Our Darkened Age

"I've been through magic and through life's reality

I've lived a thousand years and it never bothered me

I've seen the future and I've left it behind"

 

Black Sabbath - Supernaut

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"demons may have been all but forgotten by modern historians, who tend to pass over demonologies with a silence that speaks eloquently of embarrassment, but such fiends obsessed, perhaps even possessed, some of the greatest minds of early Christianity.

[...]

Another monk was visited in his monastery by a particularly timeless apparition: a middle-ranking government official. The official then grabbed the monk, who started to wrestle him. As the struggle progressed, the monk realized that he was in the presence not of bureaucracy but (the distinction seems to have been a fine one) of pure evil. This, he realized, was a demon."

 

Catherine Nixey - The Darkening Age, ch. 2: The Battleground of Demons

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"when you read a lot of ancient criticism of Christianity, it seems strikingly modern, because, I suppose that's a trick of events and of history [...] to see that it's all there right at the beginning, and that there were these, y'know, sophisticated people from a different culture, y'know, a non-Christian, a pre-Christian culture to be making those criticisms is eye-opening"

Andrew Copson interviewing Nixey for Humanists UK

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Historic recurrence has featured... recurrently, just to get the pun out of the way... here over this blog's many years, especially given the striking similarity between the mass manias of our own time and those of the previous turn of the century. And no, it's not because we're being carried on any mystical universal carousel, but because most humans are subhuman, too willfully ignorant and flat-out stupid to contextualize their latest rehashed fads. Religion, in particular, fathoms depths beyond even the reactionary by its mesolithic stagnation. Even nonsensical supernatural fabrications though can be diagnosed according to their degrees of virulence and lethality.

 

The Darkening Age meanders back and forth among such a decline from bad to worse, through Christianity's rise to power in the waning Roman Empire, and its contribution to said waning by vandalism and terror. In case you haven't been keeping up, it's very un-p.c. these days to refer to the Dark Ages as dark ages, because the decline from fumbling Greco-Roman attempts at reason and science into utterly unreasoned primitive superstition was not as absolute as historians of the 18th-19th centuries initially presented. But when even the few early medieval scientific advances were driven by, say, monks' desire to best pinpoint the numerous times of day to kneel and chant at their magic sky-daddy, you can safely point out the main restriction in thought. If the dark ages were a candle or two less dark than once imagined, even a passing glimpse at Roman religious imagination alone can shame those of us born sub crosa at our fabulistic impoverishment. The Darkening Age deals largely with the loss of this cultural, scientific, artistic and humanist wealth, not merely by pagans willingly converting because they've seen the light of dog and abandoning their old statues, as most of us have been raised to believe, but by deliberate destruction and general Christian thuggery.

Nixey's detractors (which could fill quite a few temples and spare) tend to ignore the central question of degrees. Of course belief in the supernatural is only one facet of human irrationalism and the old pantheons certainly had their dark side, but monotheism, by its totalizing proposition of a single absolute source of all good, carries the implicit moral imperative to erase all that is not of the one true god. Good vs. Evil: Fight! was baked into the pre-Christian formula from Zoroaster onward. Nixey's vignettes of late-Roman life do a wonderful job of illustrating the effect of endorsing crass, ignorant malice by absolute supernatural entitlement, and if you think for just a second you can probably picture it from examples of "Christian" values seen on a daily basis even now. Every form of paganism had its idiosyncratic sexual hangups, sure, but under monotheism physical pleasure itself was vilified. Paganism had its notions of blasphemy, of utterances which might offend the divine, but only with monotheism was blasphemy expanded to anything diverging from official doctrine. Pagans did occasionally burn books, but monotheism routinely fabricates the moral imperative to burn all but one book. Ignorance ran rampant through the empire, but the faithful of the new faith made a virtue of it. From the myriad invocations and depictions of monsters and gods glorious, amusing, beautiful, terrible or wondrous, Christianity reduced all culture to mindlessly regurgitating the same rabbi on a cross and the same "virgin" with child in the least imaginative or skillful ways possible... spiced up by pictures of saints best described as nondescript dudebros holding a couple of mundane objects as identifiers. The imagination does not boggle.

Though the author opens her book in a borderline apologetic tone for presenting historical events in narrative form, this necessity becomes apparent when you remember philosophy may be personal, but religion is a tool of social control. Religion manifests in our daily lives not by high-brow dialectics on the metaphysical being/rebeing of the not-being-being there being been, but in the unthinking masses surrounding us, willing to do anything in the name of the assuredly supreme being. What worth is the preacher's talk of peace and wisdom up at his pulpit when in the streets behind him, lurching to his rambling cadence, skitter rank and sanguine the better part of the worst of humanity, unconcerned with such vagaries of self-deception, wanting only the license he provides, knowing only that soon he will lift his hand... and point... and they will kill.

 

Overall though, Nixey's tone throughout the book is not one of moral outrage or even lamenting lamentable losses, but wonder and no small amount of exasperation, perhaps at our continued revisionism of this otherwise mundane sect's forceful rise to power. I'd say we should at least acknowledge our refusal to acknowledge that Christians' common modern manifestation of crass, anti-intellectual petty thugs is by no means incidental to our individual home towns. It has been observed all through their history, at any time the Christians themselves were not in a position to torture their observers to death. They were thus in the time of Pliny the Younger and Hypatia, of Galileo and Darwin, and they will continue to play such roles for the foreseeable future, if not directly then as the masterclass in rabblerousing to which other aspiring charlatans and demagogues pay the homage of imitation.

I've ranted quite often here about the religious bent of modern social movements, from economic creeds to snowflakes' myriad sects of woke-ism: their absolute good/evil dichotomies, their adherents' race to outstrip each other's fervor, their blind belief in the advent of some flavor of paradise/utopia once their arbitrary and impossible demands are finally met, their psalmic chanting of slogans and catchphrases. But religion itself remains the most abundant fountainhead of irrationality. Quite a few modern adherents imagine themselves to be wrestling with demons in human form whenever they meet unbelievers.

 

If the events described in The Darkening Age don't immediately sync up for you with modern fads, if you still doubt that the Christians of yesteryear are still very much the Christians of today, let me point out one of the more amusing recent cults, one so ludicrous I can't but see it as an elaborate practical joke played on its own followers, continually upping the stakes to test the depths of idiocy to which they'll sink. Everything from the deliberate improbability of its claims to its comically monosyllabic slogan approximating "woo-woo" in sound points to the sort of hoax that'll only grow into its humor after a century or so, like the Loch Ness monster. QAnon is among other things a Christian movement, making liberal use of messianic rhetoric, quite literally demonizing its preferred targets and even repurposing the old antisemitic baby-eating blood libel. I'd say the apple didn't fall far from the tree, but these imbeciles' ancestors obviously never visited that side of the primordial garden. If you find yourself exasperated with their antics, you might just find a kindred spirit in Pliny or Celsus.

Look Both Ways Before Fucking

"We are of reptiles
We are of stardust
We are of mercury
And these things are our kin"

 

Ego Likeness - Save Your Serpent

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"If all you can muster to say about this event is 'stabbing is bad and I'm against it' without looking at the reasons behind it, you're useless, and that describes pretty much the entire mainstream media."

Bill Maher - New Rule: Straw Man Arguments

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Continuing from yesterday's post: while John Oliver devoted a decent bit of air time to lamenting Qatar's indecent, primitive, filthy and dangerous labor camps for foreigners, he passively verbalized then elided the little detail that the victims of that system have been almost exclusively men, accounting for the country's absurd, overwhelmingly male demographic ratio. But you can be sure most of whatever money those men have accumulated will, in some way or another, make its way to women. There's nothing new here, really. Just the timeless routine of men being driven over the horizon, to return with spoils or die trying, in order to (consciously or not) demonstrate their fitness as providers and earn the right to be bled of a lifetime's effort by their tribe's females upon return.

This is perfectly normal.

This is unremarkable.

I was skimming through a Reuters article on the Iranian riots last week which cited the hundreds of "people" who have died so far, either in street clashes or executed. To their credit the article's cited source, HRANA, was a bit more open about the demographic breakdown: "women are 7% of the victims. Shockingly, 29% of the victims are under the age of 18" Reuters picked up the shocking youth mortality but excised the boring gender disparity. In fact I looked up the original source precisely because I knew that if any appreciable percentage of women had numbered among the victims, the entire article would have been devoted to them, but the blanket term "people" leaving you to assume parity always masks men's sacrifice. It is normal for men to die. When "people" die it's supposed to be men.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

To Ukraine. Where judging by media coverage earlier this year, you'd have thought the Ukrainian war effort consisted entirely of adorable young blonde girls and grieving widows. Because putting a real face on reality would elicit not a joule of sympathy from audiences abroad. If you admitted to our voting public that the war's victims are almost all straight, white men, you'd soon find them cheering the Russians on and chanting "nuke 'em!" at the top of their lungs. It's normal for men to be killed, it's natural, it's right, it's righteous, it's dulce et decorum et all that jazz.

Every day in the States you can hear the same retread moral outrage at uneven incarceration rates for blacks... but rarely will the same speakers admit it's specifically black men... unless calling them "fathers" in the "community" to justify their existence by their utility. You can be outraged at the suffering of blacks but not of men. Men's suffering is as it should be.

 

I've been catching up on Bill Maher's New Rules recently, only to find him returning several times to the breakdown of sexual relationships here in the states - and in the developed world at large; in fact it may have started with Japan. And every time, HBO's staunchest voice of reason places all blame unilaterally on men, ranting against that hated "incel" subculture and calling them all a bunch of school shooters. (Not a straw man argument at all, right, Bill?) As if he can't figure out why men are failing to throw themselves at women's feet begging for sex.

 

Well, I can't claim to have the complete answer, but having commented on this topic a couple of times before, I would hope it's partly due to men's increasing awareness of just where we stand in the natural order: disposable draft animals, to be worked to death or slaughtered as convenient. If you're lucky enough you might even achieve that enviable state of masculine success, of a soulless, hapless, hollow-eyed sarariman measuring your existence by the pension your wife will be sitting on after you work yourself into an early grave. Because we all know men owe women absolutely everything up to and including their lives, and thanks to our modern sensibilities we now also know that women owe men absolutely nothing except abuse.

 

What's more, we are not permitted to even address the issue. No-one will admit Qatar's government has colluded with the women of South Asia to work their men to death. Iran's revolt will continue to be painted by every media outlet as a conflict of plucky females rising against male oppression, no matter how many men die in a woman's name. When those of Ukraine's menfolk lucky enough to survive the war return to their bombed-out homes to struggle to rebuild them for their families, they'll find those homes occupied by a feminist movement spitting in their faces as patriarchal brutes, tossing them out on the streets or in jail on groping accusations and demanding they surrender all white-collar work to women as more deserving. Thug until the day you die, lavishing the spoils of your crimes on women in hopes they'll sleep with you, then on your deathbed listen to Bill Maher lambaste you for not bending over backwards far enough to appeal to women.

This is our species' normal. "They don't give a fuck about us."

You know, Maher, you're right. Being unable to get laid, or giving up on sexual relationships altogether, it hurts, it's a miserable state. But thanks to the occasional reprieve afforded us by modern amenities, a few of us can sit back, breathe freely for at least a moment, and realize celibacy's still better than trying to play Prince Charming.

Masturbation might not be enough to make us truly happy, but beating off beats dying off.

Look Both Ways Before Praying

"We are of dignity
We are of mercy
We are of cruelty
And this is not our sin"

 

Ego Likeness - Save Your Serpent

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"Every country has human rights issues, including this one. For more of that, see every other story this show has ever done."

- John Oliver nearly making the mistake of admitting his show's prejudice

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If you'd like a tidy conjunction of Social Justice Warrior willful ignorance and hypocrisy, try Last Week Tonight's last two week nights this year, respectively on the British Monarchy and the Qatar World Cup. John Oliver spends two thirds of the British segment condemning the royals (not unjustifiably) for their role in colonialism, the slave trade, the mass murder of natives, etc., and even mumbles a brief mention of the Catholic and Anglican churches' genocidal actions, making a reasonable point that not only a nation but its institutions and their representatives should be scrutinized for their roles in injustice present or past.

 

Jolly good. Now, about those mullahs...

 

A week later, Oliver manages to yammer an entire 24 minutes through his Qatar segment without ever once saying the words "Islam" or "Muslim" even as he acknowledges that Qatari migrant workers have been kept in a system of modern-day slavery as opposed to merely being the descendants of slaves two centuries prior. Odd omission, given that like everything else in a theocracy de jure or de facto, kafala has an explicitly religious justification and legal underpinning:

"In Islamic adoptional jurisprudence, "kafala" refers to the adoption of children. The original Islamic law of kafala was expanded to include a system of fixed-term sponsorship of migrant workers in several countries in the late twentieth century"

Neither does he dare to even attempt placing Arab slaveholding in historical context, as though this one minute country with its myriad redundant and now utterly useless football stadiums had only now stumbled into error and need only issue a few visas to erase its crimes. But then Oliver has been all too eager to wail "islamophobia!!!" over the years at the drop of a turban. So while he eagerly wrings his hands at how shamefully late the British Empire ended slavery in 1807/1833, he will likely never mention (as just one example) that the Turks did not do so until rather precisely a century later. Under heavy pressure from Europe. Or that terms like "kafir" or "giaour" were never mere neutral delineations of religious belief as muslims now try to pretend, but blanket slurs leveled against those filthy infidels unworthy of anything but being enslaved and tortured to death for the glory of Allah.

 

For a thousand years! There's another facet. While the European, Christian colonialism now so universally (and vociferously... and repetitively (the lady doth...)) condemned as crimes against humanity lasted about four centuries, don't expect the likes of John Oliver to acknowledge the solid millennium of genocide and slavery inflicted by muslims across three continents. Much of that time, by-and-by, coinciding with entire centuries when the various Sultans and Caliphs were far better positioned (in material resources and safety) than anyone else to gradually transition towards secular humanism, being at once obscenely wealthy, militarily unmatched and possessed of the largest, most diverse and advanced store of scientific, legal and political thought in existence. Which they apparently never bothered browsing. By all rights, you'd think Arabia should have beaten Europe to the Enlightenment Age by about five hundred years, if they'd wanted to. Dun' wanna! Rather rape a few million East-Europeans to death. Toodles.

But, in SJW rhetoric, only those born the wrong race can be accused of racism. Only those of the wrong sex can be sexist. And those legitimizing oppression by their support for violent, sadistic, totalitarian primitive superstition about divine rights can never be called out on their collusion with villainy... unless they keep a spare bedroom at Balmoral, I guess.

You can stop calling the midwife now.

"You were talking, I was watching

You were looking at your new friends

You were coercing

Yeah you're the worst thing that ever happened to this party"

 

Simon Wilcox - Mother's Ruin

 

 

Weird as it may sound given my distaste for our innate plains-ape obsession over threats to women, our emotionality and our predilection for nonsensical superstitions, I found myself captivated by Call the Midwife's first season when PBS first aired it here in the states, regardless of it being hailed as a feminist mistresswork and based on the memoirs of a Jesus-freak who blathered so much about love as a cosmic force you'd think she'd lived at a "nunnery" instead of a nunnery. For as long as (supposedly) it still clung to the memoir's original material and tone in Season 1, the show worked admirably as a period piece focused on the concerns of its time and place.

It's a delivery bicycle, get it?

 

Interestingly though it does so by focusing on late '50s characters' own awareness of the passage of time. The endearingly caballine Chummy in particular seems a walking sequel to H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay and The Wheels of Chance. Generally though, unlike most period pieces which focus on feeding the audience points of contrast with the present the easier to foster a sense of superiority, Call the Midwife contrasted postwar society with the even paster past. Even cramped, vermin-infested tenements could be preferable to the abject poverty that preceded them, and hey, at least they closed the damn workhouses. And imagine affording an automobile, even if it is a ridiculous old jalopy. Plus a healthcare system actually struggling to get care to the poor instead of just letting them rot in the streets? What wondrous times.

By the time I got around to sampling latter seasons (when the stories had about as much to do with Jennifer Worth as with Jennifer Anniston) quality had dropped noticeably: themes and plots more contrived, acting more clownish, dialogue and editing looser and temporizing at every turn. Worse, its plots had obviously shifted anachronistically to feeding our politically correct racial/sexual narratives of the 2010s, mixed with tedious soap opera threads minutely tracking various characters' tedious lives. But I couldn't put my finger on exactly when the whole routine had gone stale, and so shrugged it off assuming season four or five would see Call the Midwife through its long-overdue cancellation. Gave it no further thought until running across it on Netflix last month when my jaw dropped at seeing eleven seaso - oh holy fiddlesticks* it's still running!

How? Why!?

Ugh, never mind.

At least it answered my old query: the show got dumbed down, instantly and violently, at the very start of Season 2. Aside from overextending the already lengthy birthing scenes, needlessly contriving a dislocated shoulder and turning a formerly short-tempered but dedicated senior nurse into a petulant bully, S2E1 also shows an abrupt escalation in male-bashing. Season 1 had shown little political agenda beyond applauding the nuns and indulging in a bit of maudlin sentimentality. Men could be remembered as kind old soldiers, young men struggling in the work force, heartless pimps, heroes, innocents or villains on a case by case basis with intrinsic value. It even acknowledged conflicts between women, notably in one death to eclampsia when a nervous mother-to-be skips her check-up due to verbal abuse by the gutter trash at the clinic. Turns out cramming a dozen hormonally challenged apes together into one room doesn't necessarily make for polite conversation.

After getting good press for showing a female viewpoint however, the show was re-tooled for female entitlement. Season 2 came out swinging with one woman complaining about her absentee husband** a father pimping his daughter (who "lived without friendship such a long time" on a ship full of men***) and browbeating her father for why it took him so long to give her the biggest cabin, plus a B-plot about a cartoonishly sputtering manic wife-beater - and of course his wife's only flaw is failing to run back to her mother - not parents mind you, but mother. And of course in a perfectly logical plot twist their apartment catches fire at the end. All that and more in one episode.

 

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me by now that the show's drop in quality went directly in hand with its descent into rabid chauvinism. As I've said before "propaganda is not art. It's psychological conditioning" - the more crass and repetitive, the better to beat reason into prosocial submission. Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra. But this 2013 flashback also serves as reminder that most of our current snowflake idiocy started with feminism, with the political lobby benefiting not only from the largest baseline of beneficiaries but from a class of victims instinctively pre-programmed to accept all abuse as part of their necessary sacrifice as providers and protectors of the self-appointed fairer sex.

 

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* Don't look at me like that, NUNS might read this!

** Never mind in the real world she'd bitch him out even harder if he lay around the house in case of labor, instead of laboring at pinching every penny for her benefit.

*** Reverse the polarity: a male character being written as weeping for having "lived without friendship such a long time" while being surrounded by women doting on him and lining up to fuck him. You could reasonably read suffering in that scenario... but no modern audience would, absent the feminist conceit.

Pssst... hey, why's the Goldbergs' kid a head shorter?

They went the extra mohel.

Meta-Averse (or: Stick It, Redux)

"Long story short, it was aaall a dream."
"Thank you [...] for making [dumping you] a little easier for me."

 

The Good Place S02E09 Best Self

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Spoilers follow for Gamedec and The 13th Floor. Actually even the epigraph might be a bit much. Though let's face it, both cases offer little to spoil.

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Funny. Apparently they made a fourth Matrix movie which I never even heard about because nobody gave a shit. Having been informed... I still don't. Does that tell you anything about the direction the whole cyberpunk routine has taken? Like maybe it's taken no direction because it's so routine?

 

I bashed Gamedec last week partly for so ineptly telegraphing its climactic last act grand reveal a quarter into its story. The second mention of "the tree" at the start of chapter 2, appearing mysteriously in random places beyond the bounds of game worlds, immediately triggered flashbacks to The 13th Floor, if not for their content then for their ineptitude in foreshadowing a big mystery about as mysteriously as your drunken uncle elbowing you in the ribs asking if you got his fart joke. But had Gamedec even managed more subtle presentation, that reveal would still be... a fart joke. As soon as the tree was confirmed as important I found myself mentally repeating "please don't go meta, please don't go meta" until the tale inevitably fell back on cyberpunk's most obvious, most gratuitously rehashed logical conclusion of the world itself being fake.

Except nobody's been surprised by that since March '99! At this point we've all been treated to that "twist" so many times over that even if we literally woke up tomorrow on the other side of a virtual reality machine, all you'd hear is eight billion yawns and "yup, saw it coming" in every language from Albanian to Swahili. A plot twist stops twisting once you've so assiduously hammered it flat!

But this is hardly just a cyberpunk problem, predating it in soap operas by some decades, to the point it's its own tired cliche. You might justifiably argue some difference between the low-brow "it was all a dream" cop-out and the postmodern metatextual, fourth wall breaking, audience participation routine, but for the moment let's just admit they've both simply gotten old. Hell, this schtick's been old for almost half a century. Retcons, amnesia, coma dreams, alternate universes, magical construct worlds, amnesia, evil clones, long-lost twins, amnesia, irony, post-irony, meta-irony, trans-irony, irony 2.0, hirony and Byrony and don't forget the amnesia, all such cheap tricks to dodge the burden of coherent causality have long needed a few decades' worth of pause from common usage in order to regain any clout. Gotta let 'em air out a little. "It was all a dream" faceplanted as infamously contrived even when Dallas pulled it back in the '80s. Just frikkin' STOP IT!

Of course, aside from laziness and incompetence, one must address the added dimension of feigned cleverness or depth, both on the part of writers and their degenerate dysgenic audiences. Declaring the world a mere fantasy allows writers to position themselves oh-so preciously above it all, never stooping to the naivete of those penning honest, engaging narratives (while also never actually publishing anything more thoughtful) and allows audiences to forego understanding any complex plot, symbolism or characterization in favor of feeling clever for dismissing storytelling as make-work filler. Oh, never mind the originality, nuance, insight or coherence of our first four chapters; they were never the "real" game all along.

So what exactly did I pay you for?

 

Feigning such deep thoughts also allows both the writer and audience to indulge in mysticism so shallow it would elicit eye-rolls from snake-fondling Pentecostals, in some hogwash about the human spirit.

"Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly [...] as you are undoubtedly gathering the anomaly is systemic, creating fluctuations in even the most symplistic equations"

- translation: "shit's nuts bro" puffed up to five minutes of bearded bloviation.

Whatever the motivation and appeal behind such gimmicks, their common crime (aside from trite repetition) is disengaging the audience from the story they're reading/watching/playing. It's harder to get invested in saving the world once you figure out that by lvl20 your character can just reboot WorldOS(tm) and defrag its hard drive. Even if the grand reveal is pulled off flawlessly, your now demonstrably irrelevant setting and characters will have added little to nothing to the overall conflict. For cyberpunk in particular, it's not like the idea of humans getting stuck in virtual worlds can't be included, so long as it's downplayed, merely an accepted element of the world, a possible threat to be faced, to be dealt with via the protagonists' techne and technology, and not some cosmic revelation. I seem to recall the Shadowrun cRPG adaptations treating it just as such. Torment: Tides of Numenera's cadre of experienced professional writers, despite working within a telepathy-riddled science fantasy setting, rather wisely treated the question of the world itself being fake as the demented ramblings of primitive cargo cults.

 

Examined from our vantage point several decades later, despite its popularity since the New Wave SF of the '60s this sort of "what is real" magical surrealism has rarely borne fruit even under the pen of Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick or Neil Gaiman... and the rest of you ain't Lem, Dick or Gaiman.

Give it a rest.

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P.S.:

I may as well admit I've just rehashed this post from 2018... but honestly, the issue has only grown more aggravating with time.

It's once again that magical time toward the end of most companies' fiscal year when the crawler bots come out to play. Awww yeah, index me like that big spammy daddy, I've been a naughty little ad-free data packet.

*pout*

Gamedec

"I could've been a whistle, could've been a flute
A real life giver, could've been a boot
I could've been a signpost, could've been a clock
As simple as a kettle, steady as a rock"

 

Nick Drake - One of these Things First

 

 

If anything makes my little lupine ears perk up, it's small-time developers promising to revolutionize cRPGs. Every time. No matter how many times I've gotten burned. Gamedec was even pushed hard by GoG, front page and center for months on end last year, but its launch was received tepidly at best in user reviews - and not without cause. Long story short, don't bother.

screw this, let's go pick pumpkins

Where to start?

Visually, less popular genres like isometric RPGs have benefited greatly from increased accessibility of mid-quality graphics in recent years, and Gamedec exemplifies the new standard of "good enough": pretty but not over-reaching, so you're not jazzed but also never feel any lack in their expressivity or immersiveness. Which makes all the more glaring any lack in what is actually expressed or immersed.

 

Storytelling premise:

You are a private detective solving cybercrimes among futuristic skyscrapers where everyone games in full-body suits with neural interfaces. Meaning from chapter to chapter you'll be jumping between your generic cyberpunk world into three "virtualia" (a sanitized S&M fetish world, a Farmville clone and a samurai MMO) which makes for some quaint whiplash moments meeting various players in multiple environments... or would if Gamedec had been written more skillfully, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Gameplay premise:

Mixing genres between adventure and RPGs, you interact with the environment via point-and-click clues (no physics or combat system) but also unlock four kinds of points via dialogue and advancement, invested in character skills unlocking more interactions. A laudable precept, as I've been arguing for years on this very blog for more choice-centered RPGs instead of score farming.

So where's the rub, bub?

1) Awkward, nonsensical, unfinished

"do not translate" - good advice to deduct

If they're demanding $30 for their product, they damn well better proofread it more carefully than I do my random babbling here. Worse, many of your inter[FILE NOT FOUND]actions depend largely on trial-and-error, despite GameDec's "Dec" conceit. For instance you advance through each chapter by gathering clues then selecting from several unlocked "deductions" to move the plot along.... but much of the time you simply have to pick a deduction, any deduction, then run around to every single NPC to check for new dialogue options. Chapter 1's alleyway puzzle gets repeatedly cited as having no particular rhyme or reason to when it unlocks its clutter of clickable clues, but it's far from the only one.

Chapter 4 (the samurai game) deserves special mention though. You're up against a "timer" where certain of your actions count toward a 15-tick limit before you need to appear before the boss NPCs to account for your progress. Sorry, did I say "certain"? I meant uncertain. Many actions add unadvertised ticks to your total (even merely LOOKING at some objects) rewards appear out of nowhere and you're forced to deal with a crafting system adding ticks whenever you try to fumble through a list of recipes... which amounts merely to forcing players to alt-tab to some online guide.

2) Unprofessional professions

 

 

After the opening cinematic, I thought, nice, let's catch and punish some cheaters. I shall be the hand of virtual justice! No rest, no excuses, no mercy, exterminate the filth!

But from the start the "profession" system standing in for RPG stats/skills/feats simply makes no sense. You should gain points by exhibiting your personality (aggressive/intuitive/analytical/empathetic) but professions tend to require points in every category, denying you any personality in favor of farming green points. I picked Self-Direction at character creation, but how exactly does that equate to my only available job being a social butterfly? Sigh... re-roll. In an echo of Torment: Tides of Numenera, Gamedec tries to do away with the old good/evil dichotomy and implement an original morality system... but gave too little thought to its implementation. Basically, all four skill trees (aside from being shallow to begin with) amount to cheating in completely interchangeable ways.

Also, this ostensible detective game underutilizes the analytical approach. The blue tree is about 1/3 green.

In one instance simply looking at the scenery gives you a red point. Was I just staring at clouds that aggressively?!?

Being asked what kind of music you prefer limits you to three choices split between blue or yellow, when music is one of the few topics providing easy justification for ANY answer.

The lack of meaningful choice extends to chapter conclusions as well. Chances are you'll know the right answer at the end of the Farmville quests, but it's too much of a pain trying to finagle dialogues into permitting you to accuse the culprit, and even after a dozen reloads there seems no way to both acknowledge the obvious answer AND side with what the devs decided is the "wrong" NPC... despite talking more sense than the official correct choice.

To top it off... your character advancement doesn't particularly matter, as you can't seem to fail. The extra dialogue options you unlock rarely do more than let you fast-forward past some interactions by cheating.

3) Incompetent writing

So: Gamedec is a facetious, linear, slapdash mess with a shallow, irrelevant skill system. Might it be redeemed by its storytelling?

Despite a decent ending... no, it is not.

Characters speak indistinguishably from each other, relying on the same mix of awkward, incongruous officiousness colored by random colloquialisms.

Dialogue trees, aside from being overstuffed with red herrings, also place many options out of order as in the image above. And no, I'm not particularly worried about spoilers there, since the game's own blurb on GoG openly reveals chapter 2's big plot twist.

One can't accuse the writers of laziness, given the scores of pages of text you can unlock fleshing out the setting, but most of that flavor text suffers from the same monotony and redundance.

Best not even mention the most comically bland fetish sadist murder ever portrayed in any medium. Think Tom&Jerry on a heart bed. On Valium.

One consistent bit of weirdness: who did they think their target audience was? Because I would have assumed a game about gaming is marketed to... gamers. People familiar with games. So why do NPCs feel the need to explain terms like DPS or RNG? ... or NPC? The more I played, the more I was reminded of watching an episode of CSI Cyber: purportedly topical commentary by and for people still seething over a brief brush with modernity decades prior. Even Gamedec's virtualia, boiled down, read like talking points by Jack Thompson: sex&violence, children in peril and heathen cults.

I might hold off on wholeheartedly bashing this embarrassing thirty-dollar mess for the last chapter, which does at least think a step or two past the point you assume it would end, exploring your adventure's multiple possible repercussions.

...

But the fact its grand reveal was painfully obvious FROM THE START OF CHAPTER 2 and even follow-up reveals get telegraphed a chapter in advance, this itself can count as damning praise.

 

4) Pandering

 

Can I trade that box in for some coherent dialogue trees?

Siege of Dragonspear. Deadfire. Wasteland 3. Wrath of the Righteous. Etc.

Etc.

Etc...

In games as in any creative medium across history, incompetence, laziness or profiteering will readily hide behind posturing as champions of a popular cause. (See previous post for a webcomic example.) It does seem though like in the field of cRPGs in particular, the last few years prove that the less confident a game's writers are about their work, the harder they'll lean on Social Justice Warrior crutches to deflect criticism; whether incapable of penning more than two or three endlessly reiterated stock characters as in Deadfire or they've stretched themselves much too thin with a hundred-hour campaign and can't integrate that many characters into their setting coherently, as in WotR.

If you're ever at a loss as to guilt and innocence, right and wrong in Gamedec, just remember the all-purpose FEMale chauvINIST mantra: "man bad, woman good" - always side with women against men.

That's what we call roleplaying now.

Also, gaze enraptured at the magnificence of our homosexuals. Does it not make you want to forget all about those typos and bugs and telegraphed plot twists and tangled dialogues to prostrate yourself before the developers and kiss their feet in praise for their support of homo-righteousness? I keep saying this, but it bears repeating: Fanaticism is, among other things, a refuge for the incompetent.

I also doubt it's any accident that a story ultimately presenting (like so much Caveman Science Fiction) an ultimately luddite warning against the abuses of scary technology, also strains so hard to pander to current narcissistic social fads in overcompensation for its reactionary leanings.

 

Anyway, unless like myself you suffer from some morbid interest in bad RPGs as object lessons, Gamedec's a waste of time and money.

Soul to Call Waiting

"Daintier, smarter, better dressed"

Rasputina - Antique High Heel Red Doll Shoes

 

 

A tenacious teenage traceuse joins a magical self-cutter, a hard-bitten mercenary who'll probably bite it in the last act to defend those more sympathetic, and a twenty-faced lying bitch who's too cute to criticize, all on a quest for demonic fog. Or maybe against demonic fog. I'm sure they'll figure it out eventually. Nah, screw all that, who needs plot when you've got lesbians?

I've actually mentioned Soul to Call a couple of times before, first for its demon-Apocalypse premise and second for its heroine's obligatory politically correct daddy issues. Unlike most good webcomics which only gradually grow into their potential through painstakingly amateurish fumbling, this one benefited from a forceful, memorable introduction of its world and core cast with well differentiated personalities and goals, not to mention unusually high-quality artwork. Too bad that in the intervening years it's degenerated into more of a case study in poor pacing.

As to why that is, the short answer's that the author got addicted to the woke-aid halfway through. It now advertises its pronouns. The long answer has more to do with marketability and profitability. Granted, those early chapters' quick pace carried the caveat of introducing too many phlebotina on rapid-fire, but these could have been more gradually fleshed out (demon types, rituals, etc.) afterwards. They were not. Soul to Call peaked back in 2017 shortly before page 400-ish with the resolution of its first boss fight. (Mind spoilers if you click forward or back.)

 

It spent the next ~300 pages mired in interpersonal drama, ditching the urban decay, improvised weapons and monster-dodging in favor of an all-human inhabited area expanding a bit on the core cast's backstories and introducing their party's bard. As character development goes, this was a necessary step and well-timed breather... until it started dragging... and dragging... repurposing two chapters to lament racism against colored(-eyed) people and to introduce purposeless bit players whose plot relevance could've been discharged in one page if not for the score of pages they needed to devote to BEING HOMOSEXUAL which is obviously highly relevant in a post-apocalyptic demonic drama.

Every professional author is always on the lookout for new ways to choke more filler down the audience's throat, whether to pad out word counts or run time or stall on a high note while those Patreon subscriptions keep trickling in. Florid descriptions or digressive subplots are time-honored favorites (see Dickens) as are romantic/sexual interludes. Movies have their lengthy establishing shots or Rashomony reiterations and flashbacks. In video games it's forcing reloads and damage sponge mobs. In superhero comics you can easily burn page after page through frame-by-frame pugilism. The current era of hashtag mobs merely offers a variation upon that theme: posturing as socially conscious by reiterating the endlessly reiterated stock moral high grounds like "prejudice is bad" with all the parochial ingenuousness of a 1990 "drugs are bad" Very Special Episode.

With Soul to Call having returned to advancing its action for a hundred pages to whet its audience's faltering appetite, I'd give even odds it might now spend another three hundred and four years watching chicks holding hands in the hallowed name of "representation" for lesbians, the neuroatypical and homeless ponies.

Keep on Patronizin'!

Foundation

"And of course Henry the Horse dances the waltz!"

The Beatles - Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite

(though you gotta love Eddie Izzard hamming this one up)

I did play (and thoroughly enjoyed) SimCity 2000/3000 back in their heyday, but for the most part city sims ain't my thing. Gave SC4 a pass after hearing about some of its TheSims-inspired "features", never entirely got into Settlers&co(pycats), and only really got back into the genre with Banished, Surviving Mars and especially that nippy delight Frostpunk. Thanks to them I've gotten to really enjoy the lower-pop, more survival-focused village simulators, so three years ago I also snagged Dawn of Man and Foundation during a sale for about the same price. While Dawn of Man, despite its glaring flaws, engaged me more than enough to make me feel guilty for underpaying, Foundation should count as my karmically-balancing rip-off.

 

Apparently my complaint about French games' aesthetic focus and mechanic failure extends to French-Canadians. I was intrigued by Foundation's main selling point of freeform expansion, which turned out to mean drawing your grain fields and wood chopping areas using an MS Paint airbrush tooltip, and expanding buildings by modular rooms/doors/decorations by snapping them onto each other. Quaint... but also, ultimately, adding nothing to gameplay that traditional building upgrades or grid selection wouldn't, no further choices or decision-making.

The flip-side of such malleability is of course precision. Villagers lay down their own roads between destinations, which can end up cutting needless chunks out of grain fields as in the lower right in that image. Building expansion suffers from space and accessibility concerns, as it's often unclear how much room you'll need or waste. At the intersection of those two problems, the populace also plop down houses haphazardly within the residential areas you paintbrush for them. End result? "Villager path blocked" has been by far the most frequent message I see, and several buildings' construction stalls inexplicably when builders just stop bringing resources in, as seen in the tooltip above.

 

Bugs aside, while this may be meant to convey "the organic aspects of urbanism" in the words of Polymorph Games' sales pitch, it would take a great deal more interconnection to yield the sort of meaningful adaptation to needs and wants (heat, water, defensibility, pastures, neighbours, availability of construction materials, light, superstitions about lucky and unlucky orientations, etc.) dictating the concatenated, conjoining sheds, walls and annexes visible in medieval villages of yore. As it stands, you're paying for a shallow implementation of paintbrushing and equally shallow algorithmic residential automation, both merely perfunctory to your core resource management tasks.

To shift attention away from these basic flaws, Foundation seems in the process of tacking on lots of achievements or "collect 100 wood" miniquests, plus a mildly promising three-faction reputation grind between the traditional preindustrial three estates, which nonetheless boils down to "pick one" in terms of game mechanics as far as I can tell. Sure, the standard elements are all there, resources to be harvested and stored, constructions to be constructed, and you can watch your little chibified NPCs walking from home to market and work... but then, none of that's new, and others like Banished or Dawn of Man have done it better without tacking on superficial non-features that only an art major would want. Through it all, I just kept wanting to ask: why is your show on trampoline?

Another one for the Bozo tag.