EndLand

"I squirm into you, now I'm in your gut

I fell into you, now I'm in a rut"

Marilyn Manson - Deformography

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"The same things I've written a thousand times before. After all, an act can lose meaning if you do it often enough."

 

I'd hoped to have more to say about Strangeland but in the end I find myself resenting its ending more than admiring its high points. I will say that despite its initial setup of a man feeling responsible for a woman's death, it didn't quite go the standard "man bad; woman good" route, and it's rare to find any form of entertainment these days not openly trumpeting feminist male-bashing. Unfortunately it does slide into an older version.

Of course, it would be hard to say much about Strangeland in the first place due to its oft-noted brevity. In fact its GoG summary lists most interactable characters and despite (unlike most adventure games) touting some built-in replay value, you'll make most of your decisions during the first zone. Which prompts the first question: how short is too short?

Before online distribution, the answer was obvious: game boxes cost $50 off the store shelf (expansion packs $35) and contained a predetermined quantity of escapism, long enough to ensure you didn't feel the need to buy from other publishers but also just barely short enough to leave you wanting more of the same. A "game" meant a couple weeks' worth of evenings. Then came multiplayer replayability, endless games, the return of quasi-randomized roguelike questing, and multiple play modes (e.g. strategic overland plus personal mission-running) blowing the roof off the high end of that scale. So why do we still prop up the mandatory low end?

 

Absent the overhead of boxing, shipping and storing physical disks, and given the evident accessibility of modern game engines (seems everything I play now carries the Unity logo) the minimal unit price to justify production has been rapidly dropping. Granted, emphasizing play time over sheer sales figures made a better measure of quality, but of course this can itself be abused by designers (especially startups or dilettantes) padding out their campaign's length with ludicrous timesinks and stalling. "Hours played" has recently grown nearly as meaningless a metric as the number of players in "free"-to-play games. Strangeland feels short, especially to those of us who'd hoped for a second Primordia, but it pointedly automates a repetitive task as soon as you demonstrate you've grasped the concept of mouths instead of forcing you to trudge back and forth, and mocks you for being willing to sit in place waiting for a slow reward. Why not pay $10-15 for a condensed dose of recherché psycho-symbolism you'll remember more keenly than you would a hundred hours' worth of Callin' Duties? As a fan of science fiction, that genre most prone to hard-hitting, thought-provoking short stories, I can't help but think our expectations are to blame for a perceived lack here, and depriving us of much potential interactive quality brevity.

Moving on, this is where things have to get spoilery, not only for Strangeland but for the postapocalyptic furry comic Endtown. For whatever my evaluation's worth, they're both worth an unspoiled sit-through, though neither is world-shaking work.

Aside from constantly retconning its cosmology, Endtown (coincidentally enough) has a major problem with endings. The author has set up some intricate intrigues (the milk and meat storylines starting 2012/10/25 and its followup 2016/12/28 being particularly well developed) stemming from his furries' physical and psychological tendencies and internecine squabbles, yet instead of tying up each plot's threads he lops them all off via some nonsensical wish-granter or other deus ex machina. While personally I was most annoyed by the spaceship that runs on feels, the culprit is usually that space wizard effortlessly invalidating all others''s influence. At the same time, formerly competent, driven (or at least cooperative) characters tend to inexplicably devolve to naive, childishly labile versions of themselves, the better for their newfound incompetence to make room for external salvation or damnation.

Which brings us back to Strangeland:

"You have one wish left"

"I wish to know who I am"

"Funny. That was your first wish."

No, that dialogue is actually paraphrased from one of Planescape: Torment's more famous anecdotes. But, given that Strangeland's writer's a well-recognized Torment fanboy and the protagonist's constant deaths to advance the plot recall the Nameless One without fail, I can't help but also question the "know thyself" angle. Though Strangeland's "good" ending ostensibly has you embracing your own worth, it reminded me of nearing the end of an Endtown storyline, the heroes having grappled with demons both inner and outer, conquered existential threats and existential despair, only for a space wizard to swan into the picture and snatch up control of the situation, denying them their well-earned victory. Admittedly, it works better for Strangeland's stricter focus on psychology, as mental disorders of most varieties are so difficult to overcome precisely because they turn all your effort against yourself, raising the stakes for external symbols as lifelines.

 

I'll also admit I'm mostly bothered by exactly that one line about his lover's eyes showing him his bright self. In real life, viewing a man through the female gaze yields precisely Strangeland: a world in which the man is ugly, insane, dangerous and broken by default and in need of a yoke and muzzle (or straightjacket) his life worth an order of magnitude less than that of his tribe's females, the value of his existence defined entirely by his potential utility as provider and protector to a woman and her offspring. I can't decide whether to call Strangeland's interpretation naive or insidious, but it rings painfully hollow against realistic observation of the human condition.

 

Torment's best ending packed you off to eternal war by yourself... but as yourself, your full self. Other noteworthy games from that same period like V:tM-Bloodlines also allowed for individual endings, striding into the (proverbial) sunset finally free of various factions' machinations. In Strangeland, after spending puzzle after puzzle struggling for individual integrity, piecing together my own shattered psyche, being thrown a "good ending" bone for embracing an external influence (even symbolic) betrays the player-as-protagonist's efforts. This "freedom is slavery" reinterpretation reeks of recent decades' cultural decay.

In short, I decided stabbing myself is my canonical lycanthrope-approved ending to Strangeland. I am worthless... but <I> am worthless.

To bring this back around to my earlier point, Strangeland is a short story, and short stories depend heavily on Poe's single effect. Ruin the ending, ruin the effect, ruin $5 of the $10 story instead of 5/50. In turn, this throws a new light on Endtown's ruining various character arcs and intrigues by needlessly contrived endings. If one were to view Endtown as a single over-arching metaplot, as the story of Aaron Marx and his magic powers toying with a postapocalyptic furry farm, it might hold together better. But that's not what you find yourself reading on a page by page basis. As each new protagonist's struggle is invalidated by each new deus ex machina, each short story is ruined in turn. Endtown becomes a chain of abortions, of setups fizzling out again and again, character development, future history and phlebotina all tortured into nonsensical conclusions that the beating of that hideous heart ain't so bad since we invented pacemakers.