halcyon weeks

Fall of Porcupine came out a few days ago, on June 15. It's a video game with a narrative focus, but it has a few minigames interspersed here and there. On the Steam page, the story is advertised to highlight an "unhealthy healthcare-system", to "expose social injustice and structural problems".

More bluntly, though, between the 2D walking sim gameplay, the setting in a small town, the focus on social issues, and the cute, paper-doll-esque art style, it's very obviously mimicking Night in the Woods. And though I cannot read the minds of the developers, based on everything else about the game, I have to assume that said developers were hoping everyone else would make that connection, for various reasons.

I have played the game through to the end credits, checking a few side dialogues here and there, but not all of them. But it was enough to present my verdict.

The game is bad.

And not "bad" in just the sense of being "not entertaining" or "not thoughtful". In my view, it enters into outright harmful territory.

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As its own game

I cannot really review Fall of Porcupine as its own game, separate from NitW, because too much of it is wrapped up in NitW. It copies NitW. It responds to NitW. It is impossible to play it without seeing everything it takes from NitW. It would not exist without NitW.

For the record, I am not against copying other artists. It's all part of the grand tapestry of inter-communication that all art involves, and I believe a big part of developing your own voice as an artist comes from taking influence from others that came before you. I even believe it's possible to base the entire foundation of your work on a single other artist's work as a means of exploring what, exactly, is different about your own voice.

Also, frankly, I think NitW is an excellent game to take inspiration from. It's a groundbreaking game in many ways, and there's a lot to study and learn from it. More importantly, it uplifts the types of voices and stories that need to be heard, and if other people with similar stories are inspired by it to come forward and tell their own tales, even if it's in a similar way, I'm all for it.

Fall of Porcupine is not that kind of inspired story. It doesn't build on NitW. Rather, it takes NitW and breaks it down.

What it does and doesn't take from NitW

In a certain sense, Fall of Porcupine takes a lot of things from Night in the Woods, to an almost comical degree. If you were to remove any element from the game that had connections to NitW, including individual plot points, you wouldn't have anything left over.

Particular things I noticed that reminded me of NitW:

• A three-act structure where each act consists of three days
• Each day starts with a segment where you can explore the town and talk to various residents, leading to goofy conversations or Moments of Wisdom (and each resident has their own mini-arc to follow)
• Each day ends with a required segment that furthers the plot and usually involves doing a minigame of some sort
• Evenings where you have to choose between doing something with one friend or doing something else with the other friend, you can't do both
• The second act ends with a fall festival
• Separately, at one point one of your friends invites you to watch a drama troupe, and it turns out they're missing a member and you have to fill in for them
• One elderly resident who tells fantastical tales of the past
• Weird dream sequences
• You can jump on things you're not really supposed to jump on

I'm probably forgetting some things, or not mentioning certain things because they're omnipresent and sort of hard to describe (like the art style, or aspects of the setting, or the way that characters talk to each other).

The thing is, all these kinds of things that made NitW what it is... they were there for a reason. One way or another, every element in the game tied back to one of the game's central messages. It's so densely packed with things like that that I can't exactly go over all of them in a single review, particularly a review that's about a separate game, but let's go over a few examples.

In NitW, there's a character you can talk to who tells you stories about the past (through the medium of constellations) because all of those stories symbolically represent leftist philosophy or current events happening in town. In Fall of Porcupine, a cute old lady tells you stories about gnomes living her house, because that's kind of similar to something NitW did.

In NitW, Mae has weird dream sequences that involve figures of ancient gods, tapping into several themes at once: The history and stories of her town that have been overwritten over time by capitalist modernization and gentrification, wrestling with religion itself, wrestling with broader themes of existentialism and one's place in a universe that's overflowing with death, and Mae's own issues with largely untreated mental health and the impact it has on her waking life. In Fall of Porcupine, you have weird dream sequences with goofy talking flowers because that's kind of similar to something NitW did.

In NitW, you can jump on fences and rooftops and telephone wires partly because Mae is an aimless scoundrel who has been given no direction by broader society because she comes from a town that's dying and that broader society is, in large part, just trying to forget exists, but also partly to illustrate that when you take the time to explore all the nooks and crannies of a place that most people don't think to explore, you'll find life still living there and experiencing interesting stories, much like the whole town itself is a living thing in a forgotten and abandoned corner of the country. In Fall of Porcupine, you can jump on desks and shit because that's something you could do in NitW. You are an intern studying to be a fucking doctor and you can jump on the fucking hospital beds.

And like, to some extent, I'm not even especially surprised, right? As soon as Night in the Woods originally came out and I started seeing reviews for it, it was really obvious to me that the average gamer was just not even going to think of engaging the game on these more symbolic and metatextual levels. And although that kind of thing is often frustrating to me on a personal level, it's not really something I can fairly criticize, it's not something most people would be skilled in or be interested in being skilled in, and I don't think they should be. They can still enjoy the game in their own ways.

To the average gamer, all NitW did was create an Aesthetic. They may not understand why all the components of that aesthetic are there--in fact a lot of them probably don't even assume that there are "reasons" for the aesthetic--but they do understand that it's an Aesthetic, and they understand that they like the Aesthetic and want to see more of it. Well, Fall of Porcupine has more of that Aesthetic, for better or worse. It's the only thing it takes from NitW, but it has it.

And I think, if it were just that, then I wouldn't have thought much else of the game. I would've played it, said "Oh, it's trying to copy NitW even though it doesn't actually get NitW, that's kinda disappointing" and left it at that. Or maybe I would've enjoyed it just for having pleasant music and cute characters; there was a point in Fall of Porcupine where I thought that's how I was going to feel about it.

But it goes a bit deeper than that.

The politics

Night in the Woods is a leftist game, but it is subtly leftist. It's leftist between the lines, it's leftist only within all the symbolism I mentioned earlier. Since the average person overlooks that symbolism, they also end up overlooking the leftism, and that was obvious in the reviews for NitW, too.

But rest assured, the message of NitW is leftist. It's a story about people who have been abandoned or outright thrown to death in order to benefit capitalist interests, sometimes by the same people who are trying to undo the negative effects of capitalism. It's about how the crumbling of infrastructure and livelihoods is the result of trying to appease those monetary interests, and the only way to fight back is to unite with each other and literally fight back.

The message of Fall of Porcupine... is not leftist. That shouldn't be a surprise, given how much of NitW it ignores in favor of copying its surface-level traits.

However, it does try to have a message. Or, at least, it could be argued that it's trying to.

...I don't know how to talk about this without spoiling the story of the entire game, so if you care about that for whatever reason, I guess you can skip the rest of this review. But frankly, I don't respect Fall of Porcupine enough to feel like it deserves being unspoiled. And even if you wanted to try enjoying it just as a story, it ends up not making any sense anyway, so personally I think you might as well keep reading so you can spare yourself the trouble.

So, a brief summary of the story:

1. Our main character, Finley, in an intern at a hospital, studying to be a doctor. While chasing an escaped patient into the abandoned medical ward on the top floor of the hospital, he sees blood on the floor and a pile of documents on a bed. Shortly after finding the patient, he's knocked unconscious by a pile of boxes falling on top of him. He takes a few days to recover at home before returning to work.
2. The above plot point is mostly forgotten for a while, except for one point where Finley talks about the documents to his nurse friend Karl, who was the one who found him unconscious. Karl says there weren't any documents up there when he checked.
3. A pipe breaks in the abandoned ward, causing water to leak onto the lower floors, landing on one patient in particular who has pneumonia. This will come up later.
4. There's some weirdness going on with the hospital management where they're talking about how people might start to comment on the state of the hospital, and if any media tries to approach the hospital staff, said staff should void making comments and just bring questions directly to management.
5. There's some general commentary about how the hospital will sometimes cut costs to save money, and that the ward on the top floor was abandoned because of these cost-saving measures (they couldn't afford to maintain the infrastructure).
6. There's general grumblings among the crankier members of town that the hospital is actively bad for people, rushing treatment and sending people home in worse shape than when they went in.
7. This criticism hits a boiling point when the pneumonia patient dies. She was also old and weak in general, but the town blames the hospital for negligent treatment due to cut costs and crumbling infrastructure (e.g. leaking pipes).
8. The town gathers in front of the hospital to protest the hospital itself. Inside the hospital, Finley talks with various doctors who talk about how doctors do the best they can, and treatment doesn't always work, and the best they can ever do is bring people back to "normal" anyway, and some people just don't understand that and it's part of the struggle of being a doctor.
9. (Also, at one point Finley himself says that everyone passes on eventually, and similarly, it is also the fate of all buildings to crumble eventually. Nothing anyone can do about the buildings I guess)
10. Finley happens to stumble across the same patient from the beginning of the game, and confirms that the patient saw documents in the abandoned ward, too. Despite the fact that the patient is senile, Finley and his coworkers decide that this is enough evidence to justify breaking into the hospital records room and looking around, just, you know, in a general kind of way.
11. Finley and crew discover a shelf where a bunch of old bills and records have been removed, but they don't know what this means. In any case, they need to get back to work, because all of a sudden basically everyone in town is sick with a life-threatening illness, and it's filling the hospital quickly.
12. Since the hospital is close to reaching full capacity, to the point they might have to turn patients away, nurse friend Karl decides to clean out the abandoned ward and open it up for use.
13. Finley stumbles across a conversation between the head physician and one of the other doctors, where the head physician admits to having been part of a plan by one of the hospital's managers to change funds and rulings in order to siphon money out of the hospital. The head physician regrets being part of it, though he was blackmailed into it.
14. There's no time to think about that, though, because the previously-abandoned ward explodes and is now on fire, and the entire hospital is crumbling as a result. There's a rush to get everyone out of the hospital into the school gym, and then there's a series of quick minigames to try to save as many people as possible.
15. The day after, Finley and his coworkers walk outside and look at the now-crumbling hosital. Credits roll. During the credits, it is implied that the guy responsible for insurance fraud is arrested, the head protestor helps to rebuild the hospital he protested, and the head physician died while evacuating patients from the burning hospital.

Okay, I know that was a lot of details, but I feel they're necessary to include to show how the game attempts to deal with the issues that it highlights.

Again, the game advertises itself as exploring an unhealthy healthcare-system and exposing social injustice and structural problems. Again, the game is copying another game that is known for its focus on political issues. Which is to say, I think it's fair to say that the game is trying to do political commentary, and it's fair to criticize its handling of said commentary, rather than just give it a pass for just being a more general kind of story.

I feel that the one real problem that the game focuses on is the idea of a hospital--or any building--falling apart due to cost-saving measures taken by apathetic management. It may have copied this aspect from NitW, too, I couldn't really say. (It may have been following NitW's lead in trying to include some commentary on how to handle death, too.)

But while NitW points out that this kind of infrastructural issue happens on a much broader scale, and the inevitable result of capitalistic interests in general (and the aforementioned obsession with cost-cutting or maximizing profits), Fall of Porcupine blames the problems on a single bad actor, where the solution is to call the cops on that bad actor after the damage has already been done.

But Fall of Porcupine doesn't even entirely blame the problem on that bad actor. Remember the point of Finley saying that it's just in the nature of buildings to fall apart, just like people. Another character comments on how, when medical advancements reach the point where half the work is needed, half the staff is cut, while the workload of the rest remains the same. But I don't feel like this is really criticized as a problem with the system, just as one of the unfortunate difficulties that come with working in the health system (as opposed to literally every other system).

If Fall of Porcupine makes any comment on united, revolutionary acts, it's to criticize them. The only example of people gathering to protest and change anything is the group of people who gathers to protest the hospital itself, and the doctors caring for people in it. These people are not criticizing the management, or whatever capitalistic interests are impacting the level of care that the hospital provides. They're protesting the doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers themselves.

Going back to public reception of NitW, one of the things I noticed is that, because the leftist themes of the game are limited to symbolism, many of the people who played the game, and who saw all the social problems taking place within NitW's setting, simply viewed those problems with the same political lens that they use to examine the same problems in real life. Conservatives would often blame the individual characters for their problems, for not taking control of their own lives. Liberals without any leftist experience just saw the game's events as tragic events with no real solutions, other than to stick with the existing system until things improve for everyone else.

Fall of Porcupine has exactly the same kind of liberal lack of imagination and exploration of alternatives that I saw in these responses to NitW. In Fall of Porcupine, cutting services in the interests of saving money is just something that makes sense as a default. And everything else, in turn, is just a matter of not having enough money to spend on everything, and so by way of survival of the fittest, we just have to let some things fall by the wayside. It's mature to make peace with inevitable death, instead of ever thinking through how the death may not be as inevitable as we assumed it to be.

Worth bringing up, too, is the fact that, for a game that proclaims to tackle problems in the healthcare industry, to the point of having interviewed actual healthcare workers, I feel like it brings up surprisingly few problems that the average person would have associated with the healthcare industry.

Now, granted, some of that is due to a cultural divide. It's not clear exactly where Fall of Porcupine is meant to take place in a real-world sense, but the developers are based in Germany. I'm from the U.S., so when I think of problems in the healthcare industry, I think about how health insurance companies have artificially inflated prices of medication and procedures to be prohibitively expensive for the average person, often even when that person has health insurance, and has introduced additional unnecessary complexities to the process that make it nearly impossible for people to determine how to get care.

I don't know anything about German care, really, but at least one German friend has told me that privatization of insurance in Germany is similarly creating a noticeable gap between the rich and the poor, as well as the old and the young. It sounds like it's still something that could have at least been mentioned. But there is nothing in the game about problems with access to care, only the quality of the care, and poor quality is chalked up to either coincidental circumstances or building infrastructure. Not doctors being overworked (even though the doctors are presented as having a heavy workload), or private interests interfering with healthcare in a variety of other ways.

At the very least, I have a hard time believing that any country is having a problem with groups of angry people protesting a hospital for existing at all.

Intent

The most good-faith reading I can come up with for Fall of Porcupine, and why it is the way it is, is that it was created by politically and culturally unaware writers who wanted to tell a story about the struggles of healthcare workers, not problems with the healthcare industry as a whole. In other words, Fall of Porcupine would be a simple medical drama. I'd still say it's not a good one, but at least the intent behind it would largely be a non-issue for me. Even if it was still liberal about it, I could say "Well, maybe they just haven't seen the light yet."

I don't really feel comfortable leaving it at that with this game, because it otherwise borrows so heavily from Night in the Woods, a very political game.

I have seen the idea mentioned in leftist circles, more than a few times, that the system will fight against rebels while they are alive, and then after the rebels die, celebrate the rebels' supposed ideals while also rewriting what the rebels' messages to people actually were. Rewriting the messages to be supportive of the same system that suppressed and killed them.

I feel like Fall of Porcupine is trying to erase Night in the Woods, and rewrite and redefine what Night in the Woods' message was, while Night in the Woods still exists.

Again, Fall of Porcupine copies NitW's aesthetic, and nothing else about it. It takes out all of the teeth, and replaces them with something vague and confusing. It carves out the insides and removes all life from it, all the while keeping the cute exterior because it still finds that part pleasant to look at. It's a taxidermization of Night in the Woods.

There's a question of how successful it will be at actually replacing NitW. My guess is, not very; I think it would've had to replace NitW's substance with at least some of its own in order to get enough people to pay attention to it that would actually have a particularly big effect. Nevertheless, if the Steam reviews are anything to go by, it has already supplanted NitW for at least a few people. The people who only saw the Aesthetic of NitW, and wished they had more games with it that weren't also really dark and depressing. The kinds of people who say they thought the characters in NitW were annoying and unrelateable, and prefer the squeaky clean niceness of the characters in Fall of Porcupine.

Sometimes, liberalism overrides leftism through pure inertia, rather than intent. I can easily see how so many people could accidentally miss everything NitW was trying to say, just because they were raised in an environment where no one else ever talks about the kinds of issues that NitW is trying to talk about. And I could easily see how someone could accidentally create something that silences NitW's message in an attempt to pay homage to NitW like this.

But this was a game with multiple people working on it. Artists, musicians, programmers, writers, all working together to create this hollow mimic as superficially similar to the original as they possibly could. It feels like too much to be complete coincidence that it turned out like this.

Again, I can't read the minds of the developers. Maybe they have innocent intentions, maybe they don't. But with everything this game represents to me, I can't help but feel that it must have been created with some level of actively malicious intent. For an individual, blindness to the troubles of the wider world may be through no fault of their own, but I see no way for their game to have made it as far as it did, traveling the path that it did, without them purposely, selectively, covering their eyes and ears for parts of it.

In summary, though the reach of Fall of Porcupine is probably not actually going to be very big in actuality, I think the game should be held up as a prime example of how art can be used as a weapon, how art can be used to silence other art (intentionally or not). It serves as an example of how artistic suppression can happen without most people even realizing that it's happening. And hopefully it serves as an example of how, if you have something that's really important to you that you want to make sure other people see, sometimes it pays to be loud as fuck about it. Don't make it easy for people to write over your message, make it heard.

But more importantly, unless you're using the game for these illustrative purposes, please don't buy or play Fall of Porcupine. It's just not worth the expense.