DISCLAIMER: Deep-Hell.com is paid for by readers like you. In the new year we have new projects we’d like to be able to work on. Please consider supporting us through websites like Patreon or Ko-Fi.

The crumbling edifice of rural America is one topic that I have written thousands of words about. Somewhere in the mines of https://deep-hell.com,the website i’ve written for and managed for almost a decade, are enough words to assemble a book about the slow decay of American living.

Reflecting those pictures back at us are generations of works set in numerous unnamed but dreamed of Cyberpunk futures. They might be futures of places like Moscow, Hong Kong or Berlin. Under a rust colored sky we need reminding our American concrete rots just the same way it does anywhere.  The unforgiving side of Cyberpunk is the way it writes about the present: that the incoming future will always be defined by the industrial world no longer being able to sustain the weight of obsolescence.

G-String is a Half-Life 2 mod released in 2020. The work of a “Solo” Developer and a legion of small time mod contractors. It’s a game that is talked about in some circles but released too long after the demise of games press outside of marketing, to be featured on a demo disc anywhere but something that begs and cries with each moment of gameplay that it should have been given a life somewhere.

Each new screen I found myself staring at here was another stretch of dilapidated concrete and rebar. Old apartments crumbled under military enforcement of lock-downs. Disease and economic stagnation render apartments barred by electronic lock. Landlords mark doors with “foreclosed” or “late rent” and the hallways of these places are starkly empty of wandering NPC’s despite how we equate density with fidelity in hardware dependent videogames.

Somewhere in the city you live in is a maintenance post long since abandoned that only receives applications via an AI webapp no human is checking. The person working that job left a long time ago for the private sector. All the new water jobs are cushy, they get advertising. Except just like trash service it’s hard to make a profit on giving people clean water that doesn’t involve keeping one group of people from having access. This is a videogame about abandoned posts, empty streets, foreclosed apartments. Squatters so forced into enclosure that the red lights of a dozen cop eyes fill the screen before friendly ones.

The aspirational qualities of Cyberpunk are present: unless you don’t aspire to be a rat stuck in a tunnel clutching an SMG for dear life hoping to topple the world. Everything will try to kill you in this future: the air, the cops, the architecture. Mechanical slugs can burst out of walls at any point in time if the robots trying to rightfully exterminate those that have placed them in a permanent sexual slavery for trespassing don’t do it first.

The rat analogy starts with the first chapter ‘Lab Rat’ and never really stops: the protagonist is a psychic Korean teenager who squeezes into ever smaller places. I only wish there were a third person camera because it would be an appropriate way to pile grime and dirt onto the worn down bio suit the player wears. A Katamari of industrial refuse turned blood soaked gillie suit meant for navigating the slow apocalypse of the world.

Half-Life 2 works great for walking simulators, survival horror, puzzle platformers. Source engine  games seem to fit even more with after being pried off of the game it was designed around. G-String, likewise is a walking simulator, survival horror, puzzle platformer. Returning to the game in 2026 is to look outside my own drapes at the strange fog we’re all still living in. Network news continually blasts louder and louder words about war overseas, never mind the ones happening in Minneapolis, Chicago, LA.

I return to the developer himself: anonymously we’re connected through the way I can view the steam updates page for the game any time I want. Other than the voice actors, G-String was developed by a five-person team: the attitude of the steam page itself is the voice of the director. There will be a hopeful re-release, an expanded and updated edition of a mod for a small audience with a ten-dollar price tag on the life of the developer.

LA is a beautiful city in winter for many of the reasons that G-String is beautiful. Under a similar kind of crumbling sprawl – game stores with facades of rusted sheet metal and dangling controllers, high priced luxury hotels next to abandoned gothic-modern dwellings still four floors only a holdover from when building up wasn’t the priority.  From game developers I spoke to was that there’s just no money. I spoke to frustrated team members of Riot Games who didn’t know I listened intently to the way they wished to leave for something else.

The difference in dystopia is often what role you have in it. I no longer live in mold filled apartments built in the 1970’s in small town America. I’ve left looking at the world through my own ash covered glass for Main Street, anywhere over and over again. Out in what we call ‘metropolitan areas’ the world lays hidden and falling apart where I cannot see. Life in the city can be beautiful depending on what side of the glass you’re on.

The Director is a friend of mine, also a product of The Sprawl like everyone I talk to these days. Attached at the hip for a single weekend of introspection over the holidays, the need for everything to be capturing lightning in a bottle kept coming up: studios balk at pitches from successful developers as the age of ‘what’s next’ dies before it arrives in panicked confusion. Elsewhere someone toils away at a game to make a mark with another small team of friends and contractors: there’s no marketing budget and rarely any money coming in not from contract work elsewhere.

For what it’s worth: I think it would be rude to personally ask the developer of G-String what it’s like? To still be grinding away into an uncertain future to deliver an even more honed vision of what came before. There are articles where the team illuminates the struggle they faced with the amount of sales and fanfare the game was received with. A well reviewed darling that mostly failed to break out of freak adjacent circles. Did it hurt, and how bad? Well, we rarely give developers anything but red carpets and awards now. Turns out in the chrome-gleamed future we ourselves are the discarded robots that scream through our way digital terminals to be heard.

Would it be rude of me to ask? Do I approach the developer and ask them if they’re burned out. Do I ask about the personal cost of deciding to make a videogame so long? Does it hurt? Does it hurt needing more, needing another shot at things in an industry not primed to really give it. There’s no way to look into digital software and not find the hand of the creators, the independent artists and contractors trapped on credits screens.

G-String got released, finished at all is a marvel and might be treated like one. Against critical missteps and public evaluation every title has to be weighed, measured. The world will not justly reward art or artists. Devaluation and defunding of art seems like a generational project designed to tilt the world in a worse direction. Here against the sky tinted the color of blood, I play through another persons fading dream. Does the future have to hurt?

When I returned after my brief stint back on the west coast after the holidays my relationship to G-String had changed. Rather than being something I fired up at random in the middle of the night – here it was something more real. I personally knew developers who were slowly fighting on their backs to be recognized for new work they wanted to do. Like the developer’s posts of G-String it seems like every creative I know feels backed into a corner. Either the producer in their head is asking for lightning to strike twice, or the company they have to work for to cover the costs of overheads. The hair rising tingle of florescent lights and paid-for lunches while a group of people tell you they can only afford to make sure hits.

Knowing artists is sort of miserable if you like getting the news from a safe distance away. I don’t wonder about the tax and drain put on shoulders of people I know who’ve struggled to make software for others alone. Even the ones that can afford contractors are burnt out, the candle dying in a pool of wax just full enough to drown in. I have seen the peeling wallpaper of the real world to recognize when someone has been there, too. A stack of boxes in the corner because no one is coming to see if you’ve cleaned. The fading LED of our cyberpunk dystopia comes with a human cost attached.

You can purchase G-String on Steam.