Words have power. Stories, even told through games, have power.
Last post I introduced the NWN module/game Excrucio Eternum. But now I want to talk about why it tops my “best games” list.
First: the protagonist character you play? The dialogue choices given to you for your responses can have attitude. Gone are the clear-cut “this choice is evil and this choice is good” tropes of Neverwinter Nights or many other RPG-based games of the time. You can display some semblance of personality, and play as you like; which means, you can feel more as if the character you’re playing, is an aspect of yourself. (If, of course, you want to do so.)
And as you play, you quickly find the puzzle isn’t just in finding out what happened to your character; you learn what happened (captured and brainwashed) and who the ‘main villain’ (psychiatrist who uses magic to prolong suffering in patients) is. But here’s the trick; the good Doctor Mortis is afraid of death and pain. So much so, that that is the reason why he is prolonging the suffering of others; through a psych link to seven patients, he is effectively giving himself a constant series of immunizations. He is effectively invulnerable.
Mortis, in Excrucio Eternum.
Break the links, and you break his invulnerability, and you can confront him.
‘Breaking the links’ can mean helping the patients deal with their issues: or it can mean destroying the patients to break the connection with Mortis.
Thus begins a story of confronting fears, despair, divisions, objectification, responsibility, and so much more. Some of these aspects might resonate more to you than others: one of the characters builds himself up with lies and fantasies, leaving a crew to die with their boat engulfed in flames, and fled from his family later on, refusing to take responsibility. Another character represses a memory of her beloved brother poisoning her almost fatally, using her loyalty to him to pursue his own research even if it kills her. One character is so traumatized that she hides and believes herself as a sort of pet; after all, she can’t be hurt if there is no independent existence to hurt or to feel hope or pain. A writer/poet character is afflicted with aphasia, which leads to her despair and frustration.
This is a module that encourages you to explore fears, insecurities, lies, hopes, and definitions.
Other games do this, if even only for a little while. After all, as Ubisoft wrote in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations: “Who are we but the sum of our memories? We are the stories we tell ourselves!”
What are the stories you tell?