Strange Gaming Diaries: Anodyne 2: Return to Dust, by Analgesic Productions

just when I thought anodyne 2 was done throwing me for a loop, the introduction of metacoins gave me a whole new set of narrative themes to chew on. suddenly, you have this new representative of the center talking about enhancing your investment in the world of the game and introducing new mechanics like he's reading out exciting new patch notes. suddenly, the game takes on a fascinating new duality of themes, with the center and the video game itself starting to blur together into a single narrative entity. just as the center tries to guide nova back onto its path for her in the narrative, so too is the game suddenly dangling a bunch of shiny new collectibles in your face to try and get you back into the idea of getting cards and gathering dust and making all the numbers go up.

and although I did indeed spend a little while running around grabbing coins and making numbers go up, I found myself realizing something: I wasn't paying any attention at all to the environments and characters I'd been taking in with such curiosity beforehand. these areas of the game I'd explored had suddenly been turned into a series of paths along which I could gather these coins. the believability of these spaces as living worlds was suddenly skewered by the presence of these pointless collectibles.

not only that, but the outer sands felt so weird to explore. it's such a transparently artificial space compared to the other areas—where map transitions made various overtures towards fitting into the same geographical space as one another, the maps in the outer sands are completely disjointed areas with inexplicable videogamey forcefields along their edges, and are connected by equally inexplicable magical floating gateways. not only that, but very little in these areas doesn't serve some kind of gameplay purpose, it's almost all either npcs who guide you towards progress or environments you're meant to travel for coins. it's even noticeably easier to break the level geometry and end up out of bounds here compared to other areas, or at least it was for me.

the major thought I had while playing was how strange and...self-flagellating this all felt. like the game was hollowing out its own environments into spaces engineered solely for the collecting of items and the making of progress. it's such a weird and harrowing metanarrative twist, and it completely shifted the mood of the last few hours of the playthrough to this surreal and uneasy experience.

as for what you actually get from the metacoins, they are of course largely without benefit. the logs you can get are (for the most part) just evocative word salad, and the "metapoints" just pepper the landscape with even more garbage that purportedly give you interesting insights into the world but mostly just enthusiastically explain basic and obvious design principles like "we put landmarks in our maps so you know where to go!" and "we put TWO exits in this area so you can go wherever you want! wow! the choice is yours!" and sometimes they even blatantly lie, like the one that tells you that the super low draw distance on the map is actually on purpose so it feels like the world is reacting just to you! whoa! don't you feel so special! and so on.

then there are the "unzones", where the character "maryshaw keytawny"—a mash-up of the two developers' names, marina kittaka and melos (formerly sean) han-tani—talks through "metapoints" scattered around the areas about the creation of the games' worlds by two mystery figures named M and S. it's neat behind-the-scenes stuff, and shows off a lot of in-development assets and test levels that act as neat little glimpses into the bones of game dev.

but also there's...something kinda weird about the unzones. the character of maryshaw mentions "having an eternity living in these unzones" and will occasionally break character to comment about their love life or having their first line in one of the areas be "Whenever I feel sad, I come here to feel empty." there are also these random fully formed models of nova in various animation loops found in some places that supposedly represent spots in the development timeline where nova hadn't even been conceived as a character. it's weird. it feels like there are embellishments being made that run aground of the stated intention of just being these cute little extra developer areas. and then the weirdest thing of all came at the tailend of one of these metapoints, which read:

"(By the way. There are no other Metainfo points here.)"

alarm bells were immediately ringing. that felt like such a specifically explicit point of clarification to make, especially in a zone that you need to have already unlocked a few other zones to have gotten to, and especially especially given the aforementioned weirdness going on with the places. for that matter—and I don't know how to exactly explain this—there felt like there was something weird about the level design of these areas that seemed to encourage fucking around and finding secrets. areas that are otherwise fully formed and textured will have a random untextured ramp to seemingly nowhere. platforms will be only just barely too far apart from one another to get across. and why state that there are no other points there when you hadn't already done that, unless it was actually meant to be a secret encouragement to sniff around for secrets this entire time??

it was after about five minutes after my attempt to scour the area for secrets that I realized, oh. dammit. after thinking I was so far above it all and knew what they were doing, the allure of the metacoins still got me in the end.

I dunno if this was intentional or if I'm just seeing patterns where there are nothing but coincidences, but regardless, it hit me in a way I'm still reeling from a little bit. I even looked it up after the fact to confirm, and true enough, the game's own developer has confirmed that there are no secrets in the unzones.

in that moment, I found myself questioning all of those reflexes that had brought me to my conclusion. were those things that I thought were weird embellishments actually normal, or else maybe just thrown in without any real purpose? were the occasional breaks in maryshaw's character actually just quirky little asides that the writer included for fun? what did it say about me that I took all of this as a sign that I was being deceived, and that there were secrets being hidden from me? I realized that I had done the exact thing I'd accused the world of the game as doing, disregarding the intention of these worlds in favor of obsessive secret-hunting. maybe the point all along was to get me to jump at shadows. maybe I'm just so poisoned by youtube's video game lore economy that it's all my own fault. either way, I was deeply impressed.

anyway, on that note, here's the part where I talk about No Such Scene.

god. I could probably write a whole fucking essay about this single sequence alone. I might end up doing it right here! everything about it, from stem to stern, is at once such a fascinating anomaly from the entire rest of the game and a culmination of every single one of the game's narrative themes.

because although there is of course the complete shift in setting and general tone of the writing from dramatic and fantastical to excruciatingly grounded in reality, nora's story ends up hitting a lot of the same notes heard from throughout the game. everything just becomes a lot more real for those brief, immaculate few minutes. nora goes through soul-crushing drudgery at her shitty minimum-wage job. a neglectful parent haunts nora's nightmares. nora laments her inability to be a better friend, or to get a better job, or to generally live in a way that's worth a damn. and when speaking with her loved one, nora doesn't know how to live with the fact that she'll always be herself.

like, fuck. christ. as a girl with severe depression and a rotating roster of shitty living situations, this hit me like a brick through the window. I can't think of many other points at which a piece of art has made me feel so painfully seen. certain lines in this section felt right out of my hypothetical internal monologue, and the undercurrent of desperate hope for something better that eventually clawed its way out from the ennui made me feel a surge of all kinds of unknowable feelings in my chest.

now, with those compliments to the writing said, there are still a lot of other things to unpack with this sequence, and I should probably start with the most immediately obvious one: what's up with nora being so blatantly based on nova? what about the email making explicit mention of anodyne 2? is this sequence meant to suggest that there's a "real world" outside of the game we've been playing in? did nora click on a spooky evil email and then she got turned into nova and that's what's actually been happening this whole time???

I found myself asking similar questions, then quickly realizing that I...didn't actually care? and that it probably doesn't matter? I mean, it's like my whole experience with the unzones, right? the impulse to treat this sequence as the revelation of some kind of Lore feels like the result of the internet putting poisons in your brain that make people insist that even slightly abstract video game narratives are puzzles to be solved.

the sequence definitely does purposefully evoke a lot of comparisons with the rest of the game: vacuum cleaners keep popping up in various faintly foreboding places, and during the chase sequence with the gargoyle, the dimension dive icons even start inexplicably appearing on the floor. but No Such Scene makes no effort to conclusively elucidate anything that happens in it, and I respect it deeply for that commitment to its difficult combination of realism and abstraction.

for me, the weird gargoyle parts of No Such Scene reminded me a lot of how the continued need to survive in the soul-crushing hell of working class life has left me in a state of being constantly overwhelmed by the pressures of starvation, destitution, and increasingly severe mental illness. I've gotten very used to a life where it feels like just one more unexpected disaster could very well be the end of me, and once you live in that space for long enough, it follows you wherever you go. you start seeing catastrophe everywhere you look, and you become desperate for any kind of escape from it.

also, since I feel like I have to say it somewhere, fuck, the parts of No Such Scene before the actual bits with nora in them scared the shit out of me. game models/sprites getting glitchy and fucked up is something that always freaks me out, so I spent the entire dimension dive sequence feeling faintly like I was gonna throw up and the brief nanoscape sequence bracing for the worst. it was great, and made the reveal of nora that much more of a twist!

one last detail I want to point out: in the development history document included in the release of the game's source code (which is deeply interesting, go check it out!) one of the bulletpoints for the second quarter of 2019 is "No Such Scene appears out of the ether". I'm deeply curious as to whether this is just a cute bit of writing, or if the sequence came on just as sudden and strong for the developers too. there's something compelling about that idea, isn't there?

that's just one area in the outer sands, though.

here's the other thing about the last few areas in the game that struck me: npc dialogue becomes a lot more contemplative and philosophical out of basically nowhere. the odd couple of gravis and stavros engage the player in musings about the manuscript of life upon desert sands and the smallness one feels when looking up at the stars, and the tremuloids speak in baffling knots about the nature of the past, present, and future.

one particularly noteworthy example of this is when an npc in the jrpg pastiche world, who plays out a hilarious bit that makes light of the reflex for players to turn away from obvious plot progression in search of side content, caps off the sequence with a fit of crazed rambling that fits the same humorous tone of their previous dialogue but suddenly swerves into panicked existentialisms about the seemingly irreconcilable nature of the lived experience with the cosmic truths of the world. the last few lines are even "how is a story anything but a lie? does it even matter?"

it's the game stepping its storytelling up a level and engaging with the player on deeper levels as the game goes on, and it creates a simultaneously fascinating and lowkey scary feeling of watching something unfurl in front of you. the game is never content to have its big metanarrative twist and then settle back into the usual rhythms, instead constantly shifting around you and building further on those ideas. there's a reason I said before that talking about the game gradually like this is what I've found to be the best way to talk about it!

also found in the outer sands are nanoscape areas that aren't anybody's mindscape at all and are instead connected to what I learned after the fact was an homage to the first anodyne game's main hub area, a concept that goes pretty much totally unacknowledged by the plot but that I accepted right along with all the other changes. one of them is that aforementioned jrpg pastiche area, but the other is the pastel horizon, which contained yet another bit of writing that completely fucking destroyed me.

the pastel horizon is an area about death. you end up contacting the lost spirits of two dead characters and hearing about their lives. one of them, amago, is a fish that lived a dual life in the water and on the surface, and recounts having returned to the ocean after quite some time on land only to find all their loved ones lost to time. the other, fukuchi, explains that she came to recall a past life before she first awoke on her home island, with her need to explore the seas beyond ultimately leaning to a watery grave.

then you hop on a train to a "ghost bridge", a transitionary place between this world and the next. there, you encounter a humble bridge builder who tells you about the purpose of this place, and the kinds of souls that end up here—wild ghosts, they're called, people who slipped through the cracks and died without anyone to remember them by, people who were poisoned and annihilated by uncaring systems or who simply vanished without a trace. the builder builds the bridge for them, so they can reach a place where they can finally make those connections. even these most forlorn of souls, after all, need someone to take care of them. everyone does.

I've felt at many times like I'm doomed to become something like a wild ghost. you have no idea how much this scene means to me.

we come to the ending.

the game acts like the only way to finish the game is to achieve the center's ultimate goal and sterilize the world into cold painless nothing, but there is of course another way. returning to the dustbound prompts a reunion with elegy, in which nova very nearly succumbs to horrible agonizing fear, unable to stop thinking about the ways in which this contradiction of everything she's ever known will utterly destroy her.

the presence of the glandilock seed, a seemingly innocuous and mostly unremarked upon presence inside of nova's mind that acts as her connection to the center, starts to gain intense narrative focus as a force of doubt, of compulsion back towards her programming. its disapproving scowl sits like an ill omen to the side of the main screen, and its tendrils twist nova's thoughts away from the independent thought she tries to exercise. after bringing nova back out of this panic attack, elegy lays out the true nature of the glandilock seed—and by extension the center itself—in painful detail:

Does the Glandilock Seed help you to understand the true nature of your fears? Does it lift you up when you reach for something more beautiful and true within yourself? Or does it wield your fears against you, beating you down with insecurity until you believe you have no choice?

if there was any doubt as to the parallels between the center's role in nova's life and that of an abusive parent, this is when those themes are called upon in sharp clarity. when nova devises a plan to confront the center, it involves her convincing its agents, the people she formerly thought of as her family, that she destroyed herself, and for them to fashion a new cleaner to replace her. then, she destroys the glandilock seed inside this girl, zera, to free her of the center's influence and allow her a life of her own.

what I find so poignant about this plan is that nova's glandilock seed remains. when the game ends, it's still there in her mind, and she feels its presence with her every thought. it's clear that she expected to sacrifice herself and be rid of all this suffering for the sake of this new life, but she doesn't. she's still alive, and she's terrified of that. she's terrified of having survived, because now she knows she has an entire lifetime ahead of her that she doesn't have any conception of how to handle.

and of course it would be this way. of course the lingering influence of those traumas will remain. of course nova survives. the message of the game in these final moments is that life is full of suffering and unfair burdens, that the world is a place where we will be senselessly hurt and made to recognize that there are no lessons to be learned and no advancements to be made through that hardship, but that we still must survive those things if we are ever to experience the moments of connection and love that make us who we are—if not only for ourselves, then for the sake of a more hopeful future for those who need not go through that same pain themselves.

for a game to tell such a profoundly hopeful story while also acknowledging the grim ordeals of existence made me feel spoken to in a way that other similar stories have failed to manage. it makes me feel a little less ashamed of being broken, y'know? it can be hard to give myself that forgiveness with how long I've been alive and how many opportunities I keep telling myself I've had to heal and generally pull myself together.

games surrounding mental illness and trauma will often revolve themselves around these cathartic moments of climactic resolution, but for people like me that's not how it plays out. healing hurts, and not often in a very exciting way. it leaves ugly scars and you're going to keep realizing that you need to do more of it than you thought. I admire this game for respecting that.

the best part is, this isn't even everything I could talk about in the game. not only are there small details and even entire areas that I've left completely unremarked upon for the sake of my narrative flow, the story touches on so many more themes than these personal and gritty traumas. you could easily read the entire narrative as an allegory for the desperate attempts to make meaningful art under the cold and callous oppression of the modern world, and this is something the game textually supports in various places.

through its use of abstraction and willingness to let itself ramble and go on tangents in its storytelling, anodyne 2 manages to make a story that's about so many things at once and has deeply thought-out and heartfelt things to say about all of them. it's one of the most compellingly honest games I've ever played, and I really want to thank melos and marina for everything they put into this. I normally let that sentiment go without saying, but it feels right to make it clear. this is a special kind of game, and I want to make sure it's cherished the way it deserves to be. like we all deserve to be, in a way.