We’d tucked into a dark room at The Witcher 3's Australian distibutor and watched, hands to ourselves, three CD Projekt beards play through 30 minutes of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Occasionally they’d say something redundant, like “This guy here, he is a big bad guy.” They had travelled all the way from Poland for this. It was so underwhelming, and I felt for them. Token questions were asked, token answers were given, and it was such a shame because where they are from and how it has informed The Witcher series to date – and especially The Witcher 3, by the mythical looks of its many titular hunts – is anything but token. It is fascinating, and it is unfamiliar.
The former is always desirable, the latter particularly so in video games. The two powerhouses of video game narrative cuisine – the US and Japan – have served up so many dishes over the decades they are starting to overflavour them. Our taste buds are dead. Even a modern military FPS made by Swedes can’t go five, 10 minutes without a hearty dose of F--- Yeah America. JRPGs now compared to JRPGs then (you know when) are a stark comparison between squealing fan-service and reality too abstract to say what it means. In the West, there must be black and white struggle with ultimate glory at the end. In the Far East, there must be nebulous grey subtext with maybe something happening at the end, not sure. We get it by now. When these two worlds collide we also get a complete mess like Final Fantasy XIII, but in the East of Europe, it is the art of cope and the reaches of a landscape that will never be fully explored or understood that come together.
Where America looks to the bombast of Bay-ism and Japan covets cartoonish bosoms, Eastern Europe likes books.
Where America looks to the bombast of Bay-ism and Japan covets cartoonish bosoms, Eastern Europe likes books. The Witcher 3’s menaces are ripped straight from post-medieval folklore most will know little of, and The Wild Hunt itself is its myth of the dead and gone’s unseen epilogue. All throughout Europe, stories have always taught, stories have always healed. Where do you think most of Fables (and by extension, Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us) hired its cast?
4A Games’s Metro 2033 and Last Light are based on the frozen-over dystopia of Dmitry Glukhovsky’s novels. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. family borrows so liberally from the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic novella that GSC Game World owes them a hamper of Antirad every second Friday. This part of the world is a storied place, it being much, much older than gaming’s two most dominant territories. Eastern Europe has been damaged so thoroughly by human history its collective existential philosophy is unknowable by the standards of the rest of the world, though the body does not follow the fortitude of the mind. Japan may be the only functioning post-apocalyptic society in the world, but Eastern Europe’s apocalypse is perpetual. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s hunger and malnutrition is conspicuous, and the fictional country of Arstotska in Papers, Please is not subtle about the site of its fiction. So the uniquely articulate and bleak cultural outlook of Eastern Europe’s war and peace, crime and punishment can be empathetically understood: The end was naturally inevitable, and it is happening without end. It was a bang and a whimper, and it is the ‘now’ of self-destruction that obsesses. This is where people are at their very best and their very worst. At their most honest. The secrets of the future past don’t mean much anymore. There is only the weight of the world’s cold trail and the love men and women find in hell; where you end and others begin in a stolen silence. It is freedom in captivity, the communist notion of the capitalist dream. Embittered and pessimistic, yeah, but there is always a mountain in the distance. Your legs are broken, but you are not dead yet, and we are going to get to the peak.
Sike: The freshness of its air is also cursed. The mountain in Ice-Pick Lodge’s award-hording 2005 psychological mindsex Pathologic is called “the Abattoir.” Before it is a polyhedral fortress where children hide, and next to it is an insane asylum called “the Apiary.” In a rare examination of the present tense, it is (literally) about the plague, not the failure of its cure. More than that, it is about Russia. Every district and building of note is named for body parts and human biology, and they are all lethally sick. Some years later circa 2008, Ice-Pick would claim another Olympic gold (with expired chocolate inside) in mire-swimming for Eastern Europe and follow up with The Void. It won Most Original Game at the Russian Game Developers Conference in 2007 for good reason. Like so much great art, it’s about death. Sort of. It’s about the twilight of death, the space between breathing and mouldering. That place is the titular Void. Its sustenance is colour, and there’s a famine of monotone on. Women are distant, naked things, and men are deformed and bestial. The allusions of its obtuseness are so obvious it hurts. That is the real beauty of games from countries that breed naturally stoic people, this fear as inverted faith.
The Witcher family could have just as easily come from Russian hearts, but definitely not American ones.
What countries actually make up Eastern Europe is a subject of constant and sometimes sore debate, but it is in the nature of what they create that they find a clear kinship. The Witcher family could have just as easily come from Russian hearts, but definitely not American ones. There is something ramshackle yet bottomless there that echoes the stoic cities of Kiev and Krakow, that is in the meta inscription of the Metros and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s; an omnipresent dread everyone has learned to live with. Their games are slow affairs, often dated in presentational respects, but they are the heavy scenes Call of Duty’s one million patriotic explosions and Final Fantasy’s unfeasible haircuts have given up on playing out. It’s about the cash and the girls now. Eastern Europe’s gaming industry has a while to go before it can forget itself like that, but it’s getting there. Do yourself and video games a favour and back Ice-Pick Lodge to remake Pathologic for a wider audience if and when they deliver on last year's Kickstarter rumours.
And never, ever play Stalin vs. Martians: The Unknown Pages of the Second World War.
Follow Toby on Twitter: @jane_tobes
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