#I just really like sharing my yap sessions and I think this isn't half bad

[mushroompoisoning]

copy and paste of the ultrakill section of a school assignment I did today. because I yapped about the game for over 1000 words and apparently its coherent so. this is all addressed to my history teacher who knows nothing about the game thats why its so vague

The two media I’m picking are pretty opposite, but bear with me. The first one is an indie video game called ULTRAKILL. It’s a retro style first person shooter where you play as a blood-powered war machine descending into Dante's Inferno with the goal of killing everything there. I know it sounds like those gorey games that adults hate because they’re violent for violences sake, but again, bear with me. I find it hard to explain exactly the fascinating way that the game tells both its main story and the small, self-contained stories hidden around. Of course, you, as the player, are involved in the main story, but not as the protagonist like most stories have. If anything, you aren't a character in the story at all. To explain, I’ll have to jump into the heavy anti-war themes of the game. 

      The game takes place after humanity’s extinction and an era they called the “New Peace,” which came after the “Final War.” During the Final War, humanity had begun to build machines powered by blood. The player - a robot only known as v1 - was the final machine built during the war, and never used in combat. Humanity’s creations had destroyed the planet, and all the surviving humans of the New Peace lived atop city-destroying monoliths they had built and called Earthmovers. These massive robots - despite being large enough to hold cities on their backs - were also powered primarily by blood; the insides of them covered in meat like a living thing. All the robot enemies you encounter in the game bleed and explode into meat, as if they were biological. This is all a lot of exposition, but I swear it’s important.

      Themes of anti-war are present throughout the entire game, but it only truly becomes impossible to avoid when you reach the layer of Violence. In the second level, you encounter an enemy called the Gutterman. It’s the first real war machine aside from yourself that you’ve met on your journey - equipped with a shield and gatling gun. Reading about it in the terminals tells you that they were one of the first blood power machines built during the war, and that humanity hadn't found a way to keep blood fresh. Their solution was to weld an involuntary, nearly comatose person inside a coffin on the machine’s back, supplying it with constant fuel. Morbid, I know. But the real tragedy of the Gutterman comes from a poem hidden in the same level you first meet them. The poem is written by one of these war machines, and addressed to the person fueling it. It refers to that person as its mother, and laments about its regret and the hatred it feels for itself for how it's hurting them, and how they must hate it just as much. The poem ends with the machine confessing that it killed its own fuel source out of guilt. This isn't the only show of emotion from the robots you meet in the game. For some examples: a machine that builds itself a humanoid body for no reason other than its own joy, and would rather destroy itself entirely than let someone break it; a robot that bows to you and holds a grudge against you after you beat it and take its arm, but always remains sportsmanlike; a machine with an obsessive hoarding issue, you get the idea. Every enemy in the game has some sort of characterization, something that makes them all seem human. The only person with no characterization - aside from a single line of text not spoken aloud, which will be relevant - is v1; the player.

      The player has no character, no role in this story beyond dishing out bloodshed. No matter what it is faced with, it kills and keeps moving. As I mentioned before, v1’s only dialogue is simply “You’re not getting away this time.” to a boss enemy which got away the first time you fought it. Despite everything, it remains solely dedicated to its task. In another level in Violence you find a poem directed from hell itself to v1, and I think I should give that poem in full. I swear all this is going somewhere. The poem reads:

      “This is the only way it could have ended. War no longer needed its ultimate practitioner. It had become a self-sustaining system. Man was crushed under the wheels of a machine created to create the machine created to crush the machine. Samara of cut sinew and crushed bone. Death without life. Null uroboros. All that remained is war without reason.

      A magnum opus, a cold tower of steel. A machine built to end war is always a machine built to continue war. You were beautiful, outstretched like antennas to heaven. You were beyond your creators. You reached for God, and you fell. None were left to speak your eulogy. No final words. No concluding statement. No point. Perfect closure.

      This is the only way it should have ended.”

      You find the book on the back of the Earthmover, minutes before you destroy it. Hell speaks to the player as it seems to condemn you for how far you’ve made it, how much destruction you’ve caused and how much more you will cause. Yet, whether you read this book or not, you continue on. This is the part where I get to my point. The player doesn't have a character role in the story, but instead is a thematic element, a living allegory. You play as a representation of cruel, uncaring war, with all individual humanity removed. You play as the ultimate enemy, the final boss as everything tries to stop you, but, as you are repeatedly told: it's too late for that.

      Part of the tagline for the game is “blood is fuel,” a very literal statement, as blood is the healing system in the game. This line appears in the opening scene after you adjust your settings, right after you’re given the objective “find a weapon” and before you get to move for the first time, as if it's a motto to live by. In contrast to this statement you are meant to hold as a belief, another character, the��actual protagonist of this story, declares that “We all bleed the same blood” while he fights to free the citizens of heaven from their council. On one hand, we have the embodiment of war seeing life as nothing but fuel for its eternal pursuit of destruction. On the other, we have an angel declaring that all life is of equal value, and that we shouldn't let anyone control us, no matter the rank they’ve given themselves. 

      I have to make a conclusion because I got a bit into rambling territory there. ULTRAKILL is a game which talks about the horrors of war and its direct relation to humanity, but also how it transcends us. It portrays war as a sentient machine which we created and nothing could not stop, not even the forces of heaven or hell. It shows the tragedies that war leaves in its path, the pain and grief and suffering. I could go so much further, but this is already 1000 words, and you’re probably confused enough. I’ll just go on about how this game appeals to my romantic personality.

      It’s largely the environment for me and the little things found in them. A pair of headless skeletons embracing in a random bed; another headless skeleton praying; a blinding white landscape covered in scattered crosses, called a garden and the first thing you see in a layer called Violence; towering creatures, massive beyond comparison that you know you have to kill. Nothing compares to the feeling of stepping out into the last level of Violence and being greeted with the towering structure of the Earthmover as it looks down on you, a health bar appearing immediately, pushing you to go and kill this thing. The feeling of being so small and yet so powerful that you could destroy the very thing that ended humanity. The extensive poetics of a single, wordless scene. Does this make any sense at all? I’m not going to edit this, it’s not for a grade I don't think. Back on topic now. Something I adore is being able to think extensively about a static moment; deriving a million meanings and messages and emotions from it. A picture speaks a thousand words, as they say, and as I believe wholeheartedly.