Preemptive Retaliation

I’ve played two videogames recently that I really want to talk about. However, each time I start talking about them it turns into some pseudo-intellectual review and I don’t want that. I just want to talk about games I enjoy, so here’s the thing; if you feel inclined to do so, you should play Undertale and The Beginner’s Guide. 

Both of these games are unique as they are the only recent games I’ve played that have made me think about them long after the journey was over, and both for very different reasons.

The Beginner’s Guide was experienced in just one sitting of about an hour and a half, but at the end of that time I had to step away from the computer and do something else, anything else. Seriously, after playing this game I sat with an open notepad and spent an hour not doing anything. I was paralysed with the slow, intrusive thoughts that drifted through my mind. What I thought was a simple, personal piece of work slowly turns into something darker, deeper, until eventually it turns into a long letter about sadness and regret.

The game lies and cheats, and makes you feel bad for being lied to, for being implicit in it all.

Undertale lies too. It’s simple graphics hide the layers in its work, in its gameplay and story. Everything about the game is so whimsical and childish and charming, but at the same time there’s the underlying theme of death and destruction. You walk through this perilous, harmless world, all the while knowing that either you trap its residents there forever, or you die. It’s the equivalent of having a perfect picnic in the park, but knowing at the end you might have to split up with your partner. All through the picnic there’s this nagging voice that’s trying to ruin it, trying to bring you down like the distant sound of roadworks.

And I’m sitting there, trying to decide the fate of a fictional world, while its inhabitants try to date me and be my friend.

These are both games that have forced me, a creator, to seriously consider someone else’s creation. It’s so easy to spend my time consuming things; mindlessly feeding my attention with whatever sustenance I come across. Every once in a while I find something that feels like a meal, that feels like something I want to spend my time on, instead of something I fill my time with. I love videogames to pieces, but a lot of them seem designed to be complex stimulus that I stare at for hours, but these two games really spoke to me, and made me think about them in an abstract, non-consuming way.

I suppose I’m saying; buy these games? Yeah, buy these games.