In the opening hours of Dread Delusion, I’m met with the face of a ghostly woman who looks down on me from above. She’s like something out of a dream, and she asks me plainly if there’s any power to be found in my delusions. We both share something together there: she has to be keenly aware I’m a video -game player. I’ve been living delusions my entire life. Staring into fantasy after fantasy for some kind of meaning. All I ever find is delusions, more and more of them. I am this person or I am that person. Life feels like juggling so many of the little identities we build up over time.
The world is old and there is no saving it. It will keep going on forever: borders and nations changing, things end and begin again. Prisons rot in the bottom of high castles and those same high castles crumble back down to the foundation. I saw a review that called Dread Delusion ugly, with its half twitching rendered world calling out to another time. Ugly, the dead and plague stricken color of the grass.
When I was a kid, I was afraid of videogames. Not the bright and bubbly ones, but the ones draped and inked in so much shadow. I played them mostly alone long after everyone else had went to bed, in empty houses while people played in the grass outside. Transfixed by the shape of the things moving in front of me. Old games can sometimes be bright and well outlined, but they are just as often worlds made out of rust and soot and dirt. The greys and coppers and bronzes seem pantone rich on any television. Independent games seem transfixed by a feeling of color that can’t quite be captured ever, despite developers best efforts.
I was just in Ireland – no, that’s a place, not the title of a videogame. The delusions are catching up to me and the storm of reality choking out my head is starting to catch up to me. I’ve got a nervous sick feeling that one day the memories of the trip will be keyed again to the things in my life like songs I listened to and video games I played. The smile and nervous laughter of a gang of strangers that became friends by the end of it might be replaced by filtered down audio tracks of my own daydreaming as if played back at me on vinyl.
Parts of the color of Dread Delusion come in the forms of an early game area that looks like a rust-covered turqoise castle. Later, the land of the endless’ bare stone structures hide glittering stones the color of lichen-covered-jade. I mostly spend the first few hours of the game soaking it all in with a bitter taste in my mouth. Nothing, safe for the feeling of being somewhere new, lands at first.
What kind of game is it? It is a First-Person Roleplaying Game. In layman’s terms, that’s “real life” as it gets, or, it’s one of those games where you explore a violent world at the tip of a sword.
-and if delusions are power there are many and they are hidden as well in the art and pieces where the world is stitched together by lies and rumor as there are to be found at the end of great purpose. I poison an old king to spare him more coughing. I lie to my handlers to receive a promotion. In this world, I’m free to be a type of selfish that doesn’t force me into a black or white world. I’ve grown custom to the company of suffering I caused others as I’ve gotten older, and that’s a type of delusion too.
Something about Dread Delusion and the use of these fetid greens, red-purples and greys. They bring to mind rotting copses and old forests, up close the bricks and details look hand placed like someone chiseled every little skull decal and the lumber was shaped and put into place.
I used to kill Miranda Lawson in Mass Effect 2 almost every time I played the game. Her conniving and sneering attitude towards the crew rubbed me the wrong way, alongside common-murderers and assassins. Vengeance driven weapons of war and practical killers who thought of every drop of sweat they shed as nothing excessive for a business ledger written with an oily rag. As I got older, maybe – no – I started independent of that to think “Why not Miranda Lawson?” she’s no more genocidal than the man on your party who’s proven he’s actual capable of it: and after all: this is a videogame? what’s some fun between friends?
There are little title cards around Dread Delusion, for me after the status quo of the world ends and we wrap things up: no sweet or succor to be found and many of our decisions facing consequences we can’t be entirely in control of. Dread Delusion carries guilt and puts it in the player well, gulp-worthy guilt that can be sipped down safely. Did I make the right choice poisoning that castle? I come away from a mostly empty place filled with monsters feeling like I did something, no matter what.
Then, we are back in a cavern somewhere deep in the world cut by an elaborate crystal. Of course a god dwells deep within, caves are a persisting metaphor for delusion in the digital age. Through fantasy here, though, what can easily be a joke elsewhere or an aside line about divine power is a harrowing metaphor for how easy it is to buy into truths we only find for ourselves. Fantasy still sits so far abroad in video games from horror we’ve settled for a type of regal macabre where we can get it.
I don’t sacrifice much and the points get higher, somewhere. I smile and cut coin purses out of pockets and turn around to right ancient wrongs. Horrifying, the player in me is treading the ground as a colossus. Interest wraps around my situation when I think about what it would mean if the world starts to believe in the player, a little too much. I worry I chose yes to the god at the bottom of the cave.
At some point in Dread Delusion I start chasing the sky through the cast-off crew of the antagonist of the game: slotting them into my crew on another doomed voyage to change, harm, protect – do something to the world. It’s all something of my decision, and so a meaningful self stops being constructed within the game, and I am finished. Still lingering on the crystal-glass god in the cave, a mirror, wanting to go back just to make the choice again.
There are gods everywhere in Fantasy and Fiction if you’re looking for something to believe in: and underneath all of the folklore and mysticism we’ve built into pop-culture there’s something new there, too. Dread Delusion can provide a connection to your own imagination, maybe, but it is steadfast and hollow where I dream of silt-strides and all things that have come before. There’s a touch of shade and a well of deep reds and violets screaming out of my computer monitor at me. I hide in them for awhile, but I find myself growing out of stories about the burden of duty.
And Maybe that’s it – I scan the red horizon teeming with the firing neurons of the dead star-thing I imagine the game takes place in. An hour goes by, and it happens to me a lot lately that an hour or two will go by in a videogame and I just sit and watch things roll around. The places I want to go back to, the soft and hollow safe spaces I want to reach for are all gone or changed. I can only remember familiar colors.