Parker Posey's Mouth

Pouring snot in the wound.

This week I've been playing Meet Your Maker in open beta. It's the hot new game about traps that every trans girl will love!

Fr, the beta is pretty great. I'm having fun with both designing deathtraps and being deathed by them (the traps.) It doesn't have a great balance between the two, however.

As easy and fun as building them is, the real fun is watching others explore and try to puzzle them out. But my own deathtraps don't seem to get many visitors, which deflates the fun of making them. I imagine nothing more rewarding than knowing that my design worked. I fooled them! I got em! The replay feature seems like the absolute most critical tool in this game's arsenal, and I'm just sorry so few people have been fed to my machines. Maybe that's just a me problem, or a beta problem, or a progression problem, but it's been days and I've only had a few takers (none of whom have stuck around long enough to find the secret tomb!) so the idea that I could focus on building over raiding and just passively farm income from dead adventurers seems pretty suspect to me.

On the other hand, raiding is a super fun challenge of awareness, pattern recognition, and retention, interspersed with bouts of real panic/genius when a brand new trap setup you've NEVER seen before appears. I appreciate a good death in this game. As much as I feel like a chump when I get killed by simple traps I just forgot to pay attention to on a second or third attempt, I feel triple blessed when something truly unexpected or unique happens, and I die horribly. Sometimes seeing a trap go off as planned is more rewarding than shutting it down would be, and while the meta seems to be teetering toward guards over traps right now, it's only a matter of time before someone thinks of a new trap combo that stuns and amazes me. Honestly, I wouldn't recommend watching more than a little bit of a stream of this game since the fun of raiding is learning the instincts you need to survive and then blundering into a new situation that requires a new instinct to develop. The surprise and tension of the raid are golden. The rewards aren't so much. It's grindy. And that's where the raiding/building balance diverge.

Once you understand the economy it becomes clear that you can only really focus on one or the other. Better kit for you means a hypothetically easier time with raiding. Better kit for your outpost hypothetically means more dead raiders to farm from. But the rate you gain the resources means you can only afford to invest in developing one or the other, and in my limited experience with the beta, building requires more investment for essentially no payout, while raiding requires an equal investment for upgrades that, so far, don't seem worth the cost. I've been doing fine enough without character investments, only really struggling with guard-centric deathtraps due to lack of recoverable ammo. I could fix that one shortcoming, or I could make a trap work better, but I can't do both, and either way I'm just going to have to grind up the resources by raiding. A lot of it. I'm not a fan of grinding, even when the payoff is less obtuse, and this so far has been my biggest complaint with the beta. It's a beautiful game mired in some unfortunate grind.

If I do have another problem though it's in subtle aspects of the setting. It's pretty well written, and very pretty to look at in spite of it's bleakness, but the setting is just a little too pain-centric for my tastes. Yes, it's a post-apocalyptic genepunk game about you and a million of your clones dying in insane Rube Goldberg devices, and that I'm totally cool with. Love 2 die. Dissolve me in acid Chimera-Mommy. It's everybody else I worry about. Other than co-oping with other players, the only other people you meet or interact with are your advisors - cyborg-clones of experts in various highly specialized tasks, like building traps, who you level up by recovering compatible genetic material (genmat) for. And the Chimera - a vaguely humanoid thing in a tank, that you feed the gene-repaired clone advisors to, in the hopes that it will eventually unlock a cure for the hyperplague and revive human kind as it was before all the genepunking and such. They're all unique characters, with good to excellent voice work and intriguing bits of chatter for you. And they all make me so sad.

I'd love these advisor characters a lot more if I was confident that they were both allowed and physically able to leave their chairs. I myself am chronically disabled, and it makes the issue uncomfortable for me to think about. I know I could always be worse, and for me, part of the experience is hoping that it will always be better for others. I suppose the advisors' seemingly miserable existence is part of the story being told about the sacrifices humanity will have to make if (when) one of the litany of apocalyptic situations we aren't solving right now comes to a head. I can't blame it for that, it works in terms of the narrative. And the narrative mostly justifies the setting and mechanics as they are. I just can't help but feel that I'd enjoy the game more if the people around me didn't make me, the player, feel so morose about the human condition, and then get juiced and fed to the Chimera tank after every couple of raids. They don't seem to mind. Or at least their replacement clones don't. But I've never seen video game hub support characters as intensely aware of the profound monotony of their implied lives. And last I checked, not even dark souls has ever had shopkeepers who know that their lifespan is measured in minutes, as part of an endless and painful cycle of death and rebirth.

And then there's the sub-clones. An infinite supply of troubling Strogg-like creatures used as guard monsters in deathtraps, which are both rad as hell, and also morally despicable. The thing I like about transhumanism is the opportunity for betterment, and the idea of voluntary transformation toward and enabling that goal. The thing that makes alien monsters like the Strogg or the Borg stand out as effective horror monsters is the obvious inhumanity and the compulsive nature of the transformation. These poor things though? They're some kind of uncanny valley, where, they were never fully formed living thinking creatures, but they presumably COULD have been. They were built to perform functions that robots should have, but there isn't enough material for either fully formed human animals, or fully constructed machines to do their job. According to the advisors (who are at least nominally volunteers for their clone-borg existence) the sub-clones are made with the minimum amount of genmat possible (it being the most valuable resource in the world,) and you're explicitly told by the advisor responsible for them that it's a mercy to them to kill the things. Which suggests he is deeply ashamed of their existence at least, or worse, that they have a semblance of feeling in their mishappen bodies. Maybe it's misplaced sympathy, in-world or out of it, but I don't really see why they couldn't have just been machines instead of being made literally sub-human (their names can't be a coincidence). I mean, I'M the one making them, aren't I? I'm also the one hacking them to pieces with a sword. The implications of all that are an ethical minefield I can only even consider walking because the game's justification for their existence is "we should never have been driven to do this, and damn the old world for forcing us to such desperation." But this is what you're signing up for when you volunteer(?) to save the human genome in Meet Your Maker. If I were faced with this prospect in real life, I'd probably say "to hell with the human genome then."

I feel badly for these characters. Which is compelling in a way. And while that level of emotional impact was an unexpected and genuinely impressive feat for videogame writing (not to mention the writing of a not particularly story-driven videogame, like this) it's also kind of a bummer. That's always the fun part of artfully made games. Or films, books, what have you. You can get great writers, actors, modellers, etc. to make your game a bummer. I both love and hate that this happens. There's a conversation to be had about player agency in storytelling and whether it's fair or appropriate to face players in an interactive setting against an unchanging 'bad state' of the world, but that'd be a huge digression. The devs could've easily made this same game with a generic fantasy style setting, or a dozen other settings to justify the design choices, and they chose to write thought provoking sci-fi instead. An argument could be made that building ancient burial tombs or deadly wizard dungeons would be just as much fun without the bummer reality, but would I (or anyone) have this much to say about it? Yes, I find all of this troubling to think about. But this game left me with things to think about, which is more than can be said for most games ever produced.

I know that for me, continuing in this game world past the beta is going to depend largely on how much my actions within it seemingly help these poor souls. I want what they want - for their nightmare existence to end happily. I'm willing to work toward that. But I'm not so much interested in grinding up points to unlock more points grinders to grind up points better. And I know that whether the story delivers on any of the innumerable questions it poses, if you like either building or crawling dungeons, this game fucking rules at those things.