection. A few of these starting locations are remarkably dense with loot and sparse of early opposition, but most are only barely survivable if not borderline impossible. Unless you preemptively check the Wiki for advice, you’re more likely than not to revisit the hazy nightmare world several times before building up any serious momentum.

This all presages a survival experience utterly confident in its ability to torment the player. It’s one of the most challenging — and, by extension, exhilarating — survival games I’ve played, and it was an ideal way to return to New Vegas after a yearslong break. I’ve finally got the ostensibly Windows-only modding suite working on my Linux installation,2 and I found DUST so exciting and thought-provoking that I just had to share it with you. In this mostly spoiler-free review, I’ll try to elucidate the subtle brilliance of its design and why I think any New Vegas veteran ought to give it a shot. We’ll also discuss its technical state and how an intrepid modder can overcome most of its limitations. First, though, the gameplay that I can’t believe I waited a decade to try.3

THE GAME DESIGN

At first blush, DUST comes across as a fairly straightforward rebalancing of the core 3D Fallout experience. The mechanics and roleplaying system are retained, and the hardcore survival mode that was first introduced in New Vegas is turned on by default. You periodically have to eat, drink, and sleep, lest you suffer maluses to your stats and eventually expire. Damage multipliers are increased across the board such that both player and NPCs are dramatically more fragile. I know, I know — it sounds like any number of survival-focused mods familiar to every Western open-world RPG ever made. DUST, however, does it so well that it reforges the entire gameplay experience. Let me explain.

See, the thing about the hardcore mode in vanilla New Vegas is that, if you have a passing familiarity with the game’s world and its systems, it really isn’t very “hardcore” at all. The conceit of having to regularly eat, drink, and sleep to stave off penalties is an interesting one, but it seldom comes together in practice — infinite sources of water are scattered across the Mojave, food is easily found for free in almost every part of the game, and regular sleep is as simple as noting the locations of soiled mattresses so that you can return when the meter starts to climb. In practice, therefore, the survival mechanics suffer from the problem common to most games with metered needs: since resources aren’t scarce enough to drive the player’s decision-making, the meters are a nuisance that distract from the more exciting questing around which the game is built. There have been many approaches to overcoming this limitation over the years, and DUST’s chosen method is to forego questing altogether.

The key word is “scarcity,” and its effective realization is what sets DUST apart not only from other entries in the Fallout canon but from the survival genre in general. For starters, food and water are no longer found in abundance throughout the wasteland. Twenty years and a second apocalypse after the events of New Vegas, nearly every location on the map has been picked clean. You no longer find packaged food in every kitchen or bottled water at every campsite. You’ll be lucky to find a unit or two of each, heavily irradiated, over twenty minutes of exploration. Even more precious is ammunition, which is so uncommon that it’s practically impossible to accumulate. You might find half a dozen rounds on the corpse of a heavily armed survivor and another half-dozen in an ammo box nearby, and even that would be an unusual windfall. This all has some remarkable effects on the moment-to-moment character of the game.

First, the scarcity of survival-related resources is so great that finding food and water replaces the quest-focused primary gameplay loop of the base game. You’ll never have quite enough for comfort — by the time your desperate scavenging yields a morsel of food or a few ounces of dirty water, the hunger and thirst meters will have progressed to the point where you’ll generally be compelled to consume it right away. Then you’ll hurriedly move onto the next stop on your journey, hoping to have enough by nightfall that you won’t starve in your sleep. Besides, exploring after sunset is practically suicidal. In the absence of moonlight, you can barely see the ground thirty feet in front of you, but the terrible denizens of the wasteland can sense you just fine.

Second, the scarcity reinvigorates the cycle of scavenging and looting, which rapidly starts to feel mechanical and perfunctory in every 3D Fallout game. No longer do your eyes lazily track over the contents of every desk and cabinet as you gobble up consumables you don’t need. Instead, every footlocker or fallen enemy feels like an opportunity. When you see a skewer of meat or a few bullets in the loot interface, it represents such a significant find that the dopamine rush inherent to 3D Fallout’s early-game looting cycle never wears off.

All of this serves to wholly reconfigure the means by which you’d ordinarily approach a campaign in New Vegas. You start to carefully pick your battles and consider alternative strategies, since any fight in which you expend more than a handful of bullets will be a net loser. Melee and throwing weapons cease to be niche options for gimmick playthroughs and become essentially critical means of preserving your limited ammunition. Stealth and clever tactics are all the more useful, since landing a sneak attack with one bullet is dramatically more resource-efficient than firing several rounds at an aware enemy and, God forbid, missing a few shots. Grenades and proximity explosives each find vastly more use than in a typical playthrough, since they create invaluable opportunities to clear several hostiles with only a single expenditure of your desperately limited ordinance.

Finally, now that survival is the unignorable core of the gameplay rather than a tertiary annoyance, the player’s engagement with the roleplaying system is also dramatically altered. Perks that you’d never even consider in a vanilla playthrough, like those that reduce radiation incurred from food and water, become S-tier picks early in the game once it becomes apparent that anti-rad drugs are rarer than unobtainium. The much-maligned Survival skill, introduced in New Vegas and notorious for its low utility and high opportunity cost, is almost essential for the crafting recipes it provides — it’s now the only remotely reliable source of healing items and cooked food.

In sum, the changes to the loot table and the resulting manifestation of genuine, persistent scarcity have a profound effect on the Fallout formula: for the first time in the franchise’s history, the game feels genuinely and truly post-apocalyptic, and there’s real, palpable tension in the survival mechanics that persists throughout the playthrough. Keeping your meters topped up creates a constant urgency that obsessively steers your decision-making, and you’ll simply never escape the cruel cycle of hunger until you finally reach your sole objective and escape the Mojave.

I mean, unless you resort to cannibalism, of course. Do that, and you’ll be able to tap the game’s only common source of calories. You’d better believe there are consequences, though. The Karma system from New Vegas is replaced with a sanity meter, and killing your fellow man in order to consume his flesh is extraordinarily hard on the psyche. The Mojave tortures the insane even more cruelly than the rest, and the condition is incurable. The wasteland is at last merciless, as well it should be.

It may not surprise you to learn that DUST is the brainchild of exactly one modder, who goes by the handle naugrim04. A quick perusal of DUST’s page on Nexus Mods reveals the motivation for the project: “Gameplay wise, FNV was a step up from FO3, but the atmosphere was nowhere near as good,” reports naugrim in what I’d describe as a broadly sympathetic take on the franchise. “The Mojave seemed too… tame. That’s where DUST comes in.” And come in it did — you’ve got to love a gamer who puts nose to grindstone and manifests their vision of a great experience rather than just complaining about how the developers didn’t live up to it.

It’s a fine example of what I love so much about independent creativity in game design. New Vegas was notoriously developed under frantic conditions due to its frighteningly short development cycle and the corporate leadership’s commercial prerogatives, and so the final product released in 2010 was replete with compromises. That it’s nevertheless remembered as an era-defining title and one of the greatest video games of all time is a testament to its developers. That it remains enduringly popular over fifteen years later and continues to inspire a multigenerational legion of creatives is a testament to its community.

Despite its deliberate rejection of quest-driven storytelling, DUST is resplendent with lore-friendly narrative flourishes. Its pacing and environmental storytelling are carefully tuned to accommodate the New Vegas veteran who knows the Mojave Wasteland like the back of their hand, and it’s eerily good at subverting the expectations you might have on that basis. I can’t bear to spoil any specifics beyond some of the early-game pastiches up top, but suffice it to say that second-nature familiarity with Obsidian’s legendary RPG won’t at all interfere with your enjoyment of DUST. It gets my enthusiastic recommendation for any veteran of New Vegas. Those new to the 3D Fallout formula are advised to start with the base game, which in any case is one of the easiest recommendations in the entire pantheon of video gaming.

Before we close out, I ought to briefly talk about the game’s technical state. DUST’s greatest flaw by far is that it inherits the bugginess and instability of its base game while introducing a handful of new bugs all its own. If you only install the Steam version of New Vegas and drop DUST over top of it, you’ll almost invariably have your share of crashes-to-desktop and any number of bizarre technical fuckups that, while unlikely to outright ruin the experience, are hardly conducive to an immersive survival simulator. Luckily, a patient modder can overcome all of this with a few additions to the modlist. See the appendix down below for some advice in that regard.

I should also mention that DUST has a pseudo-sequel in the mod Fallout: FROST for Fallout 4. I don’t particularly care for FO4 and I’m not in a hurry to play it myself, but the community’s impression seems generally very positive. If you’ve played FROST, please do tell me your thoughts in the comments. I’d also love to hear about your experience with DUST if you’ve tried it before, or about any similarly hardcore survival-focused games that you think live up to the vision I’ve laid out above. If you haven’t played it and think you might like to give it a try, keep reading below for a little advice on how to get it spun up in 2026.

By the way, I haven’t finished scratching the New Vegas itch just yet. I’ve got a pretty high-concept subject in mind for next week’s edition, but we’ll return to the Mojave the week after for a long-overdue discussion of post-apocalyptic society in the Fallout universe and what we pre-apocalyptic folk might learn from it in our own time. See ya soon <3

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APPENDIX: Installing and Modding Fallout: DUST

Like most mods for Fallout: New Vegas, DUST is packaged as a compressed archive that’s pretty easily installed with the venerable Mod Organizer 2… assuming you’re still using Windows. If so, you need only follow the official directions. Even those who have never modded a PC game before should find it relatively straightforward. The caveat is that, as I mentioned earlier, the base installations of both New Vegas and DUST are pretty notoriously buggy. There are a handful of community mods to add atop them that remediated it on my end — see below for a list.

If you’re playing on Linux like I am, there are some extra steps. Mod Organizer 2 is officially supported only for Windows, but we’re living in the future nowadays and platform dependence is only what you make of it. Steam’s Proton compatibility layer comes in clutch, and the way I ended up getting this all working was by creating a global instance of MO2 with a simple Wine prefix, adding it as a non-Steam game, and invoking a launch parameter that forced it to use the New Vegas install directory as its compatability data source. If you don’t know what any of that nerd bullshit means, have no fear — some community-minded soul wrote a comprehensive, step-by-step guide on the Nexus forums that should get you to the promised land.

Finally, here are some additional mods I recommend in addition to DUST to make the experience as smooth as possible:

• Yukichigai’s Unofficial Patch (YUP), which fixes loads of bugs in the native game. Also a dependency of a couple mods below.

• DUST Tweaks, DUSTed DUST, and DUST – Additional Fixes, which correct bugs introduced by DUST and correct various oversights in the particulars of its design

You might also consider:

• Tunneler Detection Fix, which fixes a presumptive oversight in the Tunneler AI that makes them extraordinarily perceptive over extreme distances

• DUST Preorder Fixer (under “Optional files”), which prevents the game from automatically granting you a bunch of overpowered items at the beginning as the vanilla game does by default

Well, I’m back from visiting family. Did some skiing, ate more than my fill of cured meats and fried fish, and spent a great deal of time in transit. See, my mother lives in a cabin among the more remote environs of Michigan, and it’s a bit of a trek from my own home in Virginia. To get within reasonable driving distance, my wife and I fly from D.C. to Chicago, and then from Chicago to a roughly shoebox-sized installation where they’ve just about managed to pave a runway fit for puddle-jumpers. One is very much at the mercy of a limited flight schedule in so doing, and so there’s generally a lot of time to be filled in the Sartrean despair of airport terminals. On this particular trip, I used much of that time to reflect on my decision not to buy a Steam Deck back when random-access memory was halfway obtainable in the consumer market. After enjoying an eighteen-dollar sandwich at Reagan National, I ambled over to our gate and saw a guy playing Mewgenics on an OLED model, whereupon I nearly wept.

But, as scripture is quick to remind us, the mark of a man’s virtue is found in his ability to endure deprivation of voguish tactical roguelites when he needs them most. I adapted to circumstance as I always do, and I figured this presented a good excuse to reflect on how my own gaming-on-the-move practice takes shape in 2026. I used to have a Game Boy, you know. A whole lot of us did, and now I can’t remember the last time I saw one in the wild. Wikipedia tells me that Nintendo discontinued the 3DS back in 2020 and shut off the Network in 2024, and I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I never noticed either event.

I guess that reveals something about my increasingly stubborn predilection toward Linux-based PC gaming in spite of the persistent frustrations that come with the bargain, and that’ll be the theme of our briefer-than-usual installment this week. In the wake of some pertinent introspection, I’d like to talk a little about the reasons why I’ve never taken the plunge into the contemporary small-form-factor1 gaming market. Afterwards, I’ll close out with a little survey of how I personally choose to while away the hours from the discomfort of an airport gate lobby.

So, why didn’t I buy a Steam Deck before the RAMpocalypse forestalled the very possibility throughout the foreseeable future? I’d love to cop out by saying “because they cost several hundred dollars and I’m broke,” but, while that’s undoubtedly true, it belies the fact that I totally could’ve scraped together the cash for a device that was practically manufactured for me personally. A Linux-based handheld computer featuring comprehensive PC functionality with a cutting-edge compatibility layer for playing my library of Windows-only games and it’s made with pro-consumer sensibilities by the one gaming company to which I’ve remained steadfastly attached for over twenty years? I oughta be the easiest lay in the world for that shit.

And yet, this suite of idealized selling points never quite overcame my background apathy toward the concept. Similarly, I own a Nintendo Switch — a paleolithic model from the late 2010s, not a Switch 2 — that I haven’t touched in eons. The actual barrier, I think, is that the gaming experience I’m after while on the move doesn’t map neatly over the reality of contemporary small-form-factor gaming. It’s tricky to articulate precisely what I mean, but I’ll give it a shot anyway.

First, what exactly is the point of owning a handheld gaming console or miniature PC in the first place? I gather the idea is to have a library of games on your person in order to replicate some part of the experience inherent to playing them on stationary hardware. There’s been a great deal of effort to reduce the psychological distance between the two — high-resolution OLED displays, haptic interfaces, and so on — but replacing certain aspects of the traditional gaming experience remains beyond wit of engineering. Screen real-estate is an obvious one. A lot of my favorite games are intricately detailed, highly interface-dependent, or both, and any of these loses something without the ability to expand across a large physical space. Precision input is another — I can’t imagine trying to play a grand-strategy game, colony sim, or comparable spreadsheet simulator without a good mouse in hand.

I guess one could just cope by only playing games that naturally adapt to the smaller form-factor, which brings me to the least tangible issue at hand: my foremost objective when booting up a game in an airport terminal is to pass the time while shutting out the grotesque simulacra around me, and, for whatever reason, I can reliably achieve that only with a standard-sized laptop screen before my eyes and a full keyboard at my fingertips. I suppose it comes down to the aura of the thing, which opens up a whole can of psychoanalytical worms whose processing is beyond me at the moment.

I reckon there must logically be a comfortable middle ground — one of these days, when the bag is secure and I have discretionary income to piss away on hardware and materials, I’ll build myself a cyberdeck to see if I can’t bridge the gap. I can just about imagine myself using something like that to play some controller-friendly, turned-based games like the aforementioned Mewgenics, but I could also do that on my laptop if I were so inclined, and I seem not to be. In any case, my existing practice hasn’t failed me yet.

Let me wrap up by talking a little more specifically about said practice. In short, it’s to pull out my laptop and treat travel gaming as if it were one of those $40 Sudoku booklets that they sell at the functionally indistinguishable convenience shops throughout the terminals. That is, I chase after an intellectually stimulating means of passing the time so that my attention is channeled toward the stimulation and away from the cable news broadcasts on the ceiling-mounted televisions elsewhere in the gate lobby. I’ll give you a few examples.

If I anticipate waiting for over an hour, I typically initiate my airport Dwarf Fortress protocol: I boot up the classic, fully keyboard-controllable version of the game, generate a new world with extreme parameters, and try to survive the first few seasons. This is where my Sudoku analogy is at its least strained — in much the same spirit of pen-and-paper puzzling, playing a challenging start in Dwarf Fortress is very puzzle-like at first. Often, you’ll find that only a narrow selection of possible actions will suffice to prevent your seven starting dwarves from being devoured by a pack of giant hyenas, zombified by black-magical rain, or suffocated by thick clouds of diseased smog before you can get safely underground.

As it happens, I’ve discovered a couple of my all-time favorite DF starts by this method. That bit about the pack of giant hyenas was no casual invention — surviving a savage-aligned tropical shrubland with no trees or fresh water on the surface is one of the more exhilarating brain teasers I can recall from a game that didn’t actively posture itself as some sort of puzzler. It also frames an article about Dwarf Fortress that I’ve been meaning to write for several months, and which you should expect in your inbox before long.

When there’s less than an hour before boarding, I’ll usually pick one of several terminal-based roguelikes I have squirreled away on my laptop’s drive at any given time. If my brain is still fried from the foregone traveling, I favor something easy to pick up and play like Infra Arcana. If instead I’m feeling homicidal after passing through the security checkpoint and enduring the fuckwitted crowd of knuckle-dragging, slope-browed cretins ahead of me in line, I’ll often load up a long-term save in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and burn off the angst by splattering a few dozen zombies with a tractor-trailer or burning down a multi-level apartment complex just to drink in the carnage. Gosh, I’ll have to write about CDDA sometime, too.

That’ll do it for this week. Appreciate your reading to the end, and thanks again for abiding this shorter installment. I had precious little time for writing while I was away, but I couldn’t bear to leave you without something to chew on. We’re back to baseline operational capacity now, though — I finally got Mod Organizer 2 running properly on Linux, which naturally facilitated a long-overdue return to Fallout: New Vegas. I’m currently playing through a beloved mod project focused on cranking up the hardcore survival gameplay, utterly forlorn in its sensibilities. That’ll be the focus of next week’s edition, and I’ve got a hundred internet points for anyone who can guess what it is ahead of time.

Finally, I’m interested in hearing from you in the comments if you’ve got your own robust and well-considered methodology for getting a gaming fix while traveling. Got a Steam Deck or similar mini-PC that you love or regret? Do you favor a more prototypical computing setup like I do? Still playing Fruit Ninja on your iPhone instead of bothering with any of it? Tell me about it downstairs, and I’ll see ya next week.

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FLASH OF GENIUS

My goodness, the past two weeks have been astonishingly good for the tactical roguelike life-sim vertical. I expected Mewgenics to do numbers sheerly by virtue of its developers’ pedigree, but I can’t say I was expecting it to sell over a million copies and gross over twenty-five million dollars after just a week on the market. It’s a particularly staggering margin in light of its two-person development team, and it’s heartening to know that an indie game so thoroughly evocative of the Flash era can compete with $70 triple-A releases. It’s a triumph for co-developers Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel, to be sure, and presumably an important development in the history of indie gaming more broadly. That’ll take awhile longer to properly game out, so I’d like to have a look into the past this week.

I haven’t got stuck into Mewgenics just yet, but simply watching its success carries with it a certain emotional resonance. You see, I’m very much a child of the Newgrounds era: back in the early-mid 2000s, rather than developing normally, I scrolled through the Portal and devoured Flash games on my parents’ cheap-ass office computer almost every day. Thanks to the site’s creator-positive ethos, the wealth of talent it attracted, and its infamous lack of censorship, it was an ideal refuge for the type of lonely and depraved suburban teenager I used to be. This was all some years before society broadly acknowledged that adolescents shouldn’t spend hours online each day to cope with their domestic misfortune, and so I was active on the forums and even published a few crappy Flash games of my own.1 More to the point, I was a big fan of Edmund McMillen’s work long before he made his name in the broader gaming industry with Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac. Going all the way back to around 2004, I played almost every single one of his Flash games as they came out.

Now, if you haven’t heard of The Binding of Isaac, suffice it to say that it’s a masterfully crafted and eminently addictive roguelike that still gets played to this day, even finding devotees beyond the core gaming audience. Some identify it — and plausibly so, in my opinion — as ground-zero for the roguelike renaissance of the 2010s that’s still continuing apace. It’s sold millions of units and spawned a remake with three expansions, which have collectively represented a legend-making endeavor for creator Edmund McMillen and surely laid much of the groundwork for the contemporary success of Mewgenics. I really oughta write about Isaac in detail one day, since it must be one of my picks for top five most influential games of the new millennium. Of course, I hear people talking about it all the time for precisely that reason, and there’s not too much untrodden ground left to cover.

But what I almost never hear people talking about is McMillen’s pre-Isaac work, which comprises a ludography of some twenty2 Flash games going all the way back to the early 2000s. Nearly all are noncommercial works that he and various collaborators made for the love of creation rather than money, wholly embodying the spirit of that increasingly distant past. In the intervening period, the independent game-development scene has, for various reasons, pivoted convincingly toward commercial production and distribution. Not by any means a bad thing in and of itself, as Mewgenics’ cool twenty-five million can attest. But it does mean that the Flash era is now a historical relic rather than an ongoing reality. And, like any such object or institution, it has to be actively preserved if its contributions are to be recognized by posterity. Luckily, the necessary archival efforts have so far been largely successful, and Flash games are still playable on modern browsers through compatibility layers that preserve them in modern Javascript.

So, driven by a combination of historical interest and wistful nostalgia, I played through almost all of Edmund McMillen’s old Flash game catalog this past week (exceptions enumerated below). Most of them are available in The Basement Collection, which you can get on Steam for a few dollars. But for my research, I played them all for free on Newgrounds as if twenty-plus years hadn’t passed — Flash was discontinued years ago, but they still work just fine with the abovementioned compatibility measures. What follows are some brief reflections on every piece of McMillen ephemera I replayed, with more space carved out for the handful that I think still hold up and are deserving of your time in 2026. For kicks, I’ve listed each in order of how much I enjoyed the experience on revisitation.

Not included are any of the following:

• Games released after 2009

• Commercial releases

• Host, an online multiplayer game from 2007 that I couldn’t get working

• Works lacking any substantial game-mechanical identity (e.g., AVGM; The Lonely Hermit; any of the dozen-odd Dead Baby Dressup games)

This’ll take awhile, so let’s get started.

THE “HONORABLE” MENTIONS

We begin with the games that, while interesting enough to discuss for a paragraph or two, only get a recommendation for those interested in Flash game history. I’ll include Newgrounds links nonetheless, in case morbid curiosity overwhelms your good sense and you just have to see what Edmund was on about.

16. SnackOlantern (2003) | Newgrounds Link

Wikipedia tells me that McMillen once described SnackOlantern as his “worst game.” I couldn’t find a source to confirm that, but… I mean, yeah, pretty much. There’s almost nothing to SnackOlantern — you play as a carved pumpkin somehow imbued with homicidal malice, and you bounce around a sidewalk to devour trick-or-treaters who make no effort to evade you. The controls are stiff and the hitboxes are unintuitively narrow, so it’s really frustrating to play even though it’s not the least bit challenging. It is, at the very least, mercifully short. I guess the artwork and animation are pretty appealing for 2003. Let this one lie, and we’ll move on to some more interesting representatives of McMillen’s oeuvre.

15. Holiday Snow Wars (2006) | Newgrounds Link

That is, we’ll eventually move on to some more interesting ones. Holiday Snow Wars was an ambitious attempt at a psuedo-3D vehicular combat game that, regrettably, is virtually unplayable. You play as one of two Christmastime legends — either Santa Claus or Jesus — and compete against the other in a race. You slide around on sleds and can throw snowballs to knock your opponent off course, but it feels less like sledding on a snow-hill and more like crawling through a lake of cold molasses. It’s probably the only Santa vs. Jesus game ever made, so at least it has that going for it.

14. Twin Hobo Rocket (2008) | Newgrounds Link

There might be some kind of mechanical or narrative depth to Twin Hobo Rocket that simply evaded my grasp, but if so, it’s hidden behind opaque goals and a profoundly annoying voiceover performance. You play as two unhoused wretches strapped to a jury-rigged propulsion device, and your objective is to do something or other that I never figured out. This is actually the game I played for the least amount of time, because I found it especially grating on the senses. It does at least have some amusing artwork and a halfway decent-feeling core mechanic, on the backs of which it exceeds the first two entries on this list.

13. Viviparous Dumpling (2005) | Newgrounds Link

In the early 2000s, McMillen and frequent collaborator Caulder Bradford created a fictional setting called The Badlands, populated by a host of grotesque fauna, racially insensitive caricatures, and a variety of simple gameplay loops. We begin with one of the precious few games that takes place in a uterus: in Viviparous Dumpling,3 you play as a fetal Dumpling, part of a species of rotund, fleshy blobs that seem incapable of any action whatsoever. You drag your Dumpling fetus around a womb, collecting nutritious sperm cells and avoiding foreign protozoa. It’s remarkably difficult despite the simplicity of its premise, and I couldn’t quite make it to the end. I’d call this one worthwhile for Edmund McMillen completionists who are interested in his early worldbuilding, because there’s a fair amount of it on display here even though the gameplay is nothing to write home about.

12. The C Word (2008)

Well, I guess it’s time to talk about this game for the first and last time. Properly titled Cunt, it was published on Newgrounds under the alternate title The C Word. It was, in McMillen’s words, intended as “a career suicide piece.” Worried that he was selling out and despairing of the possibility that he’d lose the ability to make whatever art he wanted, he spent a little over a week throwing together a mediocre-but-playable shooter where you play as a micropenis fighting an enormous and aggressive set of female reproductive organs. The surface-level misogyny implicit in that premise resulted in predictable controversy, and this one is a little tricky to find and play nowadays. To be perfectly frank, though, it’s just not that interesting to talk about. Mechanically, it’s a bog-standard shoot-em-up where you dodge projectiles and fire at a large target. It’s functional, but incredibly dry. The presentation and theming, though unmistakably borne of the internet-brained edginess that characterized the period, don’t come across as hateful so much as immature. Folks mostly seem happy to forget about this one, so I haven’t bothered providing a link. You’ll be able to dig it up if you really want to, though.

11. Coil (2008) | Newgrounds Link

“Coil is a game with no instruction or clear direction,” reports the game as it begins. “Please keep an open mind when playing.” Yeah, this one’s pretty goddamned weird.

Coil is less a game and more a series of interactive vignettes. In each, you’re given some organic form to embody and an unclear objective that becomes apparent as you experiment with the controls, all bookended by a few sentences of mysterious narrative that postures you as some feminine-coded consciousness at the whim of a male authority. It might be that Coil is a daring interactive narrative steeped in profound metaphor, or it could just be a bizarre experiment in which you follow the life of some alien biology from its insemination to its… birth? It’s very weird, but it’s the good kind of weird that an open mind will find intriguing rather than off-putting. It’s not particularly fun to play, but the surreal presentation is at least curiosity-provoking, and there aren’t any other games like it.

10. Clubby the Seal (2004) and Clubby: Killing Season (2008) | Newgrounds Link

Clubby the Seal is — get this — a club-wielding baby seal. He seeks revenge on the cruel Eskibobs, a race of humanoid bastards who kill Clubby’s kind for sport and who, by the standards of contemporary sensitivity, are portrayed uncomfortably close to the indigenous peoples of the subarctic. The 2004 original is a fairly unsophisticated platformer notable mostly for the amusing contrast between its cutesy presentation and its shocking violence. It’s also quite a bit better than the 2008 spin-off in which an already dominant Clubby goes on an arbitrary killing spree with a chainsaw. The questions of where he got the chainsaw or how he manages to operate it go unexplored. You’ll experience just about everything that both games have to offer after just a few minutes of playtime, but both are moderately entertaining if you can develop a feel for the generally awkward controls.

9. Blood Car! 2000 (2008) | Newgrounds Link

Newgrounds oldheads will recall that the site had more than its fair share of controversies on account of its pathologically lax standards for taste and decorum. This resulted in a veritable pantheon of games made with the primary intent of shocking and disgusting a norm-constrained audience, often themed around perpetrating massacres. Blood Car! 2000 is one of them, but, lacking any timely connection to real-world events or any particularly gruesome portrayals, I’d say it doesn’t even crack the top fifty most offensive Newgrounds games. Actually, there’s really not much going on at all. You drive a car that handles like a bar of wet soap atop a greased bowling lane, and your objective is to run down a set number of nondescript, square-shaped human analogues. There’s a pretty amusing decal system under the hood that streaks the map with blood and burnt rubber, as well as several dozen gallons of human shit if you happen to strike a portable toilet. A deluxe version was released later the same year that made the level progression less boring, but this one probably won’t hold your attention for long. Nevertheless, bonus points for innovations like the decal engine and the Poop Slalom.

8. Carious Weltling (2003) and Carious Weltling 2 (2004) | Newgrounds Link

The Weltling is another species from McMillen’s Badlands lore, this one a featherless bird with no eyes that defends itself from predators by disgorging projectiles of coagulated blood. That probably sounds more disgusting than it actually comes across — the artwork from these earlier projects is almost universally goofy and tongue-in-cheek, so it’s impossible to interpret in any remotely serious capacity. The Carious Weltling duology is basically a pair of arcade shoot-em-ups with fleshy desert creatures instead of space-ships, and I happen to prefer the first because it controls more fluently. From a primary gameplay perspective, though, they’re basically identical. What most recommends the first as a historical gaming experience is that it’s McMillen’s first project with a serious attempt at core gameplay — worth checking out for those with the right sense of humor.

7. Aether (2008) | Newgrounds Link

The first collaboration with Mewgenics co-developer Tyler Glaiel, Aether brings us back into “is this actually a game?” territory, and it’s hard to tersely summarize. You play as a young boy riding a rotund creature whose prehensile tongue can grasp and swing from clouds, and by these means you escape the earth’s gravitational pull and travel to a handful of interplanetary setpiece encounters at your leisure. The core movement mechanic is surprisingly gratifying and enjoyable once you figure it out, but it exists solely in service of conveying you to loosely connected narrative beats themed around childhood angst. It’s not cringe-worthy or anything, but I wouldn’t call it a competitor to contemporary ludonarrative standards. Check this one out anyway if you read that bit about the prehensile tongue and felt like you had to see it for yourself.

6. Cereus Peashy (2007) | Newgrounds Link

Rounding out our selection of interesting-but-not-great legacy McMillen works is the last of the Badlands games, this time featuring the genocidally violent cactus-folk. It takes the form of a 2D sidescroller with much of the early-90s mascot platformers about it, but imbued with an unmistakable aura of Newgrounds-era jank. This is definitely one of the more complete gameplay experiences in McMillen’s early catalog, featuring a collection of discrete levels brought together in an overworld, alongside some contributions by Newgrounds royalty Tom Fulp. This one was in a sort of development hell for several years prior to its release, and McMillen recently said he was “kinda over it” by the time it came out. Like many Flash platformers, the controls aren’t very fluid and it’s easy to accidentally lose a life on account of mistaken input. Still, this one has a lot of personality and was definitely one of the more nostalgia-provoking revisits for me.

THE ONES YOU SHOULD PLAY IN 2026

The five games below are, to my mind, the best non-commercial work with which Edmund McMillen has been involved. I’d recommend trying them all if you can spare the time.

5. Tri-achnid (2006) | Newgrounds Link

There are two particularly notable attributes that set Tri-achnid apart. First is that it was McMillen’s first collaboration with Austrian game-dev Florian Himsl, with whom he’d later create The Binding of Isaac. The second is that it’s got one of the most unique central mechanics I’ve ever seen: playing as the titular three-legged spider-thing, you navigate the game world’s jagged topology by individually click-dragging each limb into position. It calls for steady and deliberate action, and the result is a slow-paced movement puzzler where every step feels like a minor accomplishment unto itself.

Of course, being a gangly bug with toothpick-thin limbs leaves you exceptionally fragile, and you can lose a life just by moving too fast or too greedily. I’ve never beaten Tri-achnid, or even come particularly close — it’s one of those games where losing all your lives sends you right back to the beginning. A light, abstractly told story would ideally motivate a full playthrough, but it ends up as an endurance challenge that doesn’t quite live up to the time it’d take to master. Nevertheless, I recommend trying it for a few minutes just to experience its core loop and novel movement mechanic. It’s very much emblematic of the Flash era’s experimental spirit, and that alone is worth celebrating.

4. Grey-Matter (2008) | Newgrounds Link

Called an “anti-shooter” in its original description, Grey-Matter is a high-concept experiment by Team Meat made with the apparent intention of keeping their creative juices flowing in while Super Meat Boy was in development. You play as an already-fired bullet, which you maneuver in 2D space with the arrow keys to crash into brain-shaped enemies. Again, though, there’s a unique mechanical conceit. Each time you strike an enemy, you leave behind a vertex of a triangle. After killing three in a row, the triangle is completed, and any enemies within its area are slain automatically and spectacularly. This is used to great effect — some enemy types have dangerous and hard-to-avoid proximity attacks, so you can use it to trap stubborn ones without risking yourself up close.

Enemies become gradually more dangerous as you make progress, and you’re kept in a nearly constant state of peril. It’s pretty exhilarating once it gets going, and the controls are responsive and buttery-smooth. It feels very much like a game made by the Meat Boy lads, and it’s a worthy distraction even in the absence of a sophisticated progression system. The most interesting part by far is the triangle-based attack mechanic. If it had found its way into an arcade cabinet from the 80s, I’m sure it’d be remembered as a timeless classic.

3. Time Fcuk (2009) | Newgrounds Link

2010’s Super Meat Boy represented a dramatic inflection point in the trajectory of Edmund McMillen’s career, and Time Fcuk was the last Flash game he published before its release. It’s mechanically simple, boiling down to a two-layered platform puzzler. You jump between platforms, push boxes to make space, and swap between parallel dimensions that facilitate complex logic challenges using the otherwise dead-simple setup. It’s hard to explain in concrete terms, but you’ll quickly intuit it if you take sixty seconds to play the first two or three levels.

I’m not exactly sure why, but I find Time Fcuk to be strikingly reminiscent of Terry Cavangh’s VVVVVV from the following year. It might be the art style, or I guess it could be the subtly oppressive tone. More likely responsible is the complexity it achieves with such a profoundly simple mechanical inventory. Like VVVVVV, this game probably could’ve run on a Commodore 64 decades before its actual release date — there’s almost nothing going on at the surface, but that simplicity belies how the whole of Time Fcuk is much greater than the sum of its parts. This became a recurring theme in McMillen’s later, commercial ludography.

2. Meat Boy and Meat Boy (map pack) (2008) | Newgrounds Link

Before Super Meat Boy turned Edmund McMillen and Team Meat into respected industry professionals, there was the prototype Flash version that proved the viability of its premise. If you’re not familiar with said premise, allow me the distinct pleasure of enlightening you: playing as an animate hunk of wet muscle tissue, you run and jump through tile-based levels in pursuit of the evil Dr. Fetus to rescue your beloved Bandage Girl. Perfectly responsive controls have you bouncing between walls, leaping over buzzsaws, and weaving through missiles, all the while leaving a slick trail of heme-colored moisture upon every surface you cross.

I’m delighted to say that, even eighteen years later, the original Meat Boy holds up great. It’s a little tricky to play with a keyboard in lieu of a controller, but it’s totally possible once you get into a rhythm. Meat Boy (map pack) was released later that year, featuring dozens of player-created maps of varying difficulties, many of which matched or even exceeded the originals. It also happens to factor into my own early lore — at the age of thirteen, I designed and submitted a Meat Boy map that made it into this release. It’s hard to describe the complicated emotions that I, now thirty, felt while replaying said map all these years later. It wasn’t that great, but I’m flattered even now that game designers of this caliber played my work and thought it was worth including.

Oh, and if you’re curious about which map it was, keep wondering. It’s credited with my old username, and I’d be fucking mortified if anyone ever dug up my Newgrounds account from when I was an edgy teenager.

1. Spewer (2009) | Newgrounds Link

At last we come to my personal favorite McMillen game from the pre-commercial era. Spewer is another puzzle-platformer in which you play as the eponymous experimental lifeform and must navigate a gauntlet of movement challenges at the behest of your mad-scientist creator. Your principle means of doing so is also your namesake: you’re capable of vomiting many times your body weight, which can propel you to great heights or produce a safe, fluid medium through which to swim over hazards. Various pharmaceutical enhancements can change the physical properties of your spew, and there are dozens of levels that take advantage of the opportunities to which this central mechanic lends itself.

For a Flash game, the fluid-mechanical simulation undergirding Spewer is a tremendous feat of software engineering. And, despite its deliberately unsavory premise, this game is really damn charming. Spewer, to whom I’ll assign masculine gender out of convenience rather than physical evidence, always has a smile on his face and seemingly lives for the thrill of his purpose. If you struggle to imagine the idea that a puzzle game designed around creative vomiting could be charming and delightful, go play Spewer. It might not be as consistent as Meat Boy or as replayable as Isaac, but it’s an excellent puzzle-platformer that still warms my jaded, world-weary heart.

That covers just about every Edmund McMillen game from the before-times. The Flash era deserves more credit than it gets for its role in shaping today’s gaming ecosystem, I could only barely touch on it given this week’s narrow focus. These days, when financial prerogatives have colonized so much of the gaming industry and its surrounding media, it’s almost hard to imagine that independent, non-commercial video games used to be as popular and well-platformed as they were in the heyday of Newgrounds, Kongregate, Armor Games, and the rest.

At least it wasn’t for nothing — a lucky handful of those creators, of whom Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel are two shining examples — ultimately leveraged their talent into successful careers in the industry that succeeded the Flash era. And, thanks to the hard work of passionate fans, most of these projects are not lost to time. There’s something powerfully motivating in the thought that, when a corporation of Adobe’s stature decided against continuing to support the platform responsible for all this great artwork, a legion of talented folk were able to pick up the slack and keep it all alive by freely available, third-party means. I’m sure I’ll return to the subject of the Flash era one day.

Alright, I appreciate your reading to the end of this unusually girthy installment. I’ll be visiting family over the latter half of this week, so next week’s edition will be on the shorter side. Hope you learned something, and I strongly recommend you check out at least a few of the entries from later in the list above — they’re all free to play on Newgrounds, and even the most resource-deprived computer of modern times can run them with no trouble. No installations necessary, as long as you’ve got an Internet browser to hand. If you give these a try or have played any of them before, let me know which were your favorites! I’d also love to hear about any cherished memories you may have of non-McMillen Flash games from back in the day.

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We had a grand old time last week discussing the greatness of Morrowind’s modern fanbase and angrily proscribing the thought of an official remake — that newsletter did exceptionally well for us, and I’m delighted to see that so many of you are similarly touched by the delirious fantasy of a major publisher actively supporting its fans’ noncommercial projects. In the time since, I’m back to playing video games instead of lamenting the state of their industry, and I’ve got another tantalizing-if-unrealistic fantasy to share with you this week. To wit, that of a government that enthusiastically provides for its people’s happiness and prosperity.

More specifically, I spent about a dozen hours with a little indie gem called Songs of Syx. It’s a colony simulator with much of Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld about it, but it’s got some fascinating characteristics all its own that make it an irresistible subject for analysis. It’s a colossus of artistry even in its technically incomplete state, so I thought I’d tell you about my early impressions and dig into what makes it so special to my eyes.

At its core, Songs of Syx is a colony sim. Or, in more accessible terms, it’s a game about occupying a tract of unspoiled land with a small crew of intrepid frontierspeople, bending nature to their will, and gradually expanding into an industrial behemoth capable of political dominance. Like most games of its kind, it’s built atop a staggeringly intricate simulation of people, their economies, and the labors that support both. Rather than directly controlling your plebeians, your job as despot is to designate orders for construction, trade, and management that your people will obediently carry out in between meals, prayers, and lavatory visits. If your decisions are wise and your will ironclad, the simulation rewards you with the spectacular evolution of your humble frontier party into a map-spanning metropolis, whereupon you’re free to spread your peaceful ways by force of arms.

Best of all, SoS is a proud representative of that class of games we so vigorously adulate here at The Spieler: a vision sprung from the mind of exactly one inspired creative, then realized in artwork and code by the very same. It was released into Early Access in September of 2020, where it’s remained despite what looks and feels like a feature-complete build and an astonishing sheen of polish in almost every aspect. I very seldom shell out for games during their pre-release phases, but long-time readers know I’m willing to make exceptions for projects that can back up truly novel ideas with high-quality implementations. Songs of Syx is very much one of those games.

So, here’s the plan for this week: in the first couple of sections, I’ll perform my due diligence and share my impressions of the game as a technically incomplete but nevertheless robust commercial product. Afterwards, I’ll drop the façade of consumer advice and gush for several paragraphs about how thoroughly impressed I am by the aforementioned novel ideas. Do let me know what you think — this is hardly the most accessible game I’ve covered, and I’ll be curious to know whether you find its design and presentation compelling enough to shine through the thick layers of tabular data and bar graphs.

THE GOOD

The first and most remarkable aspect of Songs of Syx, with which I’ll bookend this newsletter, is its standout visual design and the clever ways it’s integrated into primary gameplay. Let’s begin with its superficial appearance. You see, over the fifteen-ish years I’ve been playing colony sims, I’ve come to expect a fairly spartan standard of artwork from the genre. By the mid-2010s, I was so acclimated to the blocky tilesets in Dwarf Fortress that the simple, high-contrast vector art in RimWorld caught me by surprise and felt almost revolutionary. I was similarly impressed by the dimensionless (and unaccountably off-putting) artwork in 2019’s Oxygen Not Included, which was, at the very least, hand-drawn and characterful. Then the Dwarf Fortress guys finally got money together to pay some 2D artists, and the 2022 Steam version’s tiles impressed me anew despite their continued lack of depth or animation. I figured there was a sort of implicit compromise in the design of these projects: in return for a dense, layered, and deeply interactive simulation, you’re to put up with serviceable but uninspiring artwork. After all, the simulation is the core of the experience, and the visual element is only there to convey its signals to your brain by way of the optic nerve.

...or so I thought, until I started seeing gameplay footage of some new-fangled colony sim with dynamic shaders, character animation, shadow-casting, and a gorgeously evocative representation of nature. Had Bierstadt painted in pixels instead of oils, I’m certain he’d have come up with a sun-drenched landscape not unlike a Songs of Syx screenshot. The outward visual appeal is only the beginning of the game’s aesthetic mastery, though — its gameplay integrations deserve a much more thorough analysis, to which I’ll return after we’ve finished the review bit. Before that, there’s a couple more standout features to which I’d like to pay homage.

First, let’s talk pacing. In my experience, the nature of downtime is a pain-point common to almost all colony sims. It comes down to the nature of temporal simulation — in order for a cause to produce its effect, time must pass, and this becomes a major source of boredom and disengagement when the period between instantiating a cause and awaiting its effect passes a certain, limited threshold. For example, suppose I designate a strip-mining operation in Dwarf Fortress or RimWorld. When nothing happens, I realize that my miners are all busy sleeping, drinking, or sleeping off drink. My recourse is to let the simulation run, tick by tick, until at least one of them gets off his ass and begins to effectuate my queued actions so that I can have my precious morsel of sublime dopamine. I could always distract myself by planning out other game states, but that invariably lengthens the queue and compounds the problem at a greater rate than it compounds the reward.

Colony sims from the past decade often include a control for selectively increasing the simulation speed, but even those are limited by the programmatic complexity of their games’ systems — it’s one thing to play RimWorld at three times normal speed, but one third of a long-ass interval is still pretty long. That brings us to one of Songs of Syx’s most impressive innovations: press the “4” key, and the simulation speed is multiplied by twenty-five. Still fiending? Press it again, and caution is thrown to the wind as the multiplier increases to 250. In a matter of seconds, whole farms are tilled and sown; sprawling city blocks are erected from bare earth; entire forests are felled and their timber hauled away. I can’t overstate how satisfying this gets once when you develop a feeling for it — after you’ve built up some comfort with the core systems and start wrangling the speed controls, you can play this game at damn near the speed of thought. It makes SoS dramatically more time-efficient than its genre peers, and it’s an astounding feat of technical optimization.

Below, for example, my settlers build housing for 100 over a full day. It takes less than ten seconds at the maximum simulation speed.

Finally, I want to talk briefly about the setting and lore. The titular world of Syx is a fantasy land populated by a recognizable cast of pointy-eared prima donnas, stature-challenged mountain-dwellers, and squabbling deities who make pawns of the mortal races. And yet, it owes refreshingly little to Tolkien. At game-start, you select from one of six native species to form your imperial core, of which only the Humans are notably familiar. The rest are either twists on the classic formula or altogether unique: the elf analogues are bloodthirsty cannibals; the not-dwarves don’t reproduce, but spring into existence on a mountaintop; a boar-faced race of vegetarian pacifists serves as the tutorial species; a clade of isolationist reptiles are suitable for experienced players; and an austere, exoskeleton-clad race of humanoid bugs round them all out. Each of these has its own set of preferences and revulsions toward particular civics, labors, foods, and aesthetics. Additionally, some species simply don’t get along with one another on account of ancient grudges, which will cause trouble for the careless despot who compels them to live and work together. The setting’s subversions of familiar tropes and the interactions between them are consistently entertaining and often surprising.

There are also several features of SoS that stick out as entirely unique, deserving of more than a passing mention. But before we get to that, let me quickly air out my one major criticism.

THE NOT-SO-GOOD

Good Lord, is this game ever difficult to learn. For as much as I’m inclined to show leniency toward a solo-developed game that’s technically still in Early Access, it’s frankly bizarre how sparsely documented SoS turns out to be given the size and enthusiasm of its playerbase. For one, in-game onboarding is grossly inadequate. You get a pair of tutorial campaigns whose guided portions took me less than an hour in total, and the sum total of that guidance is barely sufficient to get you through the early game for just one of the six core species. Somewhat gallingly, not a moment is spent on crucial progression mechanics like research and military design.

Now, don’t get me wrong — this is by no means a dealbreaker. After all, I’m a veteran of Paradox’s grand strategy games, and their in-game tutorials are about as effective a tool as a hammer made of custard. Thing is, those games make up for it with massive and all-encompassing documentation on the Internet, most notably through the publisher-supported Wikis. Songs of Syx has an official Wiki of its own, but it’s astonishingly incomprehensive. There’s virtually nothing in the way of strategic guidance or outright tutorialization, and much of the data it lays out simply parrots the in-game interfaces. At time of writing, it’s also several game versions behind the current release. Now, to be absolutely clear, I’m not throwing shade at the Wiki editors, whom I’m sure are trying their best. Fully documenting this immensely complex game is a gargantuan project in and of itself, and there are evidently only six (!!!) people actively editing the Wiki.

Luckily, a significant portion of the community that isn’t editing the Wiki is instead devoting its freetime to making videos and writing Steam guides. The information one needs to get into the game is absolutely out there, it’s just not as forthcoming as your garden-variety Paradox nerd would hope. And so, that’s basically it for criticism. I could quibble about how the writing could use a good pass of copy-editing, but there’s really not much wrong with the game itself. Its major issues are almost strictly of a pedagogical nature, and they’re all the sort that could easily be remediated in time for the forthcoming 1.0 release. I have every reason to anticipate that remediation, or at least a substantial improvement. Besides, it’s not like the sparsity of onboarding and documentation presented too significant a barrier to my enjoyment.

But you know, that sentiment is worth consideration. I only have so much free time, and I so rarely have the patience to figure out complex systems like this on my own. The fact that Songs of Syx overcomes that trend is intriguing, and I think it comes down to how uncommonly captivating I find its design. Let’s conclude for this week by going over this game’s most laudable innovations.

THE UTTERLY UNIQUE

So, now that we’ve laid out the necessary context, it’s time for me to report without a moment’s hesitation that this is both the most beautiful colony sim and the most beautiful scalp-camera game upon which I’ve ever laid eyes. But more importantly — and almost uniquely among games I’ve played in any genre — the visual artistry isn’t just superficial. Aesthetics are a core strategic consideration inseparable from the gameplay itself. I’ll give you just a handful of illustrative examples.

It starts at the most fundamental aspects of the genre’s interface. Where most games of this type have you designate structures and orders in straight lines or rectangular areas, SoS gives you a suite of resizable brushes to literally paint your will onto the game world (there’s an illustrative clip of this just below). It’s remarkable how big a difference this makes — roads, farm plots, and foundations can easily take on naturalistic contours that conform to the landscape rather than the grid, making for cities and transit networks that look as if created by sapient agents rather than the emotionless subroutines that execute your orders. Also contributing to the illusion are the people themselves. Each of the game’s species has its own distinct aesthetic preferences whose satisfaction greatly informs their loyalty and contentment. Some expect roads paved in stone, and some want to live in buildings with rounded profiles. Some want to spend their leisure time surrounded by trees, and others desire plazas and mosaics. If you cultivate a multiracial society, you’ll almost invariably end up with interwoven districts that each have a distinct aesthetic, because the game mechanics themselves directly incentivize you to cultivate beauty in addition to function.

I’m very much outspoken in my belief that games are art, but it’s not often that I can celebrate a game as a great work of visual art in its own right. When the sun begins to set over a growing city among lush forests and crystalline rivers, the effect is jaw-dropping. The pure beauty built into the ground-level design reminds me fondly of Jonathan Blow’s The Witness, surely one of the more visually arresting games I can remember playing. But unlike The Witness, I find Songs of Syx a lot of fun to play.1 The successful merger of those qualities, particularly given that this is a solo-developed project, is a towering achievement of game design.

Finally and relatedly, I want to mention the uncommon authenticity of Songs of Syx in its capacity as a solo-developed game. Over the year I’ve been writing The Spieler, I’ve pretty much never shut up about how intensely I value the authenticity and purity of vision that tend to characterize these sorts of projects, but I must say that SoS pushes it to an almost farcical degree. Just load up one of the developer’s video diaries, watch the first fifteen seconds, and drink in the soothing aura of the garbage-tier recording quality. This is a project inspired first and foremost by artistic passion, a quality of unspeakable value in today’s industry. In an era where the fickle gyrations of the market pressure independent game developers toward soul-crushing and ill-fated efforts at wishlist optimization, I can’t overstate how refreshing it is to see a highly successful solo project like SoS drive hundreds of thousands of sales off the back of dedication to a creative vision.

After all is said and done, whether or not I recommend Songs of Syx is largely conditional on your comfort with the genre. If you’ve already got a colony sim or two under your belt, then it’s an easy recommendation. If you’re a genre neophyte but found any of the above particularly compelling, it’s definitely worth your support and I suspect you’ll find it motivating enough to stick out the intellectually laborious learning process. If you’re both new to the genre and on the fence about this game, I’d suggest checking out RimWorld to see whether or not the simulation-focused gameplay grabs you.

And, naturally, I’d love to hear from you in the comments if you have thoughts of your own about this game, or about the evolution of the colony sim genre more generally. Got a favorite that does something similar? Hate the entire genre and want to vent about it? Tell me about it downstairs, and I’ll see ya next week <3

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So, word on the street is that a Scrubs reboot will air on ABC at this end of this month. Apparently, it’ll be a direct continuation of the plot that was supposedly concluded the better part of twenty years ago. It’ll also feature most of the original cast, now suddenly aged into their fifties and sixties. According to an interview I skimmed through, there’s a gag based on the premise that Turk’s back is no longer strong enough to hold J.D.’s weight. There’s a great joke in there somewhere about how Donald Faison can’t carry Zach Braff anymore, but let’s not get too distracted. Point is, I can hardly imagine a more apt metaphor for the dreary state of legacy IP reboots.

Now, I’m fully aware that bemoaning this isn’t exactly fresh or incisive in 2026, but you’ll have to forgive me, because it’s starting to feel personal. The reason I bring up every millennial’s favorite sardonic hospital sitcom is twofold: first, because it’s a timely reminder that this nostalgia-baiting sequelization shit has gone too far; and second, because Scrubs isn’t the only cultural touchstone from 2002 that’s found its way back into the news lately. At the end of January, UK-based content agency Press Box PR published a lengthy and detailed interview with Bethesda veteran Bruce Nesmith that ruffled an aviary’s worth of feathers, and I’d quite like to get the forthcoming rant off my chest.

For the uninitiated: Nesmith was, until his mid-Starfield departure in 2021, among the ducal tier of Bethesda royalty under god-king Todd Howard and his courtiers. After contributing to the development of TES 2: Daggerfall and pioneering the (in)famous Radiant AI system for TES 4: Oblivion, he was tapped as Lead Designer for Skyrim and thus secured one of the most noteworthy credits in the modern history of game design. Accordingly, I’m interested in his opinion and take him seriously even when he says cracked-out lunatic shit like “go back and play Morrowind and tell me that’s the game you want to play again” or “the reality of playing Morrowind would not stand the test of time.” He said all that in response to a question about why Bethesda resists fan pressure to remaster Morrowind as it did Oblivion, whereupon a substantial and vocal segment of TES 3’s still-thriving fanbase was predictably incensed.

Now, I’m not here to argue with Nesmith’s abovementioned opinions. Not because I agree with them, of course, but because they’re so demonstrably at odds with reality that I can only give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he isn’t abreast of the fanbase’s strength. Morrowind is alive and well, and remains the open-world RPG of choice for countless PC gaming nerds despite its vintage. I’m actually here to take exception with the growing chorus of fans who take this as evidence that Bethesda should remaster or remake the game, and that’s our subject for this week.

Leaving aside the practical barriers standing in the way of such a project that make a first-party attempt impractical,1 the game is doing just fine. It enjoys enthusiastic fan support that, by virtually every important metric, better reflects the attitudes and desires of Morrowind’s fanbase than modern Bethesda possibly could. We’ll discuss that in more detail later on. First, though, it falls on me to acknowledge the pair of elephants in the room, since the explosive discourse of the past two weeks has all but stared right through them.

I: The “Remaster” Already Exists

Long-time readers know I’ve harped on this before — and will certainly harp on it further still when Tamriel Rebuilt’s Poison Song expansion releases sometime soon — but this point deserves to be made and remade in perpetuity: Morrowind’s passionate and increasingly vast modding community has been improving the game almost continuously for well over two decades now, and progress continues apace. Thanks to the modders and their growing patronage networks, the ambitious open-world RPG from 2002 gets better and better with every passing year. For ages now, those in the know have said without controversy that Morrowind modders are, by virtue of having much more practice, better at designing the game than the paid professionals at Bethesda ever were. This has some important implications for the prospect of an official remaster that aren’t shared by other legacy titles in Bethesda’s stable.

Let’s begin with the most obvious: OpenMW, the fan-made engine reimplementation that’s now the de-facto2 means of playing Morrowind on modern hardware, long ago foreclosed just about every rational argument for a commercial remaster of the original game. It is, in effect, a custom engine that loads the original game assets into memory and then reconstructs the original gameplay experience using modern paradigms — or, in other words, it’s a goddamn remaster of Morrowind. It’s free and open-source, runs on every major operating system, performs like a crack-smoking racehorse, and takes advantage of modern hardware to overcome the limitations that once hampered Bethesda’s original vision. And, of course, that’s before we even get into the built-in modding support backed by a rabidly devoted community. OpenMW plays great and is a rollicking good time even right out of the box.

Once we do consider the game’s modding potential, it’s basically lights out for any pretense of an official re-release that could meet the diversity of whims and expectations already served by the fan recreations. The versatility on offer reaches nearly Skyrim-like levels of modularity — with just a little patience, one can reforge Morrowind into practically any experience one likes, even if one would prefer to rip out the Morrowind experience altogether and replace it with motherfucking Star Wars. More commonly, of course, you’ll mod out or improve whichever gameplay systems you don’t like and perhaps add some interesting new content when you’ve worn out the original batch. I’ve heard modded OpenMW described as a “bathtub remaster” of Morrowind, and that’s basically on point. You’re totally free to install hundreds of mods and turn it into a resource-hungry behemoth that takes advantage of today’s finest hardware, but you really don’t need much at all to bring your next Morrowind campaign into parity with more contemporary RPGs. I’ll leave a little appendix of recommendations at the bottom in case you’re interested, and to further prove my point.

So, given the above, a rhetorical question: what on earth could Bethesda — or some contracted third party — possibly bring to the formula that modders haven’t already made available? Aside from charging for it, I mean. The only arguable improvement I think they could possibly make would be to redo it with modern, professional-quality assets, presumably driven by Unreal 5 like last year’s Oblivion remaster. If I make a concerted effort to suppress my distaste for the modern industry’s obsessive pursuit of fancier graphics, then I guess I can imagine a certain sideshow-like appeal to the prospect. I can certainly understand how it might be gratifying to experience one of gaming history’s greatest RPGs anew with the innovations wrought by over two decades of technological advancement. Besides, to realize such a project without the labor of a professional studio and a major publisher’s financial support, we’d require a colossal and interdisciplinary team of passionate volunteers who dedicated themselves to remaking Morrowind on an existing triple-A engine over a period of many years.

Oh, wait…

II: The Remake is Already in Development

You know what the very best part of the Oblivion remaster’s hype cycle was? It was when Bethesda made supportive overtures to the Skyblivion team and promised that their project could coexist with the commercial release. A lot of us community-minded Elder Scrolls fans were very worried that Bethesda was plotting to needlessly step on the modders’ dicks in order to maximize revenue, but cooler heads somehow prevailed and that didn’t come to pass. That was an important development that gives me confidence for the future of TES fan support.

For those of you unaware, Skyblivion is an extraordinarily ambitious, noncommercial project to rebuild all of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on the Skyrim engine. It’s been in nearly continuous development since at least 2012, and is slated to finally release this year after being delayed from a planned 2025 release. It’s under the banner of the even-more-ambitious The Elder Scrolls Renewal meta-project, which makes it a peer to another remake effort appropriately called Skywind.

As you’ll have guessed from the title, Skywind is an effort to rebuild all of Morrowind on the Skyrim engine. It’s not presently at the same advanced stage of development as Skyblivion, and, because of that, I don’t have too much to say. But some things can be said with confidence: in light of the progress that’s already been made — as evidenced by, e.g., a terrific twenty-minute gameplay demo from last May — it’s clearly transcended the visual presentation of the Skyrim-era Creation Engine on which it runs. It doesn’t quite rise to the graphical fidelity of an Unreal 5 backend, but the strides they’ve made in lighting, visual effects, and UI design are remarkable. Actually, since it lacks the Oblivion remaster’s dough-headed character models and the melting clown masks they have instead of faces, it transcends even the triple-A approach in at least one important respect.

With all this in mind, the thought of Bethesda kicking off another yearslong development cycle to reproduce Morrowind on a modern engine just doesn’t make sense. Unless I’m to believe that a triple-A studio in 2026 would reintroduce dice-roll combat and a story presented by nested paragraphs in a static dialogue window, then we’d be looking at a from-scratch reimagining of the original game, including a comprehensive mechanical redesign. In trying to fathom it, I find myself back in agreement with Bruce Nesmith: “that’s an entire project… Why not go and make something new?”

You know, like the supposedly forthcoming The Elder Scrolls 6, about which we know virtually nothing despite its being announced almost eight years ago.

I don’t suppose Skywind will become the standard way to play Morrowind even after it sees its 1.0 release, but I have every reason to believe that its high-effort presentation and zero-dollar pricetag will delight the fanbase to a degree that Bethesda just can’t match. I’ll wrap up this week by trying to explicate what exactly I mean by that.

TRIPLE-A CAN’T HANDLE THE CLASSICS

Here’s the thing, folks: the Bethesda Game Studios of today is, in almost every respect germane to creative ambition, unrecognizable from the plucky team that brought us Daggerfall and Morrowind a generation ago. Hell, it’s practically unrecognizable from the billion-dollar juggernaut that built Skyrim. Lest we forget, the Oblivion remake could only occur because the original source code was still lying around and another studio was brought in to do most of the work. I just can’t imagine how the bloated, rudderless sub-subsidiary of the Microsoft Corporation could possibly live up to so cherished a legacy as Morrowind’s, unless of course you consider the exodic plague3 of bugs to be a significant part of said legacy — after all, Fallout 76 and Starfield were both considered fit for commercial release in spite of their garish lack of polish.

What’s more, the managerial incentives fueling the triple-A games industry are resolutely misaligned with the spirit of late-90s/early-2000s Bethesda. The heavy focus on systems and the deliberate paucity of direct guidance from that period vested trust in players and contributed to a massively varied surface of valid approaches to gameplay, and that’s why the likes of Daggerfall and Morrowind are still so cherished to this day: they still hold up, for one, and there’s been no first-party effort to match or exceed them since. It’s no longer enough to appeal to a dedicated and enthusiastic audience, hence why nearly every first-party BGS game published since the early 2000s feels like it was made to be somebody’s first RPG. Morrowind doesn’t need to capture a broad audience of gamers with wildly variant tastes. It’s far better off in the hands of the folks who care most about it and its legacy.

I conclude for this week by echoing a tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless sympathetic opinion I remember reading on PC Gamer after the Oblivion remaster last year: rather than shoveling good money after bad on a hypothetical Morrowind remake and then galling the fanbase by asking fifty dollars for it, perhaps Bethesda would be better served by cutting a fat check to the OpenMW team to get it over the 1.0 finish line ahead of schedule. I obviously wouldn’t expect the purse-string holders of the modern triple-A industry to do such a thing if their lives depended on it, but what if they did? The gaming press would be head-over-heels, and the Morrowind nerds would have an actual, tangible reason to celebrate Bethesda’s creative direction for the first time in eons. What a comforting fantasy, right?

See ya next time <3

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APPENDIX: On Modding Morrowind

In 2026, a patient modder can bring Morrowind to a borderline triple-A level of fidelity and polish. If you’re after something curated and comprehensive, check out modding-openmw.org/lists for various well-supported modlists and idiot-proof instructions for getting it all working. They have a bunch of collections that should satisfy just about any craving. I’ve played a full campaign with the “I Heart Vanilla” list before and like it a lot.

Personally, though, I really dig the unadulterated experience and prefer very few mods. Here’s the modlist I use for trying out new Tamriel Rebuilt content, including brief summaries of what each does:

• Patch for Purists: fixes several thousand bugs and subtle inconsistencies without interfering with the core experience

• ReAnimation v2: adds first-person weapon animations for more dynamic, Skyrim-like visual flavor

• Impact Effects: adds material-appropriate sound and particle effects to missed melee attacks to make the dice-roll combat less immersion-breaking

• Expansion Delay: removes events and NPC dialogue that pester you about the shitty official expansion content until high character levels

• Tamriel Rebuilt: I wrote all about this one — check out the official website for instructions. See also Project Cyrodiil and Skyrim Home of the Nords for other huge, vanilla-friendly content additions.

Feel free to tell me about your favorite mods below! Cheers, and keep enjoying Morrowind.

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You know, despite my snobbish devotion to CRPGs from the late nineties and my well-documented apprehensions about the direction of modern commercial gaming, I’m really not the priggish antiquarian I may seem: it occurred to me recently that the first full-3D game I ever played was most likely 2001’s Frogger: The Great Quest for the Playstation 2. Dreadful game, that, but I can vaguely remember the sight of its real-time rendering astonishing my Boomer parents and wholly transfixing my impressionable, six-year-old attention span. It’s hard to imagine being impressed by standard-definition 3D on a CRT television in these days of ray-tracing and hardware-enabled DLSS, but it goes without saying that even the shittiest 3D engines were deeply impressive once upon a time.1

Now, the late nineties and early 2000s disgorged several consecutive revolutions in video games’ visual presentation. I recall the entire decade between 2000 and 2009 as a particularly exciting time to be a gamer, since practically every year saw the introduction of boundary-pushing rendering engines that brought us to greater and greater heights of polygonal fidelity. There were definitely some prominent voices who published foreboding thinkpieces about the vast forests we were missing for all those intricately rendered trees, but the general spirit of the time was greatly enthusiastic for the technological progress driving the gaming industry’s explosive growth.

Fast-forward to the present day, and there’s now a frustrating poignancy to that forgone enthusiasm for graphical fidelity as an arbiter of game design’s evolution. I can’t remember another period in the medium’s history during which this much of the core gaming audience was quite so apathetic about the state of graphical presentation. Even setting aside the fact that fucking Croesus couldn’t afford a gaming rig able to take full advantage of modern standards, we’re clearly well beyond the point of diminishing returns where graphical advancement is concerned. Despite yearslong development cycles and eight-or-nine-figure budgets, recent high-profile releases like Borderlands 4 and Highguard2 look (at best) scarcely any better than triple-A games from five or ten years ago. And still, they can barely run at playable framerates even on the finest silicon money can buy.

I’m pretty goddamned tired of it, as regular readers probably surmised from the fact that my gaming diet of late includes almost nothing but games with 2D sprites or straight-up terminal interfaces. But replaying Fallout, Fallout 2, and Arcanum back-to-back-to-back over the past couple of months has given me a newfound appreciation for the beauty and the purity of vision that characterize the hand-drawn, pseudo-3D artwork that we gamers have taken to calling “isometric” with varying degrees of technical inaccuracy. It’s far from the only way to make a beautiful video game without a 3D rendering engine, but I think it’s responsible for some of the best-looking games of all time and I reckon it deserves a closer look. This week, we’ll examine the effort and artistry that goes into the so-called “isometric” style, as well as the tremendous returns that it can deliver when done well. Now that computing hardware is worth its weight in refined antimatter, I think it’s high time for us gamers to reexamine our priorities and embrace visual artistry over visual fidelity.

Oh, a quick aside before we begin: this week’s installment marks The Spieler’s fiftieth full newsletter! It’ll soon be a year since I published our first feature, and I really appreciate the support and love y’all have shown. We’re closing in on 200 Subscribers, by the way — consider signing up if you haven’t yet!

Right, then — let’s have ourselves a quick lesson in geometry, then we’ll talk about the history and potential future of what may as well be my favorite way to visually present a video game.

WHAT DOES “ISOMETRIC” EVEN MEAN?

As you’ll have guessed from my repeatedly enclosing the word in scare-quotes, the term “isometric” has taken on a fuzzy definition in the wider gaming discourse over the years. Its precise definition varies significantly depending on whether you’re talking to a lay gamer, a visual artist, or a geometer, so I reckon we oughta say a few words about how best to understand it.

From a strict, mathematical perspective, isometric projection is a means of representing 3D objects in only two dimensions by positioning the three coordinate axes at precisely 120 degrees from one another and equally foreshortening them. The index example for achieving this with a cube is as follows: look straight-on at one face, rotate the cube by 45 degrees about its vertical axis, and then by exactly sin^-1(1/√3) degrees about the horizontal axis. Simplicity itself, right?

Well, no, not really. The inverse sine of 1/√3 works out to an aggravatingly uneven 35.264 degrees, which is remarkably difficult to represent using square pixels. “True” isometric projection is thus effectively impossible to achieve in 2D game design, and I couldn’t think of a single game that even tries for perfect isometry with the occasional exception of 2013’s FEZ,3 which in any case uses 3D rendering to evoke a 2D perspective rather than actually spriting it out by hand.

Accordingly, the games popularly labelled as “isometric” are, technically speaking, some other kind of parallel projection (usually dimetric, trimetric, or oblique). Some gamers go as far as to call any game with a top-down angle short of scalp-camera projection “isometric” — mathematically reductive, to be sure, but it really shouldn’t bother anyone but the most compulsively pedantic. I’m still a notch or two short of that, so I’m personally happy to apply the term to any game with a parallel projection of some sort, and I’ll therefore give the quote-marks a rest from here on out. The geometric distinction is subtle and of relevance mostly to artists and visual designers — keep it in mind so that you can better appreciate the thoughtfulness and skill behind 2D artwork, but remember that there’s really no need to get worked up about it.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ISOMETRIC GAME DESIGN

Game design as a profession has always tended to select for ambition among its practitioners, so it’s no surprise that 3D perspectives were sought long before accessible, consumer-grade computing hardware was up to the task of actual 3D rendering. Naturally, isometric projection was the first destination for approximating it, and it became a known quantity in the first half of the 1980s. I think the first commercial release to feature it was Data East’s Treasure Island, released for a Japanese audience in 1981. Later that same year, Sega’s Zaxxon became the first to feature an isometric perspective without looking scuffed as fuck.

The practice eventually gained mainstream attention following the release of 1984’s Knight Lore for the ZX Spectrum, which I bet some of y’all British gamers remember very fondly. It featured a very clever and innovative engine for image-masking that allowed objects to realistically stack atop one another without breaking perspective or otherwise mutually interfering. All the more astonishing was that it did so on a computer with 48 kilobytes of RAM and a 3.5 MHz CPU. Really makes you wonder what the hell Unreal Engine 5 games are really achieving with minimum hardware requirements several orders of magnitude higher than the Apollo Lunar Module, but I digress.

The likes of Knight Lore and its many imitators certainly come across as vintage to modern eyes, but the 1990s saw the first wave of releases whose graphics could be said to hold up without much controversy. Bullfrog Productions led the charge on 16-bit machines with 1990’s Powermonger, 1991’s Populous II, and 1993’s Syndicate, each of which represented a palpable advancement in the form. 1996’s Super Mario RPG, one of the most beloved isometric games of all time, took advantage of the SNES’s hardware to produce one of the most absorbing and dynamic affectations of three-dimensional projection seen that decade. Meanwhile, the Sega Genesis got Sonic 3D Blast — never universally celebrated for its gameplay,4 but it unmistakably pushed pseudo-3D graphics forward. Then, of course, Diablo came out that same year and ignited one of the most celebrated legacies in gaming history with nothing more than a few hundred eight-directional character spritesheets.

In the early 2000s, as screen resolutions continued to increase while real-time 3D rendering languished in its awkward puberty, the form hit what I consider to be its artistic peak. Games with high-quality, hand-drawn artwork found reliable audiences and commensurately enthusiastic publishing deals, and so the first several years of the decade saw a torrent of releases. City-builders and other strategy games were very well represented, and I could probably list dozens whose aesthetics hold up as well today as they did twenty-five years ago — a couple of my favorites are 2001’s Stronghold by Firefly Studios and Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom by BreakAway Games and Impressions Games. Meanwhile, other developers looked to the RPG classics of the nineties for inspiration and used their higher graphical resolutions to make strides in immersion. 2001’s Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive sticks out in my memory, not least because it openly advertised its presentation as authentically cinematic and actually delivered. I genuinely believe that, were any of these three to be released today with exactly the same graphics and slightly higher framerates, they’d be nominated for end-of-year art direction awards.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on RollerCoaster Tycoon, easily one of the greatest games ever made, period. I’ll have to devote an entire newsletter to it and its sequel one of these days.

TIMELESS BEAUTY

By the mid-2000s, games with pre-rendered, hand-drawn graphics were on their way out of the commercial mainstream. Real-time 3D had reached a point where, given sufficient processing power, its face no longer broke out and its voice no longer cracked. Once Crysis came out in 2007 with its still-unequaled renderings of North Korean soldiers getting massacred in a jungle, the writing was on the wall. The gaming public adored the spectacle and demonstrated it by shelling out for top-of-the-line hardware. Ultra-high fidelity became firmly entrenched as the big-money industry’s foremost obsession, and it remains so to this very day.

Here’s the unavoidable question that all of this begs: given the increasingly absurd expenses inherent to creating, producing, and running games at the cutting edge of modern 3D graphics, is the spectacle worth the tradeoffs? Well, if the state of the modern triple-A industry is any indication, I’ve certainly got my doubts. At the highest levels of industrial game development, budgets and sales expectations aren’t coming down even as jacked-up retail prices and luxuriantly expensive hardware drain the pool of consumers able to engage with the end products. Unless the wealthiest gamers start buying themselves a hundred copies of each new Ubisoft game, I can’t imagine how this can possibly carry on. Shit, I can’t guarantee the wealthiest nations are still going to post a hundred sales of new Ubisoft games for much longer.

But, as the global gaming audience grows poorer on average and looks toward less ostentatious means of expending its money and freetime, one begins to hear echoes of pre-rendered artwork’s resurgence. I need hardly remind you that independent game designers haven’t gone anywhere and are still exploring the boundaries of graphical presentation without compromising on consumer accessibility. But even beyond that, the double-A industry has demonstrated a growing willingness to trade the fidelity of their representations for more compelling gameplay experiences. The flourishing glut of top-down CRPGs comes to mind as an ongoing and practically indefatigable trend in this direction — Iron Tower’s Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role Playing Game from 2023 is probably my pick of the litter here, featuring some astonishingly gorgeous and evocative sci-fi environments made possible by its fixed camera. Supergiant’s Hades II deserves a shout-out as a representative of the action-roguelite vertical. And, of course, I still haven’t gotten over the absorbing, painterly isometric environments of Disco Elysium.

My point is this: twenty years from now, I reckon gaming culture will look back on the likes of Borderlands 4 and feel very silly indeed for the obsequious acceptance of Unreal 5-style hyperfidelity. But we’ll still be able to look back on games from the early 2000s and find them just as beautiful as the day they were released. Artists love to say that constraints are the foundation of creativity, and I reckon there’s no medium that proves the maxim better than game design.

Thanks for reading to the end! What games in your library stand out for having particularly excellent pre-rendered artwork? Let me know in the comments!

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Between the success of Baldur’s Gate 3, Critical Role’s lavishly produced new campaign, and about half of Stranger Things, it seems as if tabletop roleplaying has never enjoyed more adoration and respect among the cultural mainstream. It’s a far cry from the generally ill repute in which the form was once popularly held, associated as it was with the otherwise dissimilar factions of anti-social poindexters and literal satanists. One can’t help but notice the trend’s similarities with video gaming’s position in the cultural mainstream, which evolved from niche pastime to supposed architect of massacres to general acceptance over a roughly coterminous period. It’s intuitive and unsurprising that analog and digital gaming would influence each other over the decades in which both have maintained a significant cultural presence, and I want to reflect a little more on that this week.

Specifically, I want to talk about the points of explicit intersection where video game designers have tried to directly emulate the themes, ethos, or even direct experience of tabletop roleplaying. The practice goes all the way back to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for the Mattel Intellivision in 1982 — or arguably even further back if you include non-explicit adaptations for early computer systems — and continues apace to this very day. I figured I’d share some of my personal favorites, and I put together a selection that spans most of that decades-long timeframe. I’m particularly interested in the decisions that these games’ designers used to emulate particular aspects of the classic roleplaying experience, so we’ll focus principally on that. And, since it was a busy week and I didn’t have too much time for outlining, let’s take it easy and do this one listicle-style.

Our main remit here at The Spieler is to elucidate and celebrate the artistry of game design, and that very much includes games that run on a tabletop instead of a computer. Later on, I’d love to hear from you about your own favorite adaptations of tabletop roleplaying literature into video games, or whether you have different selections for the systems represented below. Alright, let’s begin in characteristic fashion with a crunchy, systems-heavy game that I bet most of you haven’t heard of.

I. Angband (and its countless derivatives) — AD&D

Remember when the genre term “roguelike” referred not just to any game with procedural level generation but to games that were… ya know, like Rogue? Me neither, that shit was ages ago. Nevertheless, I have a real affection for the genre’s early history and a lot of time invested into several old-school terminal games from the era and their modern successors. For my money — or lack thereof, since most of these things are free and open-source — Angband stands out above the rest. Originally released in 1993, it has you descend a hundred floors into the dungeons beneath the titular fortress, whereupon you defeat the Big Bad from Tolkien’s legendarium. Or not, since the game aspires to a level of difficulty tailored to the early ‘90s PC roleplaying audience. It still gets updates to this day, and there are a frankly absurd number of variants forked from the original source code to satisfy the sick cravings of any roguelike enthusiast.

The influence of Dungeons & Dragons is unmistakable throughout much of Angband’s mechanics and aesthetics, despite the fact that it’s by no means an official or utterly faithful adaptation. Here, though, I oughta make clear my general priors about D&D’s various editions. If you ask me, the biggest difference between the pre- and post-millennial editions of Dungeons & Dragons is that, where the newer ones privilege a robust and enforceable framework for running tactical combat encounters, the older ones favor systems and mechanics that minimize constraints on players’ creativity for want of encouraging imaginative approaches to adventuring. This isn’t universally true, of course, but I find it to be a pretty good heuristic for evaluating the ethos of a given roleplaying system, whether analog or digital.

That’s the essential logic behind why Angband is one of my very favorite roguelikes — given an objective no more complicated than “descend to level 100 and kill the scary boss monster,” it can accommodate a staggering variety of playstyles and produce a commensurately wide range of experiences within the confines of its mechanics. That’s also why my derivative of choice is PosChengband, which adds an absurd number of options for race and class during character creation. My personal favorite is the Ring — as in, “Ring of Power” — which is literally sentient jewelry. By glimmering seductively, you induce creatures to greedily pick you up and wear you, whereupon you dominate their minds and control them to manifest your will. That is the sort of shit I’m talking about when I refer to “encouraging imaginative approaches,” and it’s hard to imagine seeing a system like that in even the most ambitious full-3D, triple-A CRPG of today.

By the way, you can play Angband and many of its variants in your browser these days, without any installations.

II. Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer — D&D 3.5e

If, like me, you read far more tabletop adventure modules than you end up playing, then you probably have a history of getting blue-balled by campaigns that peter out long before any of their systems’ most fun mechanics are unlocked. Most CRPGs that begin at baby levels struggle with a similar conundrum: either their stories and progression balance require them to sharply limit maximum character levels (e.g., Baldur’s Gate 3 and its level-cap of 12), or else they face the impossible task of pacing out a full character progression under the crushing constraints of video game production. Obsidian’s Neverwinter Nights 2, in my opinion, suffers from a little of both: though it will mechanically accommodate very high character levels, the story and its events are seldom threatening enough to justify them, and you’ll have to play through many of hours of filler combat to reach those levels in the first place. Its expansion-pack plot sequel in Mask of the Betrayer, however, largely fixes both of these issues.

What I love most about Mask of the Betrayer is that, more than any other D&D-based video game I can remember, it captures and weaponizes the exhilaration of high-level campaigns. It has you doing battle with living gods and plotting an invasion of the afterlife itself practically from the very start, and it features some goddamn terrific story beats that can play out in dramatically different fashion between playthroughs depending on your decisions. You can import a character from the base Neverwinter Nights 2 campaign, but I think it’s just as stimulating to start from scratch with a purpose-built character whose background you can imagine as entirely separate from the game’s original story. You’ll definitely save yourself a whole shitload of time by doing so, too — NwN 2 is a fifty-hour game at the least.

Now, Mask of the Betrayer isn’t really a great adaptation of D&D 3.5e from a tactical perspective — indeed, the combat isn’t much of a factor if you know what to expect — but it does a persistently fantastic job at recreating the sensation of heroic accomplishment of which the tabletop system’s tactical combat was ultimately in service, and does so better than any of the other games on this list. For as great as I feel after spoiling the spoiler to stop the spoilerific machinations of the central antagonists at the end of Baldur’s Gate 3, even that pales in comparison to leading the crusade against the City of Judgement and wresting my very soul from the wall in MotB.

That said, I do have a great deal of praise to heap upon BG3, so let’s move right along.

III. Baldur’s Gate 3 — D&D 5e

Assuming you have any familiarity whatsoever with the past few years of gaming history, I don’t suppose it’ll be a big surprise to see BG3 on this list. Aside from being a masterclass in RPG design that flexes too many innovative additions to the medium to count, it’s a goddamn excellent translation of Fifth Edition D&D’s tactical combat focus. In terms of strategic depth and inventory of valid approaches, I’ve played a CRPG or two that can go toe-to-toe with BG3, but none that outright exceed it. There are also a few things I think it does better than any other CRPG ever released. Most notable among them is how it strives — successfully, in my opinion — to make skill-check failure states interesting and worth seeing through.

So, this is the part where I have to talk about tabletop 5e, which I’ve played more than any other tabletop system. But, as almost any tabletop roleplaying snob will insist, that has essentially nothing to do with the system’s quality and everything to do with the fact that, since 5e has been almost everybody’s entry-point into tabletop roleplaying for ages now, it’s by far the easiest system for which to actually find players. My foremost issue with it is that, while I love me some tactical combat in moderation, precious few tables can keep it stimulating and exciting for very long. Every time a fight against six goblins enters its fortieth minute as one guy overthinks his tactics and another argues with the DM, I find myself desperately wishing I was playing the same battle on my own with an impartial and quick-witted computer running the action.

What I mean to say, then, is that Baldur’s Gate 3 consistently captures the essence of what makes newer D&D fun without languishing in the chaff that so often makes it boring. And, of course, it comes closer than any other CRPG yet released to digitally simulating the breadth of approaches made available by the human imagination. No video game will ever reach parity with the tabletop in that regard, but BG3 demonstrates that innovating toward reducing the gap is worthwhile regardless.

IV. Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous — Pathfinder 1e

I think Larian Studios deserves to be called the incumbent emperor of contemporary CRPG design, but Owlcat Games has been relentlessly challenging them for the throne since Pathfinder: Kingmaker dropped in 2018. The Pathfinder system, for those of you unaware, grew out of D&D 3.5e in the tumultuous wake of D&D 4e’s misfortunate launch. It was in many respects an effort to keep the 3.5e legacy alive while its official stewards tried and failed to capture a new audience without fragmenting the fanbase. Tabletop nerds who rejected 4e’s streamlined gameplay and heavy-handed rebalancing either kept running their 3.5e books or moved on to Pathfinder, which has been a refuge for fans of highly systems-driven roleplaying ever since.

I played a little bit of First Edition Pathfinder about a decade ago, and, while I certainly appreciate the strength of its vision, its focus on tactical optimization as the principal driver of the experience just doesn’t do it for me. A key feature of older tactical roleplaying in general and of Pathfinder in particular is that unadjusted encounters are balanced to be as difficult for the players as possible without being straight-up unfair. In practice, this means that reliably succeeding in combat requires players to use just about every tactic at their disposal at all times. It practically necessitates a table of players ready for a persistent cognitive load, and I found it exceedingly difficult to find such folk among the members of my drunken circle of reprobates back then. As I described with 5e above, it was the sort of experience that had me pining for the calculated efficiency of transistors.

That’s exactly what I got when I pulled the trigger on Owlcat’s Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous several years ago, which puts its absolute trust in players to contour the system toward their particular desires. For one thing, it has what must be the most granular difficulty settings I’ve ever seen, and it’s all extraordinarily well documented. You can easily set it up to simulate the hardcore, tactical balance of its source material, or to soften the edges and lay off a little if you’re after a more relaxing and immersive campaign. Bonus points are in order for the character creator, which I think is the most tabletop-like in all of gaming at the moment. With its twelve available races and dozens upon dozens of class archetypes, only a handful of roguelikes can rival it for playstyle versatility. With the addition of the excellent and thematic Mythic Path system, WotR can reasonably claim to be the most replayable of all the modern CRPGs.

By the way, its predecessor in Pathfinder: Kingmaker deserves an honorable mention. Its greater focus on overworld travel, alongside its central conceit of fiefdom management, brings it even closer to the intangible noumena of tabletop roleplaying. I think Wrath of the Righteous is the plainly superior game, though, which is why it made the list instead. Also worth mentioning is that Owlcat’s Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is a pretty excellent CRPG in its own right, and I’m pretty optimistic about its forthcoming successor in Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy. Owlcat is coming for the CRPG throne, so let’s hope for Larian’s sake that Divinity slaps.

Thanks for reading to the end of this unusually formatted edition, folks. We’ll be back to bigger things next week — I’ve got a hefty and heavily researched subject in mind that feels particularly well suited to this moment in gaming history. See, I’ve become fascinated anew by the industry’s incorrigible obsession with state-of-the-art 3D graphics as skyrocketing hardware prices have pushed back my upgrade plans further still, and I think the time is right to reflect on what we left behind when the likes of DLSS and Unreal 5 became de rigeur for so much of high-level game design.

In the meantime, I hope ya learned something about the still-underexplored intersection between tabletop and video roleplaying. I’d be delighted to hear from you in the comments if you have any insights of your own to share.

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“I don’t avoid getting hit — I make sure I’m shot in the right places. That said, could you get me a stomach?”

Too easy. Even mint stomachs are a dime a dozen, but clever traders prefer guts that’ve been passed around a few times. Much higher margins that way.

“The hunters are starting to leave us intact when they leave. You know, so they can come back. Could use a kidney replacement if you have the time.”

This guy’s in luck! Some canny harvester just dumped a gross of kidneys, and the bottom fell right out of the nephrological market. The retail consumers don’t need to know that, though.

“In high gravity, on cold nights? I like to clutch a warm heart between my fingers.”

Bro, same.

After tallying up a third consecutive campaign of decades-old isometric CRPGs with last week’s newsletter on Arcanum, I decided it was time to vary my gameplay diet a little. Man cannot thrive solely on post-nuclear roleplaying and post-Soviet fan games, after all. A healthful gaming regimen should always include sensory stimulation, psychological roughage, and, where possible, a heaping dose of misanthropic cynicism. Imagine my delight when, at the beginning of last week, I realized I could get all three in one package — that is, I found a little indie gem called Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator going for half-price.

Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator (hereafter referred to as SWOTS, to save me a few hundred keystrokes) is a cerebral, action-arcade invest-’em-up about making it big as a trader and speculator in the intergalactic organ market. In the indeterminately distant but presumably fast-approaching future, the foremost vehicle for equity is flesh itself. Everyone has organs, and everyone needs organs. Hence, everyone demands organs, and you are their supplier. Well, you’re one of many suppliers — organ-trading is a cutthroat business in which only the savviest speculators come out on top. In your quest to pay your debts and transcend your dark past, you’ll be up against cruel warmongers, inscrutable aliens, and a friendly but ruthless golden retriever called Chad Shakespeare.

Back in July of last year, I wrote about game design’s essentially unique capacity for transfixing an audience through the nimble application of multi-sensory stimuli, and about how that ability to transiently alter players’ states of consciousness revealed an as-yet undervalued potential to explore themes and suggest messages at the basest level of conscious experience. My point of reference in that newsletter was the concept of directly emulating machine gambling in core gameplay, and SWOTS is definitely rubbing shoulders with the growing indie subgenre of casino-flavored misery simulators. But it sets itself apart from games made primarily to numb, and I came away from it feeling much more inspired than I’d expected from a tiny, low-budget game about rapid-fire investing.

You see, while SWOTS can absolutely bring about that familiar feeling of transcendent fixation into which freetime rapidly dissolves, it lacks the numbing, low-affect sensation upon which games like Balatro and Cloverpit are built. To play and engage with SWOTS doesn’t really feel like settling into an anesthetized stupor at a slot machine. It’s more like locking into a stimulant-fueled flow state at a Bloomberg Terminal on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange while peaking on DMT, and I mean that as high praise indeed. I’ll do my best to give voice to that phenomenon as we explore the organ-speculation game to which I accidentally lost several hours this past week.

PREMISE AND GAMEPLAY

“Buy, sell, and trade organs in a strange and evolving universe,” begins the description on SWOTS’ Steam Store page. “Dive into the quivering innards of alien capitalism in the sci-fi body horror market tycoon game you didn’t know you needed.”

It’s an apt description of the game’s central conceit. You play as a newly minted organ trader, part of a privileged caste with the means and latitude to speculate in bodily organs of both human and alien origin. It’s not all roses, though: as the game begins, you’re welcomed into the fold by your unnamed mentor, whose explanation of your role suggests an even darker state of affairs than the game’s premise would lead you to believe.

“You are an ORGAN TRADER. A supplier of meaty demand with a moral flexibility ranging in the parsecs,” he explains. “You BUY organs. You SELL organs. You take on client REQUESTS, and FULFILL them, and use THEIR money to fuel YOUR future.”

Toward these ends, you’re put in charge of a straightforward and blissfully efficient trading interface. The “Q” and “E” keys on your keyboard cycle between tabs on which you can peruse the market, browse or fulfill special requests, and reorganize your grisly hold of living cargo. With the mouse, you scroll through and select from listings. The “W” key transacts. That’s the game’s entire control scheme, which takes about thirty seconds to learn and about two or three minutes to master. Simple and elegant control schemes like this are usually reflective of thoughtful game design, and this is definitely one such case. Aside from the barrier to entry being lower than the game’s moral standards, the simplicity of the controls contributes to the game’s theming: with your hands essentially locked in place during trading, the peripherals beneath them start to feel like extensions of your mind. Once you get into a flow with it, SWOTS plays as if controlled by your thoughts alone, and you quickly come to embody the fantasy of coldly speculating in stolen flesh for your material gain.

So, then, the primary gameplay loop. After you’ve taken as long as you need to acclimate to the menu navigation, you click the Big Red “TRADE” Button to begin the trading day. With a circus-like musical flourish, the trading floor opens for exactly two minutes and thirty seconds of real time. You earn money primarily by accepting contracts for given organs that pay a fixed fulfillment fee, and then purchasing the requisite flesh on the open market for less than that amount. As your reputation evolves, you’ll also gain access to the organ stock market in which you can directly speculate in organ futures. You can also enhance cheap organs over time by stitching them to quality specimens in your cargo hold, eventually flipping them as you would a project house. The real meat of the game, though, always comes back to parsing and fulfilling requests. This is the most straightforward way to earn significant margins, and it’s also the means by which you progress the narrative toward one of eleven possible endings.

SWOTS is, above all, a game about processing data into information. From that information, you synthesize intelligence that converts into capital gains. Requests, rather than directly listing the conditions for their fulfillment, are presented in about three lines of natural, sentential language. The naïve approach of reading them in full wastes precious trading time, so you’ll invariably get good at skimming requests for keywords. When you find one worth fulfilling, you’ll page over to the market interface and scroll through the listed organs, searching for photographs whose silhouettes match the organs you’re after. If the price is right, snap them up before any of your rivals on the floor get to them first, and go fulfill the contract for a tidy payout. Sometimes, contracts are very simple and can be satisfied with any specimen of a particular organ. Other times, you’ll need to meet specific requirements ranging from size to condition to blood type. This can be much trickier, but the payout is usually worth the trouble if you can pull it off.

Gameplay complexity is gradually added as you make good trades and thus increase your reputation. You’ll soon be trading alongside several competitors, each of whom specializes in particular organs that they’ll buy from the same market. You have to be quick on the draw to avoid losing out on precious listings. You can alternatively pay them a generous bribe to temporarily withhold from trading, but this is expensive and quickly eats into your margins. The better strategy is to hone your skill at parsing the listing information until your brain can glean all the necessary information about a given organ before you even consciously internalize it. Toward this end, every listing comes with a serial code that you’ll learn to read — from just a short string of characters, you can ascertain the type, size, condition, blood type, and various special features of any organ on the market. If you stick with it, you’ll eventually find yourself making trades without even looking at the thumbnail images that visually identify the listings, and this enables skilled players to make several dozen trades per minute.

As you fulfill contracts, earn fat stacks, and impress those around you, you’ll periodically find special contracts on offer that advance the narrative in return for hard-to-source exchanges. You can work with whomever you please at first, but you’ll eventually run up against mutual incompatibilities as the motives and agendas of your interlocutors begin to antagonize one another. You’ll pick a narrative path to pursue, eventually triggering one of the game’s endings. These run the gamut from tentatively hopeful to hideously nightmarish, and I won’t spoil any of the specifics. But in case you’re thinking you might like to try this game for yourself, let me offer you some free advice: do not try to take the ethical high ground. There’s no coming out of the organ-trading grind with your moral integrity — the civilized universe of SWOTS is too far gone for that, and so are you.

Speaking of comprehensively abandoning our principles, there’s built-in modding support. Here, look:

Enough said. Let’s talk presentation.

PRESENTATION

As should be apparent, one walks a very narrow tightrope of taste and decency when one develops a game about trafficking in ill-gotten flesh, particularly when it comes to matters of style. Lean too far in one direction, and you’ll plummet into the Stygian abyss of half-cocked irony that only the most prescription-addled Robux farmer could take seriously. Lean too far in the other, and you’ll invite disfavorable comparisons with schlocky pop-horror that inspires no feeling save an upset stomach. SWOTS, for its part, walks this particular tightrope with acrobatic grace.

The graphical style is immediately striking. Its limited palette and crunchy, quantized portrayals are more evocative than illustrative, reminding me very fondly of the Vermis artbooks and their aesthetically similar renderings of moral desolation. The visual representations appear outwardly abstract and sometimes even elicit a certain madcap humor, but they all disguise a grotesque and unsettling nature that coheres into its true form only in the mind’s eye. The titular organs are a reliably gruesome sight to behold: slick and glistening with moisture, they pulsate and undulate in time with the thumping background percussion. Even the monochrome, low-resolution character portraits are well differentiated and instantly distinguishable.

The music, meanwhile, is a triumph. I don’t suppose I can articulate what precisely I’d expect from the score of a game about high-frequency organ trading, but the synth-driven OST we end up with is exceptionally well suited to the heart-pounding flow state in which you tend to find yourself after a few minutes of concerted play. It puts me in a mind much like the violent, saw-toothed beats in Synthetik by way of the thyroid-provoking basslines in Super Hexagon. It’s gritty, aggressive, and unrelenting until finally relaxing after the trading period ends. Also, the audio mixing is so terrific that it actually feels worthwhile to mention. Bright, punchy sound effects accompany every transaction, and they blend seamlessly into the background music as if they were baked right into the score. Balancing music and sound effects is a critical aspect of polish, but few games execute it so well that it feels like a mechanic unto itself.

Finally, a word about the writing. Sparse though it is, it deserves more credit than it gets. SWOTS unmistakably means to evoke the grim contradictions of modern capital economies through its superficially black-suppositoried theming and the dystopian undercurrent beneath it. And, rarity of rarities, it avoids veering off the cliff-edge into that groan-inducing chasm of facetious detachment masquerading as social critique that so often infects gaming’s irony-poisoned critical sphere. The sparsity of the writing turns out to be an asset in this regard, and I can’t help but compare it favorably to Cruelty Squad’s terse invective against the fading order’s misanthropic decay. SWOTS’ deft and confident rendering of machinic capital’s final destination deserves to be called a peer to Consumer Softproducts’ work, even if it never quite reaches the heights summited by Cruelty Squad and re-summited by Psycho Patrol R.

I don’t usually go for games whose primary loops are designed to produce states of numbness and low affect. As I get older and my time becomes more precious, I feel a growing compulsion to derive something grander than plain distraction from investing that limited time into a game. But SWOTS turns out to be a terrific example of what I’ve so often insisted in this publication, i.e., that game design at its best can be a vector for inspiration regardless of its superficial conceits. This is the sort of game that you can easily use to kill a few minutes on a whim, of course, but that alone doesn’t make it an idle distraction for temporarily forcing your real-world problems into abeyance.

There’s a genuinely thought-provoking throughline running through the experience of playing SWOTS, and I absolutely recommend it at the right price. Now, given the simplicity and transience of the gameplay and its narrative, the MSRP of $20 feels a little steep for what you’re getting. But if you can get it for half-off, as is often the case, this game is worth a try for just about anyone. Incidentally, if you happen to be worried about the cognitive burden of rapidly parsing data against the clock, there’s a prominent accessibility setting in the Options menu with which you can dramatically reduce the speed of the simulation. The only reason you’d definitely want to avoid SWOTS is if you bear some lingering trauma about a golden retriever stealing your organs.1

One more thing to note that didn’t fit anywhere else: developer Strange Scaffold is presently developing a pseudo-sequel set in the same fictional universe called Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator, in which you speculate against the fortunes of newborn babies. A free demo is already available on Steam, and I’d say they’re definitely going in the right direction, whatever the right direction would be for a game about speculating against the fortunes of newborn babies. I, for one, am very much looking forward to buying and selling thousands of infants’ futures for fun and profit. Oh, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t quote that line out of context.

So that’s Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. It wasn’t originally my plan to cover it this week, but it fell into my lap practically out of nowhere and I needed to tell somebody about it, so thanks very much for making the journey with me. As always, if you’re with us in our quest to bring attention and esteem to the unheralded artistry of game design, do be sure to Subscribe. See ya next week <3

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After spending December playing almost nothing but classic Fallout, you’d think I’d be over isometric CRPGs from the turn of the millennium about the ravages of civilization’s violent collapse. You’d be half-right — the first two weeks of 2026 have drawn a few too many comparisons with the post-apocalypse for comfort, and I could really use a break from games about the misery of the modern human condition. Luckily, the early-modern human condition feels more distant than ever, and I’m not yet weary of systems-heavy RPGs at large. It only made sense that, after exhausting the late-nineties Fallout games, I’d move onto the famously Fallout-like game from a couple years later that shared most of the early franchise’s creative talent.

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura is a 2001 CRPG created by Troika Games, a humble outfit formed by three of the principle minds that brought us Fallout in 1997. While working on Fallout 2, the three — to wit, Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson — fell out with the suits at Interplay over the sequel’s production and left to form their own studio. For their first project, they resolved to stick with what they knew worked best, and developed a Fallout-like CRPG now remembered as a critical darling in spite of many, many rough edges.

Nowadays, Arcanum is probably most famous for its unique and never-replicated setting. It takes place on the titular continent, which was until recently a fairly unremarkable fantasy world. You know the sort — humans, elves, dwarves, and so on intermingling with one another in a land not yet abandoned by the miraculous wonders of magick, etc., etc. But the nifty twist on the formula is that, through a combination of dwarven ingenuity, human ambition, and gnomish avarice,1 an industrial revolution has swept over most of Arcanum. The nature of everything from craftsmanship to warfare is changing faster than the land’s people can adapt, and conflict grows apace with private equity.

The setting and its particulars are the most fascinating thing about this game, made all the more intriguing by the fact that no IP since has convincingly replicated it. But there’s more to it than that: Arcanum, being the passion-driven brainchild of three of gaming’s most deservedly legendary creators, is absolutely sodden with great ideas that I’ve been waiting nearly twenty-five years for other games to steal. I came up with four things Arcanum does better than any other game I’ve played, and those are our subject for this week. Once we’re through, I’ll give you some advice for how to get it running at its best all these years later in case you care to see it for yourself.

FOUR IDEAS TO STEAL FROM ARCANUM

I: In-Universe Instruction Manual

“To begin the game with all haste, we can choose one of many pre-fabricated persons. To make such a selection, click upon ‘Pick Character,’ as shown in Figure 4-3… For now, we shall choose a pre-fabricated Character — one Mr. Merwin Tumblebrook. If the Gentle Player simply can’t bear Merwin, make use of the arrows next to his Character Portrait to select someone else; be aware, however, that you are certain to injure the gentleman’s feelings.”

-- Arcanum Players Guide, p. 91

I reckon Arcanum features the greatest instruction manual of all time, and its excellence makes the demise of standalone manuals all the more poignant. See, I remember simpler times long past when I’d get a new game off a store shelf, tear the shrink-wrap from the box as soon as it was paid for, and excitedly read the manual throughout the car ride home. Even when they were phoned-in hunks of crap, this never failed to get me excited for the experience to come. Once, after buying a copy of Far Cry 2 and realizing that my parents’ cheap-ass office computer wasn’t powerful enough to run it, I read and re-read the manual over and over again to extract just a bit of excitement from the fantasy of playing the game. You might think that says less about game manuals than about how much of a punished hyper-sperg I was as a kid, and, while you’d obviously be right, my point is that something real and valuable was lost when the industry largely abandoned them.

The genius of the Arcanum Players Guide is that, utterly confident in the game’s brilliantly realized setting, it presents itself almost entirely in thematic prose. Where most manuals would introduce their games’ settings in a blurb on the rear of the retail box, the Players Guide opens with the foreword to an in-universe history textbook, which sets up the game’s fiction and its central conflicts in the learned, scholastic tone of nineteenth century academia. Immediately thereafter, it advances the mystique of the game’s central thematic conflict — that between magic and technology — with a series of lab manuals like you’d get assigned in a science class. Even the details of player-facing gameplay are craftily imbued with a charming Victorian flair. Also, uniquely among game manuals, it ends with an in-universe recipe for banana bread. I have it on good authority that it’s very nice.

For good measure, I’ll be referring back to this document several times over the rest of this installment. Right, then — let’s talk more about that brilliantly realized setting of which I spoke.

II: The Early-Industrial High-Fantasy Setting

“One cannot speak about the recent history of Arcanum without addressing the growing dichotomy between Magick and what has come to be known as Technology. My research has shown to me a direct correlation between the widespread use of these two Forces, and increased levels of societal development… Humans, it seems, have now inherited the scientific legacy of the dwarves — and does it not appear that we are now poised for what might be called a Golden Age of cultural expansion and hegemony?”

-- Foreword to A Brief History of Arcanum, Arcanum Players Guide, p. 2

I think it’s probably fair to say that, of all its standout features, Arcanum is best remembered today for the unique and fascinating setting left tragically underexplored by the cancellation of its planned sequel. For the uninitiated, understand that I don’t use the phrase “Victorian Techno-Fantasy” lightly — the game world is essentially a Tolkien-ish continent populated by your usual suite of humans and variously magical fantasy races, but it happens to be in the throes of rapid and profound change following humanity’s operationalizing of the steam engine. The socioeconomic upheaval wrought by the introduction of steam locomotives, electricity, and the industrial production of firearms is eminently visible almost anywhere you care to look.

As in our world, nothing short of complete isolation from society can shield a people from the unstoppable march of technological progress. In the course of a full playthrough of Arcanum, you’ll visit at least two settlements that attempt to do exactly that, and the results of such totalizing isolation are about as grim as you’d expect. That’s not to say that the factions embracing change are faring altogether better, though — in addition to deadlier wars, polluted cities, and continuous political dysfunction, Arcanum’s civilized societies endure the tremendous and destabilizing antagonism of the masses oppressed by the emerging order. It’s enough to provoke the ire of some extraordinarily powerful beings with the means to tear it all down, but I’ll withhold major plot spoilers this week.

Of course, no discussion of Arcanum’s set-dressing would be complete without mentioning the top-notch original soundtrack composed by Ben Houge, easily one of the most evocative soundtracks in the medium. Scored almost entirely for string quartet, it nails the game’s nineteenth-century veneer while carrying a determined, fantastical aura that suits any playstyle. It manages the incredible feat of feeling thematically and emotionally resonant regardless of your decisions or character build. For the love of God, if you’re not going to play or replay Arcanum — and I bet you won’t — at least go listen to its Main Menu Theme.

III: The Physical Conflict between Magic and Technology

“According to some authorities, Technology is nothing more than the twisted shadow of Magic — but nay-sayers have fallen increasingly silent in recent years, as the Technological Disciplines have grown more and more powerful. Over the past few decades… Arcanum’s great cities have discovered that while a job accomplished by Technological Devices is seldom accomplished prettily, or with Magic’s flair for the dramatic, such jobs are accomplished very quickly — and they stay done indefinitely!”

-- Arcanum Players Guide, Section 3-7, p. 81

In your average fantasy RPG, the study of magic is supreme while technological progress stagnates somewhere around the invention of the crossbow. This is fair enough — if your fictional universe allows for the arbitrary manipulation of reality to mystically effectuate everything from instantaneous creation to unparalleled destruction, it makes sense that the typical egghead would prefer to study the arcane over the principles of engineering. The unfortunate side-effect is that this forecloses any world-building or decision-making inspired by the familiar achievements of the natural sciences. By means of clever lore-craft and thoughtful gameplay integration, Arcanum overcomes this and foregrounds the inevitable conflict between magic and technology in its setting and in its primary mechanics.

The spark that makes it all work is that, in Arcanum’s fiction, technology works by harmonizing the physical laws of the universe while magic works by flaunting them. Hence, the two are fundamentally incompatible with each other, and bringing them together courts disaster. In gameplay, this is reflected by an alignment meter that measures each character’s proclivity toward either magic or technology, and one’s position on the meter affects all sorts of mechanics. For example, expert technologists can create and use enormously powerful inventions like levered machine guns and power armor, but scarcely benefit from healing magic or even magical health potions. Meanwhile, expert mages can teleport across the continent in an instant or kill a man by looking at him, but mechanical armor doesn’t protect them and firearms explode in their faces.

The setting itself takes full advantage of the opportunities this all provides. My favorite example: if you buy a train ticket, the person at the ticketing booth will interrogate you about your magical proclivities and those of your companions. If your alignment is heavily skewed toward magic, you won’t be allowed to board, because your very presence could derail the train. Even if you’re just somewhat magically inclined, you’ll be made to ride in the second-class carriage at the very rear. Technological societies tend to mistrust the magically inclined, and magic-using societies often openly discriminate against technologists.

Just so we’re clear, though, the magic-technology dichotomy isn’t just a schmaltzy allegory for racism. It’s postured more like a stand-in for the conflict between tradition and progress, and the game and its story are better for it. That said, there is plenty of racism afoot, alongside an inventory of -isms big enough to paralyze an entire social sciences department. Arcanum does a pretty great job of tastefully and thoughtfully representing the race- and class-based antagonisms that its Victorian setting unavoidably brings to mind.2 It’s a little too involved to squeeze into this installment, though, so we’ll save it for another time. For now, I want to tell you about one of the foremost technological innovations of the game itself.

IV: Procedural Dialogue

“Healthy social interaction is a very important aspect of a Character’s performance in our Game! No player will be able to pursue his adventures solely by virtue of theft and murder. At some point, we must all interact with the denizens of many towns, cities, and fortifications, and a large variety of Interfaces and Skills are available to make each interaction a pleasant one… This deceptively simple interface conceals an enormously complex model of conversation.”

-- Arcanum Players Guide, Section 3-5, pp. 66–67

Arcanum was a tremendously ambitious project, replete with never-before-seen innovations of gameplay-focused storytelling. It’s generally understood that this was a major source of its infamous bugginess and instability. But what isn’t broadly acknowledged is the extent to which Troika’s ambitions paid off in spite of the final product’s rough edges, especially in light of its short development timeline and its skeleton crew of barely a dozen people. Now, with the benefit of hindsight — alongside some five-dozen retrospective videos by Tim Cain himself — we scions of the vibe-coding age can at last wholly appreciate the staggering levels of creativity and ingenuity on display in Troika’s work. To illustrate precisely what I mean, I’ll zero in on the game’s particularly well-documented system of generated dialogue.

Now, when you hear the term “generated dialogue” in a game-design context these days, you’re usually listening to the deranged ravings of a non-gamer in a publisher’s C-suite as, with eyes bulging, he explains how generative AI will soon enable us to ask our RPG interlocutors for advice on NFL parlays. But over twenty years before this kind of delirious indulgence became commonplace in the games industry, Troika managed something a hundred times more impressive with a fucking Excel sheet. Seriously, look at this:

Given a vast inventory of parameters and modifiers, Arcanum’s writers could scaffold out the shape of a dialogue, and the engine would populate it with content appropriate to the player’s precise context. NPCs can take the player’s race and gender into account, as you’d probably expect, but also their reputation, tech/magic alignment, companions, and a lot more besides. And, in service of the Victorian class-antagonistic theming, each sapient NPC represents one of eleven different social castes and will vary their interactions with the player based on their mutual compatibility (or lack thereof). Because of all this, you can have enormously different playthroughs by changing nothing more than your character’s race. Once-friendly NPCs may become aggressively discriminatory, and previously hateful ones may be willing to help you for nothing out of sheer solidarity. At its best, it embarrasses many of even the newest RPG dialogue systems.

I’m barely scratching the surface — one could write an entire essay on the subject of Arcanum’s dialogue and still leave stones unturned. It felt like a profound evolution over Fallout, which itself had an excellent implementation of branching dialogue, and it still feels immersive and captivating even decades later. Above all, it’s a stark reminder that great and memorable systems are influenced by their designers’ ambitions and creativity far more so than their budgets or the technology available to them. If somebody ever makes a remotely compelling dialogue system implementing a generative language model, it’ll be as a result of thoughtfully augmenting the work of talented writers and emphatically not of foregoing the creative process altogether. Fingers crossed for Wayward Realms, I suppose.

There you have it: four brilliant ideas from a twenty-five-year-old game that, for some reason, game designers obstinately refuse to steal even to this day. Arcanum may be flawed and imperfect like every title in Troika’s stable, but it still holds up as one of the greats and remains one of the most versatile and replayable CRPGs of which I’m aware. I think you’ll love it if you were intrigued by any of what I wrote above, and any fan of classic Fallout will almost definitely adore it, too.

By the way, Arcanum is still remarkably playable on modern hardware even decades after its release. Actually, it plays better than it did in 2001. You can buy a copy for a few dollars on either Steam or GOG, and either will probably run out of the box. But all are strongly advised to install the Unofficial Patch developed over many years by the world’s biggest Arcanum nerd, which adds widescreen support, fixes legions of bugs, and optionally restores cut content. I had no trouble installing it atop my GOG copy on Linux, and, once again, I feel obliged to take a moment to appreciate how wild it is that a famously unstable CRPG from 2000 runs flawlessly on my modern hardware and non-standard OS.

That’ll do it for this week. I’d love to hear from you in the comments if you have any heartwarming memories of Arcanum to share, or if, against the odds, you can name any intellectual properties that have successfully replicated or built upon any of what we discussed here. I’ll see ya next Wednesday.

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“Games signal a third phase for realism. The first two phases were realism in narrative (literature) and realism in images (painting, photography, film). Now there is also realism in action.”

— Alexander R. Galloway, 2004

TOO REAL

You ever get a good look at American Gothic? The original, I mean, not the parodies where Twinkie the Kid stares forlornly at Alfred E. Neuman or whatever. If you haven’t, go load up a hi-res scan of it real quick and really scrutinize that dusty old bastard who used to do the artist’s dental work. Have a gander at the woman standing in for his daughter while you’re at it. Really drink in those eyes, and then follow their gaze over to the drooping jowls that practically melt onto the muddy overalls and crusty suit jacket in which the old yeoman might as well be buried. A haunting critique of the agrarian idyll as it clung to relevance in a rapidly modernizing world. Or is it?

Contemporaneous records suggest that Grant Wood intended American Gothic as an ode to the phlegmatic tenacity of rural America in spite of the social trends that challenged it, but he had a hell of a time convincing a skeptical public of that. Art critics, even those who looked favorably upon it, interpreted it as a satire. Then, when a reproduction appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, Iowans were apoplectic at the sight of what they took as a caricature of their lifestyle. Iowa farmwives undertook an aggressive letter-writing campaign in protest — it’s said that one wished the painter’s head bashed in, and that another threatened to personally bite off his ear.

We’re talking about realism this week, and I bring all of this up to illustrate how powerful it can be when deliberately applied by skilled hands. American Gothic is a portrait of two people in front of a house, but it inspires more emotion and reflection than perhaps any other American painting. This is worth celebrating — in our hyperreal era of institutionalized sports-betting rackets, matcha-flavored protein lattes, and AI-generated videos of Gordon Ramsey lactating cornflakes, artwork that inspires by making direct, unvarnished connections with our lived realities is precious, even when it upsets us. Literature, painting, and cinema each have well-established traditions of depicting that unobstructed reality, and each has produced works with profound and lasting legacies. This week, I want to discuss the extent to which video games can do the same.

Enter Social Realism in Gaming, a 2004 paper by the author and professor Alexander R. Galloway that I came across late last year. Its stated goal was to elucidate how the theories of realism from other media traditions could be applied to games, and thus to expand the aesthetic notion of realism to accommodate the unique affective qualities intrinsic to gameplay. In order to do that, Galloway writes, gaming has to expand beyond the idea of realism as “mere realistic representation” that we often take it to mean. It’s not enough to have extremely detailed graphics and/or high attention to detail if the characters and events one portrays don’t mirror any recognizable facet of the audience’s experience — for Galloway, a truly realist game is one that “reflect[s] critically on the minutia of everyday life, replete as it is with struggle, personal drama, and injustice.”

Now, in 2004, Galloway had to stretch to find extant examples of this in the commercial gaming landscape. Do any of you remember Rockstar Games’ State of Emergency? Can’t say I do. Thing is, gaming has evolved dramatically in the decades since the publication of this paper. The vastly larger audience, the accessibility of design software, the relative ease of distribution, and many other factors besides contribute to ever greater strides in the aesthetic horizons of game design. There’s also been a considerable amount of research in response, including no shortage of work critically reevaluating Galloway’s seminal work. We’ll talk about some of it this week as we discuss the still-emerging but very much established character of realist game design. Later on, I’ll ask you for any examples you might have in mind. Let’s begin with a singleplayer WWII campaign that nobody seems to remember these days.

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad

Tripwire Interactive’s suite of first-person war shooters were big throughout the 2010s, and their squad-based gunplay was just about the biggest thing going in multiplayer shooters until Fortnite and Escape from Tarkov came around to burn all our crops and raze all our dwellings. Though the studio is most remembered for its tactical multiplayer offerings, it’s often forgotten that 2011’s Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad had a mission-based singleplayer campaign. That’s probably because it was removed from the game altogether in later updates and is now available only to nerds like me who bought the thing ages ago.1 It’s worth talking about nonetheless, because it might be the first WWII shooter to earnestly portray the subjectivity of its participants in the heat of the action, without leaning on cutscenes or other cinematic flourishes.

RO2’s most fascinating innovation in this regard is its disturbingly grounded portrayal of the acute psychological stress endured by the soldiers you control. Men will scream in terror as bullets crack past their ears, or loudly exclaim that they don’t want to die. Many of the voice performances sound conspicuously youthful. It gets especially distressing when a Bolshevik nails you in the gut and your doughy, eighteen-year-old avatar begins whimpering for his mother. It’s quite discomforting, and it works pretty well.

Galloway’s paper devotes an entire section to the question of whether military games are in any meaningful sense realist, which ultimately concludes against the proposition on the basis that war shooters of the era (e.g., SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs, Delta Force, and America’s Army) were designed around the supposed thrill of participating in armed conflict rather than around any encouragement of critical reflection in their audiences. Fair enough — gamers in the early 2000s were easily sold on the fantasy of heroic military achievement, but generally preferred not to openly question the nobility of sending their countrymen to die overseas for at-best nebulous reasons. However, Galloway does make an exception for military games whose events directly correspond with the lived experiences of their players. One example he cites is a game released by no less than the Central Internet Bureau of Hezbollah2, speculating that its target audience might reasonably identify with its portrayals in a deeply personal manner. This ultimately informs Galloway’s conclusion that realist games require some direct congruence between the political reality portrayed in the game and that lived by the gamer, which he calls the “congruence requirement.”

I think there’s something to Galloway’s congruence requirement, but RO2 may just demonstrate that there’s more to realist game design than that.

“[T]actics emphasizing player-character subjectivity… convey the philosophical and ideological tenants of neorealism and broader social realism,” argues Maxim Tvorun-Dunn in Social Realism in Red Orchestra 2, a 2022 paper that seeks to critically reevaluate Galloway’s work. Those “philosophical and ideological tenants,” steeped as they were in the growing social consciousness that grew from the gruesome aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and the first World War, are a natural fit for the orgy of ideological violence that characterized World War II. Tvorun-Dunn suggests that social realism in games is, as in neorealist cinema, dependent on “convergence between a game’s functional and visual rhetoric” and need not possess the direct congruence between portrayed reality and player reality for which Galloway argued.

That’s certainly convenient for RO2, since you don’t run into many people these days whose lived realities are affectively congruent with the defense of Stalingrad. By my estimation, it’s probably more accurate to call it a game with a realist edge rather than a social-realist game outright, since it broadly lacks the critical teeth that Galloway and others have identified as instrumental to the social-realist aesthetic. This is a common pattern among games about war, even those that make an effort to humanize their participants or otherwise draw attention to the terrible realities of armed conflict — it’s difficult to feel somber and reflective while you’re having a rollicking good time shooting Nazis in their bellies. Nevertheless, it at least evinces the possibility of social-realist game design that doesn’t lean on the directly familiar. With that in mind, let me give you what I consider an even stronger example.

This War of Mine (2014)

After Minecraft changed the mainstream gaming landscape by selling more copies than the Bible, the early-mid 2010s were absolutely swamped with survival-crafting games. Most of them followed a familiar template, dropping players into resource-rich wilderness environs to gather supplies and fight off a derivative cast of fantasy enemies. It was getting pretty old by the middle of the decade, so 11 bit studios’ This War of Mine was a refreshing change of pace: instead of theming the survival experience around man’s struggle against nature, it adopted a soberingly realist take on man’s struggle against man, dropping players into a bombed-out urban hellscape in the middle of an active conflict zone. There are no trees to chop down for firewood and no wild pigs to hunt for food — most usable supplies are either scavenged from the rapidly dwindling pre-conflict stockpiles, or already possessed by other noncombatants who’d really prefer that you not doom them to a slow, miserable death by seizing them.

If it felt like a stretch to say that the designers of a 2011 WWII shooter had realist intentions, then you’ll be relieved by the explicitness with which TWoM’s Warsaw-based developers have enumerated their primary influences. The game’s linguistic and visual aesthetics are deliberately reminiscent of the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, and it’s of course unignorable that the game’s release in November 2014 took place against a backdrop of the conflicts in Syria and Gaza. The throughline uniting these influences is, naturally, the urban conflicts that displaced and slew countless civilians. A common refrain in interviews was that the developers wanted players to believe the kind of violent chaos they portrayed could take place anywhere, including wherever you live, and the game does a frighteningly good job at sustaining that premise.

Where Red Orchestra 2 is a game evoking the oft-forgotten humanity of frontline warfighters, TWoM is a game entirely focused upon the even less-remembered humanity of the non-combatants who shoulder the lion’s share of suffering and misery in societies ravaged by war. Gameplay consists of managing a dilapidated house that’s become home to a small group of survivors left deprived and terrified by the collateral damage of a war that rages off-screen. Your objective is simply to hold out until a ceasefire is declared. To do so, you send your survivors on scavenging expeditions where you’ll collect supplies, bargain with other survivors, and occasionally murder them in desperation as long as it’ll buy you one more day. One sequence that stands out in my memory to is when, with no clear alternative at my disposal, I stole from an elderly survivor who watched me the entire time but was powerless to stop me. Some ten million sales and a closetful of awards are proof enough that these grisly design choices resonated with the public.

I’m prepared to say that This War of Mine succeeds as a work of social realism by continuously reinforcing the depravity of its subject matter through primary gameplay. As long as one approaches it with serious intent, it’s bound to succeed at the developers’ goal of forcing the player to reckon with the pervasive familiarity and remorselessness of modern conflict. And, given the sheer volume of wartime imagery to which many of us are now exposed in the social media age, one might even credibly argue that TWoM at least partially satisfies Galloway’s congruence requirement.

But enough about the overt and unignorable terror of war. Let’s go back to where we began and talk about realist portrayals of the much more subtle violence that so often escapes our cultural purview.

My Summer Car (2025)

The game begins, and you peer through a narrow, almond-shaped aperture that allows a sliver of light into the inky blackness surrounding you. As the honorary march of the Finnish Defense Forces plays at great volume, the aperture gradually expands and pushes the darkness further away. It widens to its zenith, and you start to make out the interior side of a car door against which a woman’s pump-clad feet are firmly pressed. A baby’s cries fade in over the music, and the camera zooms out to reveal you, freshly born, still covered in amniotic goo. The camera zooms out further to reveal what looks like a Datsun 100A as it speeds along a highway. “SUOMI FINLAND 1976,” reports a title card. The time and place of your birth.

We fade in on a bedroom, humbly appointed for one. Nineteen years have passed, and you find yourself alone in your family’s home in the municipality of Alivieska. A handwritten note on the refrigerator reveals that your parents have gone off to Tenerife, leaving you alone to fend for yourself. “Fix your dad’s old car… it has been filling up the garage for years now,” it reads in part. “Your dad says if you can repair the car and make it pass the inspection, you can keep it.” And, indeed, the garage contains the scattered remnants of the Datsun in which you were born, half-buried in the sprawl of its several dozen parts. Your goal: stay alive long enough to piece together a whole fucking passenger sedan from scratch.

As a game, My Summer Car is alternately relaxing, lethargic, and exhilarating. As a work of realist design, it’s like the modal average of American Gothic and every single one of its parodies. Fundamentally, it’s a game about assembling a project car, given game-mechanical depth by the addition of survival mechanics. It’s made accessible by a superficially tongue-in-cheek presentation that begins to dissolve upon close examination. MSC also centralizes survival mechanics to drive the game’s pacing — the contextual adjustment that makes it so fascinating to talk about is that your player character, a teenage underachiever, survives not by trapping game or tilling soil but by performing blue-collar labor in order to afford sausages and beer. Building the titular car, then, ends up as a tertiary part of the game loop as you spend most of your time chopping firewood, picking fruit, or pumping liquid sewage from your neighbors’ septic tanks so that you don’t run out of money.

So, here’s where it gets real: My Summer Car is set in a fictional municipality in Finland during the aftermath of the country’s very real financial crisis in the early nineties. A combination of economic mismanagement and unsustainable equity bubbles incited massive devaluation and a precipitous collapse in consumer spending power, alongside wide and persistent unemployment. The game, set in 1995, reflects a society still reeling from the catastrophe — almost everyone you encounter in My Summer Car is either unemployed, dependent on alcohol, profoundly nihilistic, or some combination of the three.

This is another game that does a remarkably good job of emphasizing the player character’s subjectivity, like we discussed above in Red Orchestra 2. It features a standard suite of survival-game needs to fulfill — hunger, thirst, fatigue, the usual stuff — but also emphasizes the management of stress. You can keep it down by, in prototypically Finnish fashion, relaxing in the steam of a sauna, but it’s considerably more efficient to simply develop a nicotine habit. Your stress level passively grows while you’re awake even while you’re not engaged in stressful activity, and one can’t help but wonder about the motivations behind this design choice. A reflection of the player character’s angst at a life without much to look forward to? I’d have called that a stretch until I noticed that the sequel, fittingly titled My Winter Car and released into early access just days ago, now includes a “PROBLEM” meter that you satisfy by regularly consuming alcoholic beverages. Also, one can’t help but notice that the protagonist’s hands are now covered with prison tattoos.

What brings us over the edge from goofy work-sim into the realm of social realism is that MSC isn’t just about the central conceit of its title, i.e., fixing a car. It’s about inhabiting the reality of a person for whom the promises of society were left unfulfilled, and about finding some kind of satisfaction and peace in what’s left over. Crucially, it takes full advantage of its medium in service of facilitating that experience: you don’t just observe a sequence of pastiches that evoke the atmosphere the game is going for, but you actively plan and execute their every moment, even if that execution boils down to doing nothing for several minutes while you wait for the bus. The banality of the primary gameplay makes the occassional triumph all the more satisfying, not unlike the small victories that sustain so many of us through the seemingly unbreakable cycle of ennui that characterizes the gradual degeneration of our collective spirit.

Happy New Year, by the way!

“[R]ealism in gaming is a process of revisiting the material substrate of the medium and establishing correspondences with specific activities existent in the social reality of the gamer,” Galloway argues in his conclusion. This is part of what makes game design so special as a medium: it’s the only form in which an audience member personally acts upon the artist’s representations to evolve them. To Galloway, the correspondence between that action and the reality of the player is the foundation of the form’s realist aesthetic. Whether or not this is materially true, it’s been a fascinating subject to consider, and it’s apparent that the most creatively intrepid sectors of the gaming industry have met the challenge since this paper was published in 2004. The artistic potential of game design is practically limitless by nature of the medium’s versatility and intermodality, and ambitious game designers actualize more of that potential every year. 2025, for all its foibles, was an absolute banger of a year for innovation in game design. Here’s hoping that 2026 keeps the flame alight.

Alright, now I want to hear from you. What games do you remember as most absorbingly reflective of your own lived experiences? Or, do you have any games in your library that felt eerily evocative of social realities around you? Tell me about ‘em downstairs! Next week, we’re doing a retrospective review of everybody’s favorite Victorian-flavored techno-fantasy CRPG — hope I see ya there.

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This was a pretty strange year for me on the whole. I’ll spare you the gritty and largely uninteresting details, but suffice it to say that my professional trajectory has been all over the place since my employment status abruptly changed back in April. My bills are paid and my stomach is full, though, so I’m still comfortably in the upper percentiles of human fortune and can’t complain much. I have quite a lot of free time lately, and most of it has gone towards professional development in an effort to resist the antediluvian chaos that defines the software industry for which I’m currently trained. The plan is to finesse some stable employment in the first quarter of 2026, and I’m pretty sure it’ll work out. Once it does, I expect I’ll develop a much more reliable balance in my writing schedule, and I reckon my work here will improve as a result. Appreciate your patience in the meantime!

I’m largely happy with The Spieler’s output in 2025. Some posts could’ve used another pass for clarity, others were undernourished by my busy schedule, and a couple make me cringe to look back upon, but I suppose that’s all par for the course in a solo1 operation of this nature. This week, as the year winds down and our cholesterol levels continue their descent down to baseline, we’ll have a look back at some of our best from 2025 alongside some contemporaneous reflections. So, then, without further niceties:

THE SPIELER’S TOP FIVE OF TWENTY-FIVE

I’m ranking these in order of my own esteem rather than outright popularity, although there’s considerable crossover between those criteria. Attempting to put them in ascending order felt too arbitrary for comfort, so here they are in no particular sequence:

The Rise and Fall of Literature-Based Video Gaming

This was an ambitious, data-driven project that boasts the most likes and comments in The Spieler’s entire catalogue thus far. Gratifyingly, it brought a lot of new eyes to the publication, and I’m mostly quite pleased with how it turned out. With the benefit of hindsight, though, I wish I’d given myself another week to think it through — the comment section made abundantly clear that there were a number of conspicuous blindspots in my dataset, and my analysis left behind some relevant context as a result.

Principally at issue was that my data from MobyGames, while broad and robust, included a lot of titles that were simply beyond the scope of the analysis (mostly shovelware) and didn’t include some categories that probably were in-scope (all of Japan, for example). Nevertheless, I still think the trend I observed reflects observable reality, and I’m pretty proud of this one. Still laughing at that damn scarecrow, too.

Gaming Needs More Historical Fiction

Our central remit here is to celebrate the artistic accomplishments and expand the cultural horizons of game design, and I think this one resonated the most in those regards. I stand by my thesis that video games and historical narratives are a match made in heaven, and I think that’s one of the more straightforwardly promising avenues for expanding the cultural mainstream’s respect of the medium.

Relatedly, Kingdom Come: Deliverance was my biggest surprise of 2025 for how sharply my opinion pivoted — I started the year thinking it was one of the worst RPGs I’d ever played, but ended it wishing I had the hardware to play the sequel (incidentally, my full review deserves an honorable mention for this list). I can’t think of another game that does historical fiction better, and it’s a terrific example of how versatile game design can be as a framework for storytelling. That versatility will inform at least one newsletter I have planned for January, by the way.

Morrowind Modding is an Active Rebellion

I think this one had some of my stronger analysis of gaming’s cultural evolution, and it was damn fun to write. Playing a couple-dozen hours of Tamriel Rebuilt’s Grasping Fortune expansion was possibly the most fun I had with a video game this year, and I’ve been looking for a good excuse to return to Morrowind ever since. TR and the Morrowind modding community at large really do represent some of the best and most interesting work going on beyond the professional industry these days. I’m following its progress with great interest, and I encourage the same of all you CRPG fans.

The next major expansion, called Poison Song, is widely expected sometime in the first half of the new year. It’ll add another swath of mainland Morrowind to the already vast tracts implemented by TR thus far, and bring us tantalizingly close to the much-anticipated megacity of Almalexia. It’ll also rework a substantial amount of mod content from the early 2000s that feels noticeably behind the extraordinary standards of Grasping Fortune and such like. My apologies to the large majority of you who don’t know what the hell I’m on about, but you’ll know more soon enough.

The Game Where You Rebuild Politics from Absolute Scratch

Our most-read and second-most-liked post, this was in effect a review-come-celebration of an obscure strategy game that I love more than any other. Shadow Empire has had an expansion about internal politics called Republica in the works for awhile now, so I’m looking forward to revisiting it soon. No release date as of writing, but I anticipate it sometime in the first half of the new year.

Now, if I had to guess, I’d hazard that the title did a lot of the heavy lifting where this review’s outsized readership was concerned (and, with no false modesty, I whipped up a pretty dope-ass thumbnail). Rebuilding politics is a tantalizing premise for a lot of us these days, and that’s certainly a large part of why I find Shadow Empire’s fiction and framing so compelling. I have some other candidates in mind for discussing the role of gaming in social/political catharsis that don’t involve wading into the stinking mire of contemporary political dysfunction, so stay tuned for more if you got a kick out of this review.

The Philosophy of the World’s Most Hideous Game

If you caught me at a jog, I’d call Cruelty Squad my favorite game of all time about as often as not. It’s as much a work of art as any game ever published, and I think I came relatively close to doing it justice in this piece and in its sequel published the week after. There’s an argument to be made that Cruelty Squad is better left to stand on its own and that it doesn’t need hobbyists like me trying to interpret it through Marcel Duchamp and Lev Shestov, but I’d retort that “nothing matters and it’s my God-given right to compare a video game to a fucking urinal and mean it as a compliment” is an equally valid argument.

I also got a lot of mileage out of Consumer Softproducts’ 2025 Early Access release of Psycho Patrol R, which will probably see a full release this year and provide a much-anticipated excuse to further stan its developer. That one’s my pick for Most Anticipated of 2026, by the way. Ville Kallio’s been making some terrific progress on his simulation of the so-called “machine zone” that characterizes the experience of slot-machine dependence, and I’m entirely prepared to abandon myself to it when the time comes. Excited to see you there.

Thanks again for a great year, folks! I’m looking forward to getting back in the groove now that the tricky latter half of December is effectively behind us. I have every reason to believe that 2026 will be a great year for the publication and for the broader ecosystem of games-writing, both of which built palpable momentum since I posted that review of the goofy Vin Diesel game back in February. I’m glad to be a part of it and to have you all along. Best wishes to you and yours for the new year, and I’ll see you next week with a newsletter featuring more effusive praise of abstract game design from Finland.

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Season’s greetings, friends! Happy Hanukkah to those who celebrated and Happy Holidays to all who still have something to be happy about in this beleaguered world of shadows. It’s been a busy December over here and I need some time to recover, so I figured we’d have ourselves a light-hearted and seasonally thematic post this week that won’t require too much mental bandwidth. We’ll be back to our regular schedule of reflection on video gaming’s artistic horizons come the new year, but today calls for something lighter.

My first idea for this edition was to celebrate some of video gaming’s best Hanukkah-related titles. Then I remembered that there are next to zero of them, save a couple dozen dreidel simulators. Meanwhile, one can’t help but notice that today is Christmas, a holiday from which game designers have drawn inspiration for nearly as long as the medium has existed. For my purposes, the only wrinkle is that I’m not particularly well equipped to reflect on Christmas in any sort of high-minded or spiritual capacity. But that shouldn’t be a problem, since video gaming has always favored an egalitarian approach to representing the yuletide. We’re absolutely spoiled for Christmas games that anybody can enjoy as long as an impious display of violence from time to time isn’t a deal-breaker.

So, let’s keep it low-key this week while I tell you about a few of my standout Christmas-game memories. Do feel free to leave a comment if you’ve got any of your own you’d like to share.

Hitman: Blood Money — Mission 7 (You Better Watch Out…)

“Hello, Forty-Seven. Your next assignment’s in the Rocky Mountains. Senator Bingham is being blackmailed by pornography tycoon Lorne de Havilland, who has a compromising video of the senator’s son… during a creative sexual tryst.”

The Hitman franchise’s Agent 47, memorably portrayed by David Bateson in the games and unmemorably portrayed by both Timothy Olyphant and Rupert Friend in the 2007 and 2015 films that I bet you forgot about, is arguably the least emotive character in the history of popular media. The guy makes Spock look like Truman Capote, and that’s why it’s so goddamn hilarious to dress him up in facetious disguises in every Hitman game that facilitates it.

2006’s Blood Money is a nostalgic favorite of mine for many reasons, but perhaps chief among them is how confidently it straddles the line between heart-pounding, stealth-action tension and the borderline campy ethos of its presentation. In the setup for its seventh mission, you’re to intercept a videotape of salacious kompromat, thus preventing its release from harming the reelection campaign of an agency client. You’ll also liquidate the responsible parties while you’re at it. Toward those ends, you infiltrate a notorious pornographer’s ritzy Christmas party in a secret Rocky Mountain fortress and gut him right in front of his small dog.

Now, this game was written and produced during a bygone period of American history in which public revelations of sexual indiscretion would hurt rather than enhance one’s political prospects, so we can overlook the quaintness of the premise. What can’t be overlooked is that the party’s organizers hired a guy to walk around dressed as Santa Claus, whose thoroughly drunk ass you can ambush in order to seize his outfit for yourself. It’s actually a fairly reliable strategy: the Santa disguise will keep the guards off your back in all but the most secure locations in the level, despite the fact that Agent 47’s slim, hairless figure is hardly evocative of the character. This is probably the only game ever made in which you can garrote a man while dressed as Santa, so I’m happy to take it in the playful spirit in which it’s intended.

Saints Row IV: How the Saints Save Christmas

“Fuck Santa.”

First, a word on the Saints Row series. The second game, Saints Row 2, is one of my favorite video games of all time. I love it for its absurd, balls-to-the-wall action, of course — no game has better executed the premise of joyriding a septic truck through an upscale neighborhood and slathering everything with liquefied human waste. But what really made it special for me was the contrast between its gonzo action and the relative groundedness of its writing and characters, who had relatable motivations and humanlike emotions despite the generally wacky tenor of the game’s writing. The sequels almost entirely did away with that in favor of quadrupling down on the wackiness, and I always found it more off-putting than amusing. Then there was the 2022 reboot. The less said about that one, the better.

But if I had to pick a personal highlight from among the series’ post-SR2 offerings, it’d have to be How the Saints Save Christmas, a DLC mission pack for Saints Row IV released in December of 2013. The series protagonist and player character, at first bereft of Christmas spirit on account of their being a criminal kingpin and mass-murderer, is visited by a proverbial ghost of Christmas Future who tells of Santa’s imprisonment in a simulation and warns of a gruesome dystopia to come if he’s not rescued.

The writing isn’t exactly profound, but it’s occasionally pretty funny and it sets up some delightful action setpieces. Several missions’ worth of rampant property destruction and relentless slaughter eventually culminate in Santa’s liberation, and the protagonist at last discovers a source of Christmas joy beyond murder and consumerism. I think. This experience doesn’t really lend itself to a concrete thematic analysis. Anyway, bonus points for that one sequence where you light the world’s largest menorah while klezmer music plays in the background. Not the most culturally uplifting representation, but I’ll take what I can get.

Die Hard (NES)

Nah, just messing with you.

Viscera Cleanup Detail: Santa’s Rampage

“The tragic events that unfolded at this workshop must in no way deter you from performing your duties in a manner befitting the company’s reputation. Your work here entails cleaning up the horrific aftermath of Mr Claus’ unfortunate breakdown.”

The digital marketplaces are absolutely sodden with work simulators these days. We’ve got everything from long-haul trucking simulators to farming simulators to house-flipping simulators, and those are just the ones that came out before 2020. After the pandemic cloistered working professionals in their homes and kicked off the work-simulator craze, there came to be so many that designers had to differentiate their products by developing completely ironic work sims and work sims featuring metatextual critiques of neoliberal capitalism. One can’t help but wonder whether we began to miss the forest for the trees somewhat.

One work simulator that certainly did not — and indeed, one of the earliest to find a significant mainstream following — was Viscera Cleanup Detail, an instantly iconic concept in which you play not as the indefatigable protagonist of a sci-fi boomer-shooter but as the custodial professional who has to clean up the mess that the actual plot left behind. Gameplay consists primarily of mopping up blood and carrying solid detritus (mostly amputated body parts) to an incinerator for disposal.

Sound a little dark? There’s more where that came from. Enter Viscera Cleanup Detail: Santa’s Rampage, a standalone expansion from December of 2013. The elves have unionized, Santa is saddled with debt, Krampus needs him to post bail, and jolly old Saint Nick turns to drink before going postal with a shotgun and enough molotov cocktails to embarrass the Red Army Faction. The expansion therefore takes place in Santa’s ruined workshop, which is remarkably cozy despite the carnage. Of all the games on this list, this one might be the easiest to recommend — you can finish it in a couple of hours, and it’ll only cost you $2.50 at full price. Easily worth it if you need to blow off some steam after spending time with your family over the holidays.

Alright, folks, that’ll do for this week. I reckon we’ll spend next week looking back on our most noteworthy output from 2025, and I’ll tell you more about my plans for the beginning of next year. In the meantime, I’m going to go recharge my batteries. Do feel free to chime in with your own memories of seasonally appropriate gaming, and happy holidays to you and yours <3

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Last week, we had ourselves a little retrospective on the classic Fallout games from the late nineties, focusing on the uncommon qualities that made them stand out amid a sea of repetitive, underwritten crap in their era and that keep them elevated atop a pedestal of critical admiration to this day. I repeatedly teased an exploration of the classic games’ long-lasting and still-active modding community and, after a week spent wrangling third-party installers and sifting through obscure forum posts, that’s precisely what I have in store for you this week. We’re all about elevating the prestige and esteem of games-as-art here at The Spieler, so what better than to spend a week focusing on a diverse variety of fan games that exist for virtually no purpose other than the desire to create artwork using Interplay’s Fallout 2 as both canvas and brush?

Aside from the choice of engine, the central characteristic that unites all of these games is that they’re noncommercial by legal necessity. Interplay never licensed the Fallout 2 engine for commercial use by independent creatives, of course. And you won’t be shocked to learn that, following their acquisition of the intellectual property rights in 2007, Bethesda Game Studios (a division of Bethesda Softworks LLC and proud subsidiary of ZeniMax Media Inc., a proud subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation) never did so either. Consequently, the hard-working folks who pour thousands of hours into developing these ambitious fan games have never grossed a dollar from their efforts and never will.1 Then again, PC games modding has never been known as a lucrative endeavor at the best of times. At least these passionate creators are showered with adulation by their legions of adoring fans and so develop large bases of industry clout that they can leverage into greater opportunities, right?

Wrong! I hate to break it to you, but the classic Fallout games’ extant playerbase is vanishingly small these days, and the subset that still makes and plays mods for them is so microscopic that it scarcely reflects visible light. These are profoundly obscure, utterly niche products that only a very narrow segment of gamers are culturally equipped to enjoy, and so their creation is first and foremost a labor of love. Despite the wholesale lack of material compensation, these things are still getting made even twenty-seven-plus years after the industrial development of classic Fallout came to an end. This all evinces the unquenchable flame of creative passion that motivates the folks making these games, and so it should come as no surprise that some of gaming culture’s most brilliant works of independent craftsmanship are to be found among the handful of finished, fully released examples below.

These days, what with machinic facsimiles of artwork dominating whatever’s left of our collective discourse, it feels more important than usual to show love to creative work that’s motivated above all by the satisfaction intrinsic to producing art. So, let’s do exactly that and see just what the proud children of Fallout have wrought from the base metal of late-nineties computer roleplaying. In the interest of time and concision, most of our focus for this week will be on the handful of artisan RPGs that, by my reckoning, deserve direct comparison with the great classics of the medium. But, since those represent only a fraction of the worthwhile output produced by the Fallout 2 modding community, let’s start by briefly recognizing some less fully realized concepts and incomplete works-in-progress.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

I don’t necessarily recommend that you take the time to install and play any of these unless you’re a true devotee of the form, but I hope you’ll at least get some food for thought out of reading about them. Consider the below an amuse-bouche in advance of the more thorough examinations that follow. Presented in no particular order.

13V (2011)

ModDB

A genre-bending total conversion of mysterious origin, 13V is a parodic adventure game that just happens to use classic Fallout’s engine and setting. I’m leading with this one because it illustrates the creative flexibility that modding can enable — 13V bears only incidental resemblance to the game upon which it’s built, playing more like a point-and-click adventure game from the early nineties than an RPG. It follows a linear story about proactively seeking replacement parts for the eponymous Vault-Tec supercomputer that manages the protagonist’s crappy Vault, which I take to be a tongue-in-cheek parody of Fallout 1. The gameplay itself is structured around inventory puzzles and sardonic dialogue that rarely offers any freedom of choice, but it’s occasionally pretty funny and showcases some asset work that punches well above its weight. The game’s real standout feature is its creative mapping: rather than spriting new assets from scratch, 13V’s creator cleverly merged existing sprites from the old games to evoke different objects, and this is done with such attention to detail that only a long-time veteran of the early series would recognize it. The game is available in English, and I’d say it’s worthwhile if you’re at all intrigued by the premise of a comedy adventure on the Fallout 2 engine.

Oblivion Lost (c. 2009)

ModDB

Gosh, this is a strange one. Developed over about a year-and-a-half by a pair of Russian fans, Oblivion Lost is an absurdist remix of the base game whose central premise is the transposition of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl into the world of Fallout. It begins like FO2, but then your character is waylaid by SoC protagonist Strelok on the way out of the starting village. He insists you drink with him and, after a two-week bender, you come to your senses having somehow learned to speak Russian. Mutants, anomalies, and other mainstay features of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series are integrated into the game loop in a manner that might be genuinely stimulating for a very specific kind of Fallout fan, but this one is all but completely impenetrable to decadent Westerners even if you can get past the thick, sludgy layers of buginess and jank. It’s the sort of thing you’re probably better off experiencing as a video on YouTube rather than playing for yourself, but Oblivion Lost has a reputation among Fallout modders for a reason and it’s definitely worth a few yuks at the least.

Fallout Yesterday (unreleased)

Development Build

Arguably the most notorious modding project for Fallout 2, Yesterday is an audacious attempt to recreate Fallout 3 on the classic engine. Not Bethesda’s actually existing Fallout 3, mind you — this is a recreation of the sequel that Black Isle Studios was slated to develop (codenamed Van Buren), which was cancelled several years before Todd Howard et. al got their hands on the franchise. Crucially, Black Isle’s original design document for Van Buren survives to this day, which is how the Yesterday team was able to credibly approach so ambitious a project. It’s an absolutely huge undertaking and is reportedly years away from completion even after ages in development, but a playable version does exist on Nexus and it’s possible to finish the main story under very specific circumstances despite much of the game remaining wholly unimplemented. It was last updated this past January and, while it has a lot of problems, the amount of effort on display in the mapping, spritework, and scripting is astonishing. Of all the games on this list of Honorable Mentions, this is the one that comes closest to a recommendation. Not for general audiences, of course, but Fallout obsessives will almost definitely find something to love.

THE CRAFT RPGs

We come now to the modding projects that can stand on their own not only as complete RPG experiences built atop Fallout technology, but as worthy successors to the legacy of the classics in their own rights. Veterans of the classic games should enjoy all four of these. Note that they all assume their players have some familiarity and comfort with the classic engine, so interested parties who never got around to the Interplay games would do well to get their feet wet with Fallout 2 at the least. Presented in release order.

Fallout 1.5: Resurrection (2013)

English Version

Created by Václav Panoš, Marek Štípek, Milan Ratičák, and Marián Lóži

Given that barely a year passed in between the releases of Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, it’s unsurprising that fans started getting antsy for a third game as the new millennium dawned. Around 2003, a group of Czech Fallout fans decided they’d waited long enough and resolved to take matters into their own hands. The resulting decade-long development effort eventually culminated in the release of Resurrection, which became the first completed Fallout game of the 2000s to credibly recreate the feeling of the classic games. Its name drips with symbolism: at the time of its release, the most recent game to unmistakably evoke Fallout’s presentation and gameplay was probably Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura all the way back in 2001 — it was a resurrection of the Fallout aura that had until then lied dormant. And, not for nothing, it begins with the left-for-dead protagonist rising up and emerging from a cave. Go figure.

Resurrection begins in 2170, between the events of Fallouts 1 and 2. The player-created protagonist, thoroughly amnestic, awakens with a strange talisman in their possession and gradually pieces together their involvement with a mysterious cult whose machinations threaten the emerging civilization in the wastes of New Mexico. It features a small but entirely new map, a variety of scratch-made 3D cutscenes, and an extraordinarily bleak tone that sets up a wasteland more foreboding and depressing than any Fallout setting that came before.

In its capacity as a self-described successor to the classic gameplay formula, Resurrection delivers in spades. Of the three games on this list that take place within the Fallout universe, it feels the most thematically coherent and arguably features the most robust and fully realized original story of the bunch. It’s also extremely successful at replicating the classic games’ practice of empowering players to drive the narrative according to their own whims, and its two possible endings — while almost agonizingly melancholic regardless of the player’s choices — are powerful denouements whose progression throughout the game mirrors the thematic weight of Interplay’s writing, if not its penchant for well-placed moments of levity.

Fallout Nevada (2015)

English Version

Created by Aleksandr Poshelyuzhin and Nevada Band

Created principally by a single obsessive from Siberia, Fallout Nevada is among the largest and most ambitious fan games yet completed on the FO2 engine, at least where its design goals are concerned. A plot prequel to Fallout 1, it takes place a little over a decade after the civilization-destroying Great War and centers around the former residents of Vault 8 in the years immediately following their emergence from underground. The player, also a former Vault-dweller, investigates a dark conspiracy against the burgeoning Vault City that clarifies much about the figure who would eventually become Fallout 1’s central antagonist.

At its core, this is a complete adventure setting with reams of original content that, aside from a lack of voice-acting and copy-editing, feels like a Fallout game from the nineties that never hit the market. It’s not perfect — popular criticism of Nevada tends to focus on its immense scope that occasionally overleverages the project’s limited development resources. There are loads of gorgeous new sprites, hub cities with hours of engaging sidequesting each, and a great soundtrack with some high-quality original music. There are also a number of characters copied right from other gaming franchises and a handful of tiny backwaters with at-best marginal roles in the game’s fiction, so the conflict between aspirations and reality is readily apparent. Indeed, a first-party design document for a redux version produced as a thought experiment went as far as cutting around half of the game world in order to better focus the experience.

But, scope-creep aside, Nevada was a broadly successful effort and a tremendously encouraging debut outing for Poshelyuzhin and Nevada Band. It reflects an intense love for the classic Fallout games that inspired it, and that admiration comes across throughout practically every sequence, even those visibly affected by compromise. It presaged more excellent work to come in Fallout Sonora, which we’ll talk about shortly. First, though, something completely different.

Olympus 2077 (2015)

English Version

Created by Artem Samoylov, Aleksandr Berezin, and Sergey Bokarev

Olympus 2077 is unique among completed fan games on the FO2 engine in that its setting takes place beyond the Fallout universe. In service of that, it features a remarkably well-realized dieselpunk aesthetic with loads of original spritework that feels distinct from but utterly authentic to the Fallout aesthetic that unavoidably inspired it. I think this one is my pick for best-looking fan game on the classic engine, and its alt-universe take on Power Armor is instantly iconic.

The player character begins the game as a lowly slave in the bowels of the titular Olympus tower, a colossal monolith of industry and repression in the ruins of what was once Silicon Valley. The first part of the game is a recollection of the protagonist’s childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood in the tower’s basement (a bit like Fallout 3, but not half as cloying) that ends with a bizarre misunderstanding that forces them from the bleak but relatively stable hole in which they’ve spent their entire life. After climbing out and witnessing the Sun for the first time, the player explores the wasteland of Northern California in search of aid for their people and a resolution for their suffering. Horrifyingly, you soon learn that your people’s short and repressive lives in bondage are a target of envy for many factions of free folk who have it even worse. Post-nuclear society is in a rigid state of arrested development, and nothing short of a change in management at the peak of Olympus stands any chance of moving it forward.

Olympus 2077 is about as ambitious a display of unadulterated passion as fan games get. The amount of custom assets on display, from spritework to animations to mapping to scripting, is nothing short of staggering for a noncommercial project with a lifetime player-count that might not exceed three figures. It’s a Fallout game beyond the Fallout universe, and it’s a contribution of profound importance to the series’ legacy for having pushed the classic engine’s limits as a storytelling engine. Despite being a mod at its core, it looks and feels like an entirely original product that might as well have come out right alongside Fallouts 1 and 2.

Fallout Sonora (2020) and Dayglow (2023)

English Version

Created by Aleksandr Poshelyuzhin and Nevada Band

The second major release from Poshelyuzhin and his team, Fallout Sonora takes place across a vast swath of the southwestern U.S. and part of northern Mexico. The latter in particular was all but completely unexplored by the official Fallout games, and that’s what inspires Sonora’s fascinating survey of how America’s neighbor to the south was affected by the hardcore jingoism and subsequent nuclear annihilation that form the aesthetic and thematic foundations of the series’ fictional universe. It wears this inspiration on its sleeve, even as soon as character creation — adventurous players can take a trait to gain basic literacy in Spanish, and this adds a breadth of interactivity to the world. Even without it, though, you’ll still get to experience a bevy of artwork that colors the Mexican Fallout experience, from a variety of new environmental tilesets to a kickass original soundtrack by Russian musician Nobody’s Nail Machine.

Sonora’s central premise is immediately evocative of Fallout 2 — the player character is a villager in a humble, technologically unsophisticated society on the margins of post-nuclear civilization, and the action kicks off when the village is raided by a mysterious force that absconds with most of your friends and relations. The latter half of the game then draws comparisons to New Vegas as your sprawling investigation gradually reveals a multi-faction power struggle, giving way to a political conflict in which you play a decisive role. There are a ton of named characters to meet, persuade, and liquidate, many of whom have absolutely incredible Talking Heads that match and sometimes even exceed the already sky-high standard set by Interplay in the nineties.

Sonora further distinguishes itself among its craft RPG fellows in that it’s the first Fallout fan game to have its own expansion, called Dayglow, which adds the eponymous ruins from franchise lore as an off-map location populated with unique items, characters, and quests. Dayglow is integrated into the main Sonora campaign in a manner that will feel instantly familiar to anyone who’s played the Honest Hearts expansion for Fallout: New Vegas. If you play it as part of a complete Sonora campaign, you’ll be looking at a playthrough of comparable length to Fallout 2. Of all the games on this list, I think Sonora is the one that fans of the Interplay games will most effortlessly enjoy.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

In this degenerate era of monocultural stagnation, AI-generated Call of Duty sequelization, and Dubai chocolate in the water supply, creativity for its own sake is one of the most refreshing things in the entire world. Video game modding has always been a hotbed for such undertakings, but even work as wholesome as independent mod-craft has seen itself colonized by disingenuous financial and social incentives over the past decade or so. Particularly in the still-rippling wake of Fallout 4’s Anniversary Edition shitting the bed and alienating legions of fans with its half-baked approach to integrating community work into the core game, the classic Fallout modding community’s enduring strength despite its small size gives one room for hope in the sea of hypercorporatized darkness that defines so much of the modern professional industry.

One more thing I’d like to note that didn’t really fit into any of the specific writeups above: for reasons that nobody has yet convincingly elucidated, almost all of the projects we discussed today — and indeed the majority of the Fallout 2 modding community writ-large — hail from former Eastern Bloc nations. Despite said community’s relatively small size and commensurately limited output, this strikes me as too strong a correlation to write off as a coincidence. Is there some discernible, verifiable reason why gamers of the East gravitate so strongly toward these artifacts of late-nineties computer roleplaying? This is where I’d ordinarily make some flippant remark about the general bleakness of the post-Soviet condition, but I find that chaos caused by economic liberalization hits a little too close to home lately. Let me know downstairs if you have any speculation you’d like to share.

So, there’s our brief look at one of gaming’s proudest creative micro-cultures. It’s been going strong for over a decade, and work continues even as you read these words. I really do consider it no exaggeration to say that the best of this community stands alongside the paid, professional work from the similarly passionate creators who inspired it all those years ago. And to think that all of it was built atop a CRPG from 1998 that never even had official modding support! Incidentally, a comprehensive reflection of Fallout modding as a series-wide phenomenon could probably fill an entire book, so I’m sure this isn’t the last time we’ll be talking about the subject. Sometime soon, I’d love to tell you about the politically anarchist Fallout: Tactics mod whose production was directly funded by the Canadian federal government. See ya next time <3

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Tell ‘em, Ron.

In 2077, the storm of world war had come again. In two brief hours, most of the planet was reduced to cinders. And from the ashes of nuclear devastation, a new civilization would struggle to arise. A few were able to reach the relative safety of the large, underground vaults. Your family was part of that group that entered Vault 13. Imprisoned safely behind the large vault door under a mountain of stone, a generation has lived without knowledge of the outside world. Life in the vault is about to change.

Spoken by an unnamed narrator in the silken voice of a then-forty-something Ron Perlman, those words open 1997’s Fallout: A Post-Nuclear Roleplaying Game. It was a unique triumph of RPG design that terraformed the landscape of gaming history almost immediately upon impact. It all but singlehandedly revived interest in roleplaying video games after years of stagnation, and the sterling reception from consumers and critics alike laid the foundation for a worthy sequel barely a year later. Its sagacious writing and the player-driven storytelling it supported were together a salve for a genre long used to thoughtless exercises in context-free violence. It’s remarkable just how little it resembles the properties bearing the Fallout name that followed in 2008 and beyond.

I just finished up a playthrough of Fallout 1 for the first time in about a decade, and I’m happy to report that it still feels like one of the greatest RPGs of all time. Actually, it’s even better than I remembered, probably because of how refreshing it was in contrast to the Skinner boxes and grift-machines that predominate in the commercial industry of today. See, the classic Fallout games1 are often described as highly influential to the games industry that followed, but I reckon that’s only half-true. They had some extremely influential systems — e.g., its choice-and-consequence nonlinearity and the Perk system that probably inspired tabletop roleplaying’s decades-long Feat obsession — but hardly any games ever released are particularly Fallout-like in terms of style and core gameplay.2 One gets the impression that circumstances were perfectly aligned toward their creation thirty years ago, but are now functionally irreplicable.

This week, we’ll talk about what exactly makes that late-nineties Fallout aura so enduringly special. It’s a vision of RPG design as player-driven storytelling engine for which the contemporary market has barely any room, and from which modern game design still has much to learn almost three decades later. Fallouts 1 and 2 present themselves like outlines of stories whose narratives are ultimately filled in by the player through ordinary gameplay. In service of demonstrating that, I’ll sprinkle in some anecdotes from the spoiler-light first half of my most recent playthrough of Fallout 1 as we talk about what makes it so unique. Of course, there’s much more to classic Fallout than just the first game, or even the second — next week, we’ll talk about the independent, noncommercial projects that carry on their legacy better than any game you can find for sale.

CLASSIC FALLOUT AS STORYTELLING ENGINE

If there’s one thing for which I’m earnestly grateful to the Fallout TV show, it’s that its popularity caused the franchise to osmose through the popular culture such that I won’t need to thoroughly explain the setting. So, as a quick recap: there’s no more petroleum! A cartoonishly imperialist America fights a hilariously militarized China. The Reds annex Alaska, so Uncle Sam snatches Canada. Nuclear war in 2077. Some people hide away in underground vaults to emerge generations later, and the rest of the survivors organize into post-apocalyptic proto-nations. Oh, and it’s all passed through an aesthetic filter woven from 1950’s-flavored retrofuturism. Great stuff.

As the game begins, you create a character using Interplay’s in-house SPECIAL3 roleplaying system and tag a few skills in which to specialize. This being my first playthrough in ages, I select the famously safe and versatile combination of Small Guns, Lockpicking, and Speech. Exploration and diplomacy will be much easier, and I’ll become unstoppable with conventional firearms barely an hour into my playthrough. The opening of the game is one of few things that all playthroughs of Fallout 1 have in common: every character is a resident of the enigmatic Vault 13 in southern California, and each story begins with the Vault’s overseer enlisting the player to solve a delicate problem.

“The controller chip for our water purification system has given up the ghost,” explains the overseer in the voice of actor Kenneth Mars. Foreboding news, since the aquifers of California now contain quite a lot of strontium. “I think you’re the only hope we have. You need to go find us another controller chip.” Our sole lead is the known location of Vault 15, about a week’s journey to the east. Vault 13 has at most 150 days’ worth of clean water in storage, so time is of the essence.

That’s quite literally all of the direction you’re given, and it’s part of how the classic Fallout games manifest their extreme open-endedness. Only the bare essentials of the story are shared between playthroughs: you’re dispatched from Vault 13, and the main storyline progresses when you bring a water chip back home. Everything that happens in between those two events is a direct consequence of your decision-making. You can visit whichever of the game’s dozen locations you want and do so in any order. You can retrieve the water chip through peaceful diplomacy, brutish slaughter, or anything in between. But no matter what you do, you’ll develop a reputation among the wasteland’s inhabitants, and the game will react to your decisions to an extent that was practically unheard of before 1997.

For my part, I journey eastward towards Vault 15, but tarry awhile when I encounter a walled settlement of hardy survivors who founded a relatively prosperous community among the ashes of civilization. “Welcome to Shady Sands, stranger,” says a modestly armed man as I approach the gate. “Please holster that weapon while you are here.” A welcome sight, especially compared to the bombed-out, rodent-infested husk that awaits me in Vault 15.

The venerable CRPG Book Project characterizes Fallout’s presentation as “sharply written with a dark, ironic optimism,” and I think that’s a pretty excellent description of the game’s tone and general atmosphere. From my perspective, the central theme at the heart of every Fallout game is the conflict between man’s cooperative, social nature and his proclivity towards domination. Civilization has been destroyed in nuclear fire. How can we rebuild without regressing into the same cycles of conflict and violence that brought us here in the first place? Every major faction in the franchise has its own interpretation. Should we bioengineer our racial and ethnic divisions out of the genome? Embrace our differences and have another go at liberal democracy? Subjugate or outright slaughter all those who are weaker than us? Something else entirely? The best Fallout games give their players many opportunities to insert themselves into the debate, but there’s a reason why so many of them begin with a narration of the words “War never changes.”

Shady Sands, the progenitor of the New California Republic from later games, falls squarely into the “embrace our differences” camp. Glad for a warm welcome, I help them out by gunning down a bunch of gigantic, mutated scorpions occupying a nearby cave in return for a heap of character XP. Then I pay my respects and depart, making a brief detour to the now-derelict Vault 15 where I find a few supplies, a shitload of rats, and no water chip. So, I follow a rumor about a major trading city to the south where might be found a water chip. Called the Hub, it turns out to be a vast sprawl of ramshackle merchant operations amongst the occasional brick-and-mortar dwelling occupied by the wealthy and influential. Very much a libertarian vibe, but most of its people are just ordinary survivors with ordinary problems who are happy to trade goods and rumors, and particularly so with anyone who helps them out.

THE MEANING OF “PLAYER AGENCY”

A lot of gamers purport to want agency in their RPGs, but what precisely constitutes that agency is usually left unspecified. We often think of “player agency” as meaning something to the effect of “the player has a lot of options at their disposal.” In practice, this usually means that the player forks a story by selecting one dialogue option over another. That’s certainly part of the equation, but it’s too reductive as a catch-all definition. I think a better interpretation is that players express agency over a game when their own imaginations and decision-making faculties are the primary drivers of the experience. Designing RPG narratives like this is how you end up with choicey-consequencey games that empower players to tell their own stories rather than glorified choose-your-own-adventures whose incidental plot elements are revealed or ignored based on your selections in a dialogue interface.

Fallout’s own handling of dialogue is deservedly famous for both its efficient brevity and its surprising flexibility. Unlike most modern RPGs, Fallout will often quietly insert extra dialogue choices into the list of options if the player meets the requisite Speech skill threshold. It’s then up to players themselves to apply their own intellects and social intuitions to actually make use of the skill. This makes it dramatically easier to roleplay both diplomatic characters and the socially inept — you seldom feel like you’re being railroaded into an obviously correct choice or being arbitrarily prevented from doing so. Speech in classic Fallout lets you insert yourself into the game’s fiction without becoming a cheat that the game gives you and encourages you to use.

Compared especially to the standard that grew popular in Fallout 3’s diluvian wake, the classic Fallout games put an extraordinary amount of trust in the player. My time in the Hub really stuck out as an example in this most recent playthrough. You can find a lead on a water chip by inquiring of the settlement’s more worldly merchants, but you won’t want to follow it before you’re geared up. Weapons, armor, and healing supplies — particularly those at the higher tiers — are extremely expensive, and you’re a broke wanderer. There’s a ton of money to be earned or expropriated in the Hub, but it’s on you to figure out what options are available to your character and how far you’re willing to push your morals to take advantage of them. And don’t forget: you’ve been traveling for a few weeks at this point, and Vault 13’s water supply continues to dwindle.

For my part, I meet the head of a trading company whose caravans keep mysteriously disappearing in the wastes. My investigation leads me to the abode of the series’ famous Deathclaw, a mutated reptile much taller than a man with sword-like talons and a tough hide that my early-game firearms struggle to pierce. But I’m a good enough shot by now to reliably target individual body parts, and its eyes are as squishy and penetrable as one would expect. In the heart of its cave, an eight-foot-tall man with pale-green skin and elephantine musculature lays dying. A data tape on his person reveals that whole legions of mutants like him are terrorizing the wastes, attacking caravans and kidnapping the “normals” for reasons unspecified. Guess the borked water chip is just about the least of Vault 13’s problems.

Nevertheless, I get another lead on a chip from a Hub resident who’s grateful for my warning, if not for the chaos it presages. I embark from the Hub towards the aptly named city of Necropolis, inhabited solely by ghoulish survivors whose forms are twisted and decrepit from prolonged exposure to nuclear radiation. Most are shambling husks without discernible humanity. But as I wander the sewers, I encounter a camp of them whose leader addresses me with peaceful overtures.

CREATIVE PASSION FOR ITS OWN SAKE

A recurring theme among older RPGs is that their limited audiences and commensurately lower budgets made room for more creative latitude in their designs than we’ve come to expect from the obsessively growth-oriented industry of today. They could take risks, experiment with bizarre ideas, and otherwise push the envelope in ways that are sharply restricted by the modern industry’s huge investments and long development cycles.

Classic Fallout exemplifies too many instances of this to count, but my sentimental favorite has got to be the Talking Heads. These games had 2D sprite graphics that’re readable, evocative, and still hold up well. But the character sprites, lacking faces or emotive animations, couldn’t really sell the games’ most narratively important characters or the excellent work of the voice cast on their own. Not wanting to exacerbate the problem with nineties-era 3D or to add thousands of development hours by painstakingly animating faces, the team met the problem in the middle with an innovative approach to character animation that hybridized computer graphics with meatspace sculpture. Here, look:

Of course, these work best when you see them in action. My hot take is that the Talking Heads from classic Fallout look better and convey more personality than any of the fully animated models from the entire library of 3D Fallout games that followed. And while I’m at it, another word on the 2D spritework. The effort and talent on display with damn near every sprite in these games is astonishing for the era. They don’t always reach the ceilings of immersively desolate atmosphere that their 3D descendants occasionally hit, but I reckon their floors are much higher. Plus, the technical simplicity that this style affords relative to 3D environments pays dividends in development efficiency — an entire settlement can be visually conveyed to a player with just a few dozen assets. This is a large part of the reason why Fallout 2 could be made in less than a year despite the tremendous scale of its world, and it’s also why the independent creators of today can make fan-games that compete with the OGs without salaried teams or ageless development cycles. More on that next week.

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The ghoul in the Necropolis sewers explains that, because their water pump is broken, the city’s drinking water is purified by a fully functional water chip. He begs me not to take it unless I can repair the pump. The chip is elsewhere, practically unguarded, and I could easily seize it and leave the poor wretches to their fate. But I’m clever enough to execute most mechanical repairs and would rather not gain a reputation for dooming an entire people, so I emerge from the sewers and head for the warehouse containing the broken water pump. A team of mutants stops me at the door. Their horrifically mutated leader, intellectually handicapped by whichever process made him so, grunts an explanation of his orders: refuse entry to and take custody of any normals.

“But I’m not a normal!” I exclaim in protest.

“Harry confused. You not ghoul. You not normal. Hmm, what you?” he mumbles.

“I’m a highly advanced robot,” I confabulate. Fortunately, the Speech dice roll in my favor.

“OK. Go now. Gotta keep eyes out for humans. Not have time for you.”

The water pump is easily repaired in the warehouse beyond. I hear the pump whir to life as I yank the water chip from the mainframe in which it’s socketed. A few months have passed since I left Vault 13 in search of it, but I’ll now be able to return with plenty of time to spare. However, in light of the past week’s events, it’s apparent that the Vault is still in danger. And indeed, the overseer has a new job for me almost as soon as the water purification system successfully reboots.

“The mutant population is far greater than could be expected by natural growth or mutations… someone’s generating new mutants,” he explains. There must be some kind of fearsome, eldritch lab hidden somewhere in the wastes. “As long as someone is creating hostile mutants at this rate, the Vault’s safety is at stake! Find and destroy this lab as soon as you can.”

...and again, that’s quite literally all of the direction you’re given. The game ends after you permanently stop the deliberate generation of new mutants. But you still have to figure out what’s creating them, who’s responsible, where they’re at, and how on earth you intend to stop them. After starting and completing an entire hero’s journey, you’ve still got well over half of the game to go.

WAR CHANGES AFTER ALL

Fallout isn’t a perfect game by any means, but its legacy endures for good reason and it absolutely deserves to be counted among the greatest computer RPGs of all time. Imitated by many but replicated by none, it proudly elevated artistry and thoughtfulness as core pillars of its design. These days, it remains a precious artifact of the medium and a must-play for any serious observer of gaming’s cultural evolution. It drips with humanity even while awash in the current of its witty satire, and it offers a thought-provoking perspective on the franchise’s now-mainstream setting that fans of the latter 3D Fallouts will love to death. I can’t recommend it, or its sequel, highly enough.

If indeed you entertain an interest in trying the classic Fallout games, I’m glad to report that you’re in luck. They’re sold on Steam and GOG for $10 each, or for a fistful of pocket change on sale. Thanks to modern compatibility layers, they both run out-of-the-box on contemporary systems. I must say, it was quite a trip to see a CRPG from 1997 run flawlessly on my Linux machine with absolutely zero adjustment or configuration. By the way, both Fallouts 1 and 2 are quite manageably brief by modern standards. In particular, you can expect your first full playthrough of Fallout 1 to take less than twenty hours in total.

Classic Fallout may never have been replicated by any official installment of the franchise it created, but rumors of its demise are severely exaggerated. Since at least 2013, there has existed a small but healthy culture of craft RPG design that uses Fallout 2’s engine to create entirely original games both within and beyond Fallout’s fictional universe. These are noncommercial projects made by very small teams of extremely passionate fans, and they represent some of the best and noblest of what independent game design has to offer. As a matter of fact, I’d say at least a couple of them compete with Interplay’s standard of quality. That’ll be our topic for next week — get yourself Subscribed if you haven’t already so that ya don’t miss it.

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Just about every creative industry is in a weird-ass place when it comes to the role of generative AI lately. If you ask me, the weirdest ass of them all belongs to wherever the games industry has found itself in 2025. In between great games marred by avoidable communications failures and forgettable games languishing in the slop pits, it’s been a banner year for controversy. I’m not the least bit surprised by that, of course — since video game production is a fundamentally interdisciplinary artform and a huge driver of commercial profit, it was never going to escape the morass of quarreling that now follows large language models and automated content generation wherever they tread.

And now that the S&P’s most dominant corporations are all using datacenter capex to settle history’s most expensive dick-measuring contest with TPUs instead of rulers, it also comes as no surprise that industry figureheads are trying their damnedest to convince the public that resistance is futile. Prominently, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney made headlines last week for decrying Steam’s AI disclosure policy on the supposed basis that AI “will be involved in nearly all future [game] production,” a take that seems tailor-made to piss people off. Relatedly, it’s the nature of AI disclosures and the importance of transparency more generally that I want to focus on this week.

As I’ve mentioned before, I can hardly bear the competitive shit-flinging that characterizes what passes for discourse around generative AI, so I try to keep my distance and hardly ever talk about it in my writing. That’s not for lack of opinions, though. Given my informatics education, my proximity to the software industry, and my general distaste for the cultural footprint of corporate managerialism, I can’t help but overthink it all. I try to constrain this publication’s focus around celebrating the artistic achievements and horizons of game design, but I can hardly deny that there’s a pretty significant intersection between that subject and the unignorable specter of AI in the games-adjacent creative industries. So, let’s talk a little about it so that I can get it off my chest as 2025 nears its end, and then we’ll return to something more culture-positive next week.

ENHANCEMENT VS. REPLACEMENT

We’re living through an era of extraordinary tension between consumer, creative, and managerial incentives, and that tension is particularly stark in the video games industry. AI might as well be the contemporary figurehead of that tension which, by my reckoning, arises from the none-too-subtle distinction between enhancing the creative process and using it to replace human creativity altogether. Consumers in general, and gamers not least of all, clearly recognize this distinction even if they don’t always articulate it.

It’s well understood by now that AI-adjacent tooling is commonplace in game production because it can have a demonstrably positive impact on developer experience and, by extension, creative productivity. Indignation didn’t really set in until the rise of wholesale asset generation that was sold as a replacement to that process. Thing is, there’s a substantial and relatively intuitive difference between technology that enhances the creative workflow and technology that regurgitates an inference over training data to produce a facsimile of that creative workflow’s product. To better illustrate it, I come prepared with a recent example.

Embark Studios’ ARC Raiders was released at the end of October to considerable acclaim, and it’s notable for innovating with one incarnation of AI tech while stoking controversy with another. As a quick summary, a machine-learning approach was used to train the game’s many-legged robot enemies to move naturalistically across unpredictable terrain, and the game also includes a trove of text-to-speech voicelines that were based on the work of real actors but implemented with generative AI.

I read the former as a clever and valid application of machine learning descended from approaches that game designers have used for ages. It would’ve been absolutely miserable to manually calculate and implement all that skeletal animation (if such a thing were even possible), and the effect usually looks pretty great in action. Besides, a machine learning-based approach like this can’t just be lazily generated. It involves the same process of ideation, iteration, and refinement required of any software development project. And unless I’ve drastically misunderstood the nature of Embark’s specific approach, it didn’t give upper management an excuse to reduce headcount and it didn’t play fast and loose with anyone’s intellectual property. It’s a case of AI as it was understood before GPT 3.5 that enhances the creative vision behind the product, and I see no reason not to get behind it.

Meanwhile, the AI-generated voicelines tend toward the uncanny and preposterous, and they add essentially nothing to the experience. One wonders why on earth Embark made the decision in the first place while surely aware in advance that it would piss people off and presumably cause a non-trivial reduction in sales from the archetypes of gamer who quite rationally refuse to support this kind of thing. The voice actors on whose talent it was trained apparently consented to and were compensated for this, but I don’t suppose for a moment that they were given practical latitude to refuse. And above all else… I mean, for the love of God, at least half of these generated voicelines sound like shit. The intonation is off, the timbre isn’t believable, and I’d expect less wooden delivery from a middle-school theater production. Despite three years of ceaseless hype and a trillion dollars invested, the machines remain decisively incapable of performing human emotion at anywhere near the level of a voice actor. I’ve seen more believable acting from Microsoft’s social media feeds.

Writers elsewhere have made compelling points about how this offputting implementation of GenAI is conspicuously at odds with the premise and spirit of the game itself, i.e., of humankind resisting displacement by unfeeling machines. So too does the game’s pithy AI usage disclosure on Steam, which evasively claims that the game “may” use AI-based tools and that such cases reflect “the creativity and expression of our own development team.” Yeah, I’m not buying it, chief. It strikes me as a barely concealed effort to minimize consumer displeasure at a decision that management knew in advance would be unpopular. But at least the game is pretty great in general terms, and at least the team made a pretense of supporting the flesh-based creative process.

Oh, well. Guess we’d better talk about Activision’s latest nonsense.

AGAINST A SLOPPIFIED GAMES INDUSTRY

So, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 isn’t looking too hot. As an avowed supporter of human creativity, gameplay innovation, and reasonable production budgets, I’m certainly not going to pretend that I was expecting much from the latest installment of gaming’s most creatively sandblasted IP. BLOPS 7’s pivot to AI-driven development wasn’t a big surprise either, given the practically existential investment that its primary stakeholders have made in the technology. But, good God, I didn’t expect it to be quite so shameless. I won’t relitigate the whole story, but suffice it to say that some official assets in this $70 video game are frightfully reminiscent of the laziest generated garbage one sees on social media, and it’s not a good look. A cursory search through YouTube turns up reams of evidence that textures, animations, and perhaps even whole cinematics were entirely prompt-generated. Now, let’s take a deep breath and have a look at the game’s AI disclosure:

“Our team uses generative AI tools to help develop some in game assets.”

Good God, that must be the most loaded sentence I’ve read in all of 2025. The word “some” alone is working more overtime than the average triple-A game developer.

Here’s a little food for thought: given that Activision-Blizzard and its parent company Microsoft are so unrelentingly GenAI-positive in their earnings calls and press releases, why weren’t they bragging about the specifics of BLOPS 7’s AI-driven approach to development and singing the praises of their supposed innovation in the field of enterprise game design? Well, if Occam’s razor is any indication, they’re very deeply proud of the profit margins it’ll supposedly enable but not particularly proud of the product that they’ve ultimately produced. And I must say, the game’s mediocre sales and increasingly anemic player count suggest that they were absolutely right to be disappointed in the product itself. Footage of BLOPS 7 is a gruesome, Orwellian window into the harrowingly dull future that industry executives envision for high-level game development, so it’s encouraging to see that it’s provoking measurable displeasure even among the core audience.

Here’s the thing: for all the pronouncements that GenAI is inevitable or that it enhances productivity, major studios and publishers clearly recognize that most of their customers don’t fuck with machine-generated slop, and slop is the inevitable result of replacing human-based creative labor with machine generation. This would certainly explain why BLOPS 7’s AI disclosure was so desperately malnourished. It feels skin-crawlingly duplicitous, and there’s already at least one prominent example of someone getting a whole-ass refund on the disclosure’s account.

I’m not here to argue that modern AI is an entirely worthless technology. It’s already demonstrated some net-beneficial use cases under narrow, well-defined conditions. But that’s precisely why transparency about its use is so important: it gives us as consumers the information necessary for distinguishing between tech that makes better games and tech that cynically increases profit margins at our expense and at the expenses of those games’ creators. Recent history has repeatedly shown how a dearth or absence of transparency is indicative of a studio or publisher with something to hide, and it’s absurd to expect the general public to embrace a technology about which they’re being openly lied to.

Conversely, meaningful efforts at transparency reflect a genuine interest in using that technology for mutual benefit. Progress requires experimentation, after all. A lot of good-faith experiments into AI usage will inevitably fail, and it’s entirely rational to question whether or not a given result was worth the trade-offs. So, before we wrap up, let’s look at a game that’s doing almost everything right.

A CASE STUDY IN EXCELLENT TRANSPARENCY

Good news, nerds! I’m talking about Shadow Empire for a second consecutive week. Bear with me, I promise this will be interesting even if you’re not into geopolitical roleplaying.

To briefly recap, Shadow Empire is a strategy game built atop a complex simulation that I like very, very much. There’s no need to painstakingly reexplain why for our purposes here, so suffice it to say that it’s an ambitious work of creative and innovative game design largely made by a single person. It was released in late 2020, well before GPT 3.5 and the corresponding avalanche of generative tech that assaulted the popular culture like so many Visigoths at Rome’s gates. It’s also an undeniably niche product targeted at a limited audience, and it had a commensurately limited budget. So, when it experimentally introduced machine-generated character portraits a few years post-release and provided a conspicuous option to toggle them off, I was intrigued far more than I was disappointed.

Why? Well, for one, because I could tell right away that I liked the human-made portraits better and was glad that I could swap back to them with zero friction. It also demonstrated an interest in using the technology to meet the practical barriers of solo-development halfway rather than as an exercise in pleasing shareholders. But above all else, VR Designs was uncommonly straight about the specifics of the AI strategy and comprehensively documented where and how it was used. As usual, you can read it on the game’s Steam page if you’re so inclined — it’s a bit too long to reproduce here.

Now, would I have preferred that VR Designs and Matrix Games contracted one or more human artists to put together the requisite assets from scratch? Yes, of course. I want to see more creatives getting paychecks, period. Also, I find the original human-made artwork from 2020 to be substantially more grounded and thematically appropriate. Besides, it mercifully lacks the uncanniness that pervades machine-generated portrayals of human beings no matter how many teraflops we cram into the AI industry’s cavernous gullet. At least I know that no personnel were replaced to fill in these holes, that it’s not making calls to GenAI tools in-game or harvesting my data, and that I can shut it off or mod it out at my leisure. For those reasons, I’m sure as hell going to keep playing Shadow Empire, and I’ll look forward to supporting the dev by getting the forthcoming DLC whenever it ends up coming out. If and when somebody releases a scratch-made mod for the other artwork, I’ll throw them a few bucks, too.

The schism between investors and skeptics in the AI debate remains plainly visible, but I increasingly believe that the defenders of human creativity are winning the battle of ideas. For every GenAI-evangelizing executive, one can point to an oppositional figure with a demonstrable connection to the boots on the ground. Obsidian didn’t use GenAI “at all” in developing The Outer Worlds 2, despite the all-in approach of its parent company. PUBG creator Brendan Greene is an avowed supporter of the revolt against it despite the similarly totalizing approach of major investor Krafton, Inc. Statements like Tim Sweeney’s are hard to square with observable reality, and I have no reason to believe that the human-driven creative process is to be replaced in the foreseeable future.

As far as I can tell, the likes of machine learning, AI-assisted coding, and the partial automation of repetitive workflows are all here to stay, and I’m okay with that as long as it keeps driving innovation, benefiting the medium of game design, and otherwise enhancing the creative efforts of human artists. I’m not entirely opposed to AI as it’s variously understood in the software industry, but I’m categorically opposed to the devaluation of human creativity, and the two very often go hand-in-hand these days. I’ll not put my support behind projects that flagrantly reject the sanctity of human creativity, but I’ll stay open to compromise where it can reasonably be had.

Ultimately, I’d rather have folks with disparate ideas working together in good faith toward mutually beneficial resolutions. But unless and until the hype recedes to background levels and forces the discourse’s loudest voices back down to earth, those of us who just want to make and play good games will have to do our best to exercise the agency we’ve got. Toward that end, we should continue to reward earnest transparency and continue to speak out against efforts to quietly normalize development approaches that disrespect the medium. Money talks — eventually, the predictable backlash to such disrespect will no longer be worth whatever nebulous gains are to be had from propagating it.

Phew. Gosh, thanks so much for reading through all of that. We’ll be back to a happier subject next week. Nuclear annihilation, perhaps. Didja know folks are still making Fallout games on Black Isle’s classic engine? See you soon.

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My word, the undersocialized ranks of cerebral PC strategy-gaming fandom sure are eating good these days. If you proudly hoist their banners as I do, you’ll probably agree that the recent and broadly successful launch of Europa Universalis V is shaping up to be a defining release for 2025. By most indications, not least the observations of some distinguished map-gamers among my audience, its density of interlocking systems that simulate everything from the conflicting societal values of early-modern society to the north-Egyptian legume harvest has resulted in a frankly unfathomable breadth of experiences on offer to the creative player. The thing’s been out for less than a month, yet folks are already racking up three-digit playtimes and spilling forth a Noahidic flood of content on YouTube and elsewhere.

This is quite something to behold, especially when you recall that very nearly 100% of this game’s moment-to-moment experience is outwardly characterized by staring at a map and a library of data. I’m not making fun, of course — I’ll be right there with ‘em as soon as I have less on my agenda and more in my wallet. In the meantime, I’ve been contenting myself by playing similar games already in my library and meditating on what exactly it is about these massively intricate political simulations that so frequently translates into thousand-hour expenditures of freetime. More specifically, I’ve been dabbling in Crusader Kings, Shadow Empire, and Europa Universalis IV and treating each as an exercise in roleplaying, which is the most reliably captivating playstyle for me personally.

And, as a frequent player of roleplaying games more generally, that really got me thinking. The communities around those three games above — and around other games like them — all but universally agree that roleplaying is an entirely valid goal for a serious campaign. Hell, “RPG” is among the most popular user-defined Steam tags for both Crusader Kings and Shadow Empire. And that’s despite the unignorable fact that the gameplay paradigms defining their genres have almost no readily apparent similarities with the sorts of games that actually market themselves as RPGs. But almost anyone who’s found themselves engrossed in a game like these will tell you that they can scratch a very similar itch.

So, here’s the million-dollar question: are these high-level strategy titles themselves roleplaying games? For my money, at least some of them absolutely deserve to be counted as such. The problem is that they don’t fit neatly into any existing classification of RPG of which I’m aware. How on earth would they? A roleplaying video game in which the action and adventure take place almost entirely within the players’ imaginations is far from what we’ve come to expect of so famously sensory a medium. It’s more like… well, it’s more like a classic roleplaying game that you’d play on a tabletop. The sort where you look at a hex map, resolve conflict through circumstantially modified dice-rolls, and— oh, dear God...

Well, that settles it as far as I’m concerned. But I’m still not aware of any formal classification for this kind of roleplaying, so let’s invent one. Call it a GRPG — in my head, that stands for “Geopolitical Roleplaying Game,” but folks reinterpret the acronyms for RPG subgenres to suit their convenience all the time, so feel free to read the “G” as “Global” or “Grand-Strategic” if you like. This is ultimately just a speculative exercise in characterizing a nebulous but enduringly popular form of computer roleplaying, so there’s no need for strict intellectual rigor. Besides, I’m still pretty worn out from combing through a thousand literature-inspired games for last week’s installment only for the comment section to convince me that I could’ve stood to comb through two or three times that many. Come along now, and let’s get speculating.

SO, WHAT IS A GRPG?

The crux of my argument is that a certain subset of high-level strategy game — grand strategy, 4X, wargame, what have you — facilitates a roleplay-focused playstyle that’s complementary to but distinct from roleplaying video games as they’re commonly understood. It definitely isn’t the whole set of such games: as a prominent example, many of them are platforms for match-based competition with well-defined victory conditions that reward what you might call “optimal” play and deemphasize player-directed storytelling. I have the likes of Civilization and Total War in mind when I think of high-level strategy games that don’t quite fit this classification.1 Games like Crusader Kings and Shadow Empire are vastly different from one another at the level of primary gameplay, but there are certain qualities that unite them, and I think it’s in those qualities that we’ll narrow down the subset of which I speak.

So, with that in mind, here are some criteria I came up with to unify the GRPG subgenre:

1. The player controls the foremost decision-making agent of some distinct, nation-scale polity and cooperates or competes with similar agents

2. The player is capable of producing supranational effects through gameplay as a matter of course

3. A given campaign has no pre-determined narrative structure, instead leveraging its systems and simulations to produce emergent narratives

A game that meets all of these criteria is a GRPG. In essence, it’s a game that uses high-level strategy as a driver of emergent narrative that a player can easily inhabit. Hopefully, these do a good enough job of winnowing out games that locate their appeal beyond the concept of player-directed roleplay.

But what exactly is it to roleplay as a geopolitical actor rather than as a fantasy adventurer, sci-fi mercenary, vampire socialite, etc. as RPG history has led us to expect? Rather than agonizing over the fine details and trying to come up with some kind of systematized definition, I think it’ll be more productive to tell you about what it’s like in each of the three games I mentioned up top. For the sake of clarity, we’ll proceed in order of most reified roleplaying experience to most abstract.

THREE PARAGONS OF GEOPOLITICAL ROLEPLAYING

1. CRUSADER KINGS

If you’re not already familiar with the Crusader Kings series’ central conceit, I’ll spell it out for you real quick. It’s a grand strategy game taking place over the two-or-three-hundred years either side of the Battle of Hastings in which, rather than controlling a nation or government, you play as an individual leader with a distinct background and personality in a world full of such individuals. The nations on the map emerge from the tribal, feudal, or imperial-bureaucratic titles held by these people, and your goals typically center around enhancing the wealth and international prestige of your dynasty rather than the nation itself. When your character dies, you may continue playing as that person’s primary heir (whose succession you’ve ideally guaranteed by managing your succession laws and internal politics).

The roleplay potential in a game like this is pretty straightforward, since you as the player embody an individual person and direct their actions in accordance with your will as you would in most any RPG as the term is traditionally understood. What makes it special is that you’re not clearing dungeons or passing skill-checks, but organizing and managing a medieval realm at a strategic level. The choice of timeframe is therefore very deliberate: we’re in the era before the emergence of the modern Westphalian nation-state, back when geopolitical boundaries and national diplomacy were functions of powerful individuals and their mutual interactions rather than any kind of international political norms.

So, the roleplay opportunities on offer mostly aren’t to do with the day-to-day experiences of your characters, but instead with the macro-scale impacts of their leadership and how effectuating them weighs heavily on their crowned heads. A particularly clever innovation from CK3 was the introduction of the Stress system, which encourages you to act in accordance with your characters’ trait-defined personalities lest they grow angry, despondent, and unhealthy from their inability to live as their authentic selves.

2. SHADOW EMPIRE

Again, in case since you haven’t played Shadow Empire, I’ll walk you through the premise. Millennia in the future, a space-faring humankind has colonized countless worlds beyond our solar system, but the species’ collective identity has long since dissolved after centuries of resource wars and a total breakdown of interplanetary communication. Your world was driven into prehistoric squalor long before your birth having lost contact with greater humanity, and your people only now begin to emerge from the darkness. You — as in you, the player — were chosen to lead the young nation through its tentative first steps in restoring civilization from first principles, and it’s up to you to construct a political order from scratch that can face the harsh environment of your post-apocalyptic world and either befriend or subdue the other young nations who would also quite like to emerge from their Hobbesian state of nature.

Like Crusader Kings, Shadow Empire makes frequent use of the second-person singular pronoun in reference to the leader of the nation whose government and military you command. That’s about where the similarities end at the level of primary gameplay, though. This is a 4X/Wargame about exploiting planetary resources and using them to drive a national war machine that can protect your people from the various raider clans, zealots, and xeno-arachnids that threaten you throughout the campaign until you either consolidate global dominion or are wiped out in the attempt. What makes the two titles worthy of direct comparison is that both embody their players in the character of an individual leader who manages relationships with other human characters in their orbit, and this is used to manufacture emotional resonance and interpersonal drama in places where such things are seldom found in strategy gaming. Choices that you’d make without a second thought in a non-GRPG strategy game here become vectors for memorable, player-driven storytelling.

By the way, I wrote a long-form review of Shadow Empire earlier this year, and it happens to be the publication’s highest performer. Check it out below if you haven’t yet:

3. EUROPA UNIVERSALIS

Right, then, the big one. From a roleplaying perspective, what most separates the EU games — and indeed, most Paradox grand strategy titles — from the two above is that you don’t play as an individual. Actually, it’s quite difficult to identify the agent as whom you play, insofar as you play as anything less nebulous than “a nation.” The institutions of government and the people who run them are largely abstracted and are postured as owing fealty to players rather than constituting them. But we do need some characterizable being for the player to embody if we’re going to call this a GRPG and hold a straight face. Personally, I like to think of the player as controlling the spirit of the government — some kind of noospheric entity that permeates the consciousness of its every participant, which averages out into the decisions made by the player. Perhaps you can see why I called this the most abstract version of geopolitical roleplaying.

But roleplaying it certainly can be, not least because the term “roleplaying” is frequently cited by many players as their preferred method of engaging with EU’s intricate and open-ended simulation. What folks usually mean by “I’m doing an RP-focused campaign” is something to the effect of “I want to effectuate a plausible and immersive alt-history for my chosen nation without relying on optimal (i.e., unrealistic) exploitation of the systems,” although the specifics of what precisely constitutes such an experience invariably differ from player to player. Some make no pretense of roleplaying, starting as a Mongol successor state and quickly usurping the crown of the Holy Roman Empire in order to speed-run a world conquest. Others begin as a minor regional power and painstakingly recreate the circumstances that historically led it to become a massive empire. Most play it somewhere in between, taking advantage of the game’s systems to produce desired outcomes but setting and self-enforcing personal constraints to maintain the feeling of historical immersion that grand strategy does so well.

Since this is quite a bit more abstract than what we’ve covered above, let me give you a specific example. One of my favorite campaigns in EU4, which I’ve played a few times in various ways, is to start as an east-Asian Jurchen tribe and consolidate rule over China, forming the historical Qing dynasty along the way. The game provides a bevy of event-driven missions to guide you along such a campaign: you’ll start as one of the aforesaid tribes, dominate your same-culture neighbors, declare yourself the hegemon of the Manchu people, and then take the fight to the sclerotic Ming empire. Once you have Beijing under your control, you can seize the mandate of heaven and declare a new imperial dynasty.

Or you could do none of that, cutting China into ribbons and bleeding it dry for every last ducat without ever becoming emperor of a new dynasty — some folks prefer to do it that way, since experienced players can leverage the tribal horde government into much faster and more efficient conquest. Personally, I find it much more entertaining to use the game’s systems to tell an alternative history of how the Qing rose to prominence, often long before they did so in real history.

PALACE OF THE MIND

A large part of what makes video game design special as an artform is how it can bring together different intellectual and sensory stimuli into a point of confluence that produces an experience greater than the sum of its parts. This is why roleplaying video games have been around for nearly as long as the medium itself, and it explains why the RPG genre has grown into a colossal rhizome of subgenres and experimental fusions over that time. The games we talked about above, for example, take advantage of complex digital interfaces to deliver large amounts of information to players at practically the speed of thought in order to encourage and complement those players’ imaginations. There’s just so damn much that one can achieve by supplementing one’s imagination with thoughtfully curated digital stimuli, and a lot of that is all but necessarily unique to computer roleplaying.

The power and scope of that method — of computationally enhancing the human imagination — is why computer roleplaying still has so much unexplored potential left to uncover. This GRPG concept of mine is just one of countless still-emerging forms of roleplaying whose practice is utterly unique to video gaming. And until such time as human dungeon-masters can succinctly explain a complex and evolving world-state several dozen times an hour, it’ll remain so.

Alright, those are my consolidated thoughts on the most abstract form of computer roleplaying of which I’m a regular participant. My definitions are provisional and my examples personal, so I’d be glad to hear from you if your thoughts differ. Do also let me know if there are any other high-level strategy games of which you’re fond that also facilitate this sort of geopolitical-scoped roleplaying. The three I talked about above just happen to be the ones with which I’m most deeply familiar.

That’ll do it for this week. Next time, we’ll look ahead to 2026 and try to make some sense of the industry’s curious momentum and the friction it’s been causing. Stay tuned for that, and get yourself subscribed if you’re not already.

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