In excitement for Fading Afternoon I dug up something I wrote about Arrest of a stone Buddha a year or two ago.
At the beginning of Arrest of a stone Buddha you mark a date on the calendar. Then the game cuts to a church where you get up from your seat and are instructed to shoot a man who is praying.
I felt like I understood the concept of the game early on. You're living out the hitman fantasy. You kill droves of people in setpiece locales while maintaining a cool demeanor. There are short scenes with your handler, an old army friend, who tries to make idle conversation but you maintain an emotional distance and are just there for your next target.
Between jobs you get to further the cool guy image with button combinations to put on sunglasses, cross your arms, and smoke. You can press a button to put your hands in your pockets as you stroll through 1970's France. It's a certain kind of attention to mood through player action that I really haven't experienced much of in games. I've seen this kind of thing played out in cutscenes or forced walking segments where the game takes control of the camera and points you towards a set piece or your character does a unique animation that you have no control over. But there's something about choosing to press the buttons to be the tough guy taking the elevator to the roof, crossing your arms as you wait, then lighting a cigarette and looking out over the city that really stood out to me. These purely aesthetic verbs describe a majority of your time outside of assassinations.
While I was enamored by the novelty, after a few days it was time for another job. The action here is a kind of interesting puzzle that I have a hard time pinning down due to my lack of experience with games like this. You pick off a single target and then have to navigate to your escape vehicle as hoards of enemies coming in from either side of the screen and limited ammo. You get more ammo by disarming enemies but you can only do that if they're close enough. I never quite got a hang of how exactly your health worked but once a person starts shooting at you it seems only about one or two more shots before you go down. So there is an kind of interesting mix of wanting to let people get in close to take their gun but if you let too many people pull out their weapon you're going to be facing down too many guns to effectively take them all out before you take a bullet. Throw in enemies that walk at you while aiming and rifle men who stick to the edges of the screen and you have a little puzzle that requires some reactive thinking. The controls favor lengthy transition animations over responsiveness, but you get a cool feeling pulling off a maneuver to twist around and fire off a quick shot at an enemy behind you.
So that's the loop. Take out a target, shoot through dozens of people, make your escape, mill about France. It was an effective formula for a few cycles but I soon began to notice a shift take place. Your character complains about having insomnia which leads to him requiring pills to sleep through the night, though he will only take them after 6pm. There are roughly two in-game days between jobs and each day is about 24 minutes in real time. This leaves mandatory stretches of time where you are left to your own devices. Maybe you go to the theater but that just amounts to sitting in a dark room until the lights come on. The museum is a series of blurry images hung on the wall for you to stare at. You can pass some time sleeping with someone but you will undoubtedly still have more time to kill. At this point the illusion had worn away some. I wasn't as enamored by picking a new jacket and sunglasses, I checked my watch often to see how much time until I could sleep, I was skipping as much time as possible to get to the next job.
Then I would do the next job and was right back to having nothing to do.
Around the time that the cycle of violence and mundanity was beginning to wear on me a conversation with the handler character began to set things into place for me.
"How do you cope with all this?"
"Work"
"What about when there's no work?"
Yes, the deconstruction of action tropes has been done very effectively in several other places. But at this point I found Arrest of a stone Buddha a very interesting game exploring depression as well. I had become disconnected from the activities I previously enjoyed or thought were cool. All of them had become hollow despite nothing really changing. Now I saw no point in doing anything as the cycle continued. When I had to go buy more cigarettes it was a brief moment of excitement because it was something new but then I returned to waiting around until the next job and even then the jobs were beginning to lose their appeal as I shot my way through the same waves of enemies. After a mansion shootout the date I selected at the beginning of the game appeared on screen.
The main character sat on his bed like most days but instead of being able to get up the only buttons that did anything are the aim button and the shoot button.
Something that can happen with media about depression or hardship is a lack of contrast. If everything is oppressive and horrible it can slip into morose or cynical trappings that leave the work difficult to empathize or identify with. But by taking something initially exciting and breaking it into a repeating cycle in a way that forces you to confront boredom and questions of purpose Arrest of a stone Buddha not only feels like an effective examination of genre tropes but also the cycle of depression.
You can find Arrest of a stone Buddha on Steam and Nintendo switch.