I am pretty sure Neverending Nightmares is set in the late 1800s to give its edward gorey riff more authenticity, in the perfectly naïve way that indie games plumb this or that aesthetic in order to stand out, rather ignorant of what they’re standing in. still, the extravagant wealth portrayed in this facsimile of high living could have only been accumulated through slavery or colonialism (or of course, both). implicitly then, racism and class war drape the warped nursery that facilitates playing chicken with the protagonist’s misogynistic impulses, ones that he inevitably succumbs to in his imagination, again and again. notably, only ever in his imagination. he is fighting the ghosts of his unconscious drive, things that he inherited but does not ever quite completely understand.
if there is a coherent story, it’s only to create a non-productive, schizo-oedipal between sister/daughter/wife. it is very enjoyable to me how much the author does not understand freud, because the legacy of freud is much better mangled like this and made into worthless dead-ends. so it is interesting, then, how much the game delimits its own potential. its mechanics are ever-present, and demand some joke-like spectrum of mastery. but they do not develop really. and the game still resists being stripped down to its essential components, adding disjunctions and doodads that lead to non-linear, non-connecting zones. or more often, plain, gratuitous, horrible self-violence, as if it is the only possible response to what the protagonist has inherited. the idea of non-productive flows comes to my mind, in a way that naturally stymies and cuts off the post-Silent Hill 2 psychodrama in a way that’s a mixture of stoic deliberation and totally natural submission into a complete portrayal of impulses (also, budget constraints, lol).
and so much like this. there’s a dream sequence in The Book of Franza by ingeborg bachmann where a father points out to his daughter: “this is the cemetery of buried daughters,” and hearing this she sobs. this exchange, metaphor doubled, is charged with patriarchal violence, seeming to say, I will bury you there, or, haven’t I already? yet it’s also farcical, as the father and daughter yet live, and the implication hangs on without ever getting held on. if I’m able to step outside of jung for a moment, I can re-recognize this scene as shared grief. the position-in-relation, instead of the position-of-satisfaction. should we not mourn for the daughters? I think this counterfactual in vain, the specter of neurosis looms all around, and I don’t yet know how to forgive it.
I love many scenes in books and I don’t end up remembering them. I’ve held on to this one like a reality marble, a final projection, and I think it’s because it’s a physical place. a place you can look at and go to, one you can walk around in. this physical, dreamed up allegory of endings, is… well it’s a lot like a videogame, to me. it is, I guess, the evil version of the museum of dead wifery, one that’s to be taken at face value, instead of integrated into an ironic system. it provokes a stale romanticism, a domestic grief, a remove from the problems, as they’re used to garnish existing grief, that is converted into relation only by a selfish desire to embody the more difficult, accumulated forms of covalent suffering from this place of remove.
lots of games are like this, including Neverending Nightmares. I suppose if I had more integrity I would condemn it, if I believed art is our vehicle into a better world. cecile pineda wrote that writing can “…provide a moment of grace, both for her who writes and him who reads, in a very dark world.” her novel Face is almost a constructive case against degradation, as it refuses to be specifically one problem of degradation. and so like that book, it is a stupid, pithy fact that I relate to the honest depictions of intrusive violence in Neverending Nightmares. maybe not all of them at once, and maybe not as much anymore, but if I could discard every mistake and thoughtcrime I’ve made at once, I probably wouldn’t be writing about games anymore.
if there is a coherent story, it’s only to create a non-productive, schizo-oedipal between sister/daughter/wife. it is very enjoyable to me how much the author does not understand freud, because the legacy of freud is much better mangled like this and made into worthless dead-ends. so it is interesting, then, how much the game delimits its own potential. its mechanics are ever-present, and demand some joke-like spectrum of mastery. but they do not develop really. and the game still resists being stripped down to its essential components, adding disjunctions and doodads that lead to non-linear, non-connecting zones. or more often, plain, gratuitous, horrible self-violence, as if it is the only possible response to what the protagonist has inherited. the idea of non-productive flows comes to my mind, in a way that naturally stymies and cuts off the post-Silent Hill 2 psychodrama in a way that’s a mixture of stoic deliberation and totally natural submission into a complete portrayal of impulses (also, budget constraints, lol).
and so much like this. there’s a dream sequence in The Book of Franza by ingeborg bachmann where a father points out to his daughter: “this is the cemetery of buried daughters,” and hearing this she sobs. this exchange, metaphor doubled, is charged with patriarchal violence, seeming to say, I will bury you there, or, haven’t I already? yet it’s also farcical, as the father and daughter yet live, and the implication hangs on without ever getting held on. if I’m able to step outside of jung for a moment, I can re-recognize this scene as shared grief. the position-in-relation, instead of the position-of-satisfaction. should we not mourn for the daughters? I think this counterfactual in vain, the specter of neurosis looms all around, and I don’t yet know how to forgive it.
I love many scenes in books and I don’t end up remembering them. I’ve held on to this one like a reality marble, a final projection, and I think it’s because it’s a physical place. a place you can look at and go to, one you can walk around in. this physical, dreamed up allegory of endings, is… well it’s a lot like a videogame, to me. it is, I guess, the evil version of the museum of dead wifery, one that’s to be taken at face value, instead of integrated into an ironic system. it provokes a stale romanticism, a domestic grief, a remove from the problems, as they’re used to garnish existing grief, that is converted into relation only by a selfish desire to embody the more difficult, accumulated forms of covalent suffering from this place of remove.
lots of games are like this, including Neverending Nightmares. I suppose if I had more integrity I would condemn it, if I believed art is our vehicle into a better world. cecile pineda wrote that writing can “…provide a moment of grace, both for her who writes and him who reads, in a very dark world.” her novel Face is almost a constructive case against degradation, as it refuses to be specifically one problem of degradation. and so like that book, it is a stupid, pithy fact that I relate to the honest depictions of intrusive violence in Neverending Nightmares. maybe not all of them at once, and maybe not as much anymore, but if I could discard every mistake and thoughtcrime I’ve made at once, I probably wouldn’t be writing about games anymore.