Huh. Funny, then, that this game uses zombies-as-antagonists when the hot trend is zombie-as-player.
Look at Dark Souls. Being undead is advantageous - you get to fail and try again. Re-spawning has been elevated from mere mechanic to narrative mechanic. If an obstacle is too unmanageable, you can even build a 'hoard' and summon in an extra pair of hands to cut the workload in half.
It's closer, but imo it's more the logical evolution of the soulless lone chud protagonist in shooter games. DS even pokes fun at you for it: "Good job dipshit, you killed hundreds of beings and took the pointless throne. Did it get you anywhere? No. You're king of nothing."
I'd argue Ep 1 of Midnight Gospel is the closest thing to what Plastic Pills is suggesting.
“Good job dipshit, you killed hundreds of beings and took the pointless throne. Did it get you anywhere? No. You’re king of nothing.”
Kind of tangential, but I really love how
No Man's Sky spoilers
No Man's Sky takes a contradictory angle to the same position.
You rush across the galaxy to discover the secret of the ATLAS protocol and when you finally get to the center of the galaxy you discover that No Man's Sky is a computer simulation of a computer simulation ( :shocked-pikachu: ) and that the simulation-within-simulation is breaking down and eating itself. The countdown timer only reads "17" and you have no way of knowing if that's 17 minutes, 17 hours, 17 days, or if "time" in the simulation has any relation to whatever "time" the ATLAS protocol is running off of outside the simulation.
So, you find out in the end that the point of the story was that the story was pointless; but that's a good thing because now you can spend the rest of "existence" freed from that weight around your neck.
This is doubly interesting because you can almost read it as an in-universe reckoning with the finite nature of these online games. You don't really know when it will happen, but at a certain point the switch is flipped and the "universe" is gone forever; and your "job" so-to-speak is to enjoy the ride while it lasts.
Huh. Funny, then, that this game uses zombies-as-antagonists when the hot trend is zombie-as-player.
Look at Dark Souls. Being undead is advantageous - you get to fail and try again. Re-spawning has been elevated from mere mechanic to narrative mechanic. If an obstacle is too unmanageable, you can even build a 'hoard' and summon in an extra pair of hands to cut the workload in half.
It's closer, but imo it's more the logical evolution of the soulless lone chud protagonist in shooter games. DS even pokes fun at you for it: "Good job dipshit, you killed hundreds of beings and took the pointless throne. Did it get you anywhere? No. You're king of nothing."
I'd argue Ep 1 of Midnight Gospel is the closest thing to what Plastic Pills is suggesting.
Ha! Too true! I love how thematically rich Souls is and I hate that you have to be a masochistic gamer to access it.
Kind of tangential, but I really love how
No Man's Sky spoilers
No Man's Sky takes a contradictory angle to the same position.
You rush across the galaxy to discover the secret of the ATLAS protocol and when you finally get to the center of the galaxy you discover that No Man's Sky is a computer simulation of a computer simulation ( :shocked-pikachu: ) and that the simulation-within-simulation is breaking down and eating itself. The countdown timer only reads "17" and you have no way of knowing if that's 17 minutes, 17 hours, 17 days, or if "time" in the simulation has any relation to whatever "time" the ATLAS protocol is running off of outside the simulation.
So, you find out in the end that the point of the story was that the story was pointless; but that's a good thing because now you can spend the rest of "existence" freed from that weight around your neck.
This is doubly interesting because you can almost read it as an in-universe reckoning with the finite nature of these online games. You don't really know when it will happen, but at a certain point the switch is flipped and the "universe" is gone forever; and your "job" so-to-speak is to enjoy the ride while it lasts.