Category: hades

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Releasing the Grip of Grief with Games

I don’t like the hyperbole of saying that videogames saved my life, but it tracks true. Nowadays so many people say similar; ‘this song saved my life’, ‘this book rescued me from the edge’. Videogames did a lot for keeping me alive in a very dark period of my life. If it wasn’t for games, and to a lesser extent, writing about them, there’s a strong chance I wouldn’t be sitting here now, telling this story about how I used gaming to deal with the grief of bereavement. 

In 2007, my three-year old daughter Amelia was a passenger in a road traffic accident. The car was T-Boned on her side of the vehicle. Amelia suffered severe brain damage, was rushed from Essex to London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital, where she spent five days in intensive care, had two bouts of brain surgery and several blood transfusions. She died on February 8th 2007 after it was revealed she was brain dead. We removed life support. My world collapsed. Everything went dark.

The following months, probably years, were spent in a trance. I wasn’t sure what I needed to do, or even what I wanted to do. I reached out to my gaming buddies I’d met online, looking for a distraction; we played Crackdown and Rainbow Six: Las Vegas on Xbox 360. I wasn’t finding joy anymore though. Perfect runs through Terrorist mode of Rainbow Six didn’t please me, the beta of Halo 3 brought a small amount of fun to my post-tragedy life, but I was struggling to connect with the hobby I started twenty years previously on an Atari 2600.

The Grip of Grief

Grief feels different for everyone; for some it can feel like the loneliness of being the last person at a party; for others, it’s an overwhelming sadness that washes over them like waves of a frigid ocean. However it’s experienced, grief is relentless, it never seems to let go. It does occasionally relax its grip, allowing for some light to get through, as fleeting as it might be. In those moments I felt an overwhelming guilt that I could feel hope, which triggered another spiral.

I spent several years in this state, lacking any form of motivation or ‘want’, drifting from game to game, finishing them and feeling no sense of accomplishment. My days were spent in a mire of tiredness, guilt, shame and mostly, anger. My world felt empty despite having my wife and second daughter at my side. 

The death of Amelia gave me a sensation of lost control. As a parent, we feel we must protect our children from anything and everything. I couldn’t prevent the accident that took her life, I couldn’t save her in the moment she needed me the most, I couldn’t control my emotions any longer. The only control I had was in removing her life support and I didn’t want that. Loss of control is part of being human, but I needed, desperately, to reinstate my grip on it.

Isaac’s Eternal Journey

In 2011, a game came along that stole me away from my grief. A game played in bitesize chunks, it didn’t require too much of me.  It’s a game that has now been in my (almost) daily rotation for those eleven years, I’ve grown with it, it made me fall in love with the roguelike genre, it gave me back my sense of control. That game is The Binding of Isaac.

Edmund McMillen’s The Binding of Isaac is a roguelike played from a top-down view. With a slight edge of Robotron, players can shoot in cardinal directions while exploring separated rooms where groups of enemies await. Edmund’s major inspiration for Isaac was The Legend of Zelda, though his masterpiece is not at all family friendly.

I think I discovered The Binding of Isaac through YouTube. It first appealed for juvenile reasons, the game is filled with gore, scatological imagery and debased toilet humour. Beneath this is a deep and resonant story of religious indoctrination and the control religions have over people, as well as the human struggle with our minds. Over the years, McMillen has expanded The Binding of Isaac several times, but Isaac’s story has remained the same; to escape his murderous mother who believes Isaac is a danger, an evil.

In order to escape, Isaac must traverse several ‘worlds’ battling enemies and large bosses who resemble religious and parental tropes. In order to do this, Isaac collects items to change his base stats, attacks and abilities. Items synergise with each other creating powerful combinations. Over time you learn which combos bestow the most damage, you learn which items effectively ‘break the game’ open by min-maxing every room, every enemy, every item drop. It rewards the player by handing them full control over their fate.

Controlling Destiny

This aspect of control appears in all roguelikes, the majority of titles require the player craft their character builds, paying attention to the smallest upgrades and details to gain enough strength to battle demons and monsters. Ultimately, over the years, these games – Enter the Gungeon, Dead Cells, Spelunky, Hades, Nuclear Throne – have given me a psuedo-control over death.

To some extent, all videogames give us this control. Even playing Mario as a kid we were controlling the life and death of our hero and the enemies around them. But with a roguelike, there is rarely a safety net of ‘lives and continues’, there’s always a sense of finality, because often death relinquishes all progress made on that attempt at the game. Besting death in a roguelike is about more than success, it’s about retaining our growth, our abilities and our progression.

For me, during a time of desperate fragility, I needed to find solace and rediscover my sense of self. I could do that via these games, by crafting a character, slowing my play style and taking my time. They each allowed me to take calculated risks and create controlled situations because the finality of death had visited me, leaving me empty – progress could be lost with one missed shot, one wrong move, one blindsided action.

If we look at Spelunky, a game about discovering treasures untold in a series of worlds, we find a game hell-bent on killing us. Sure, the hero can take a certain amount of hits from middling enemies before dying, but that one bad jump could land you on spikes which kill you instantly. All that time, that care, robbed from you. Mastering this, taking control of the character’s fate, is in some ways empowering.

This sensation stepped up once I started dabbling with FromSoftware’s SoulsBorne games, arguably the pinnacle of roguelikes, though they’re often classed as adventure games. These titles, when broken down into their constituent parts, asked more of me as a player. My demons were bigger, more dangerous, my life more fragile. There was more on the line. A SoulsBorne game feels more like Spelunky; you can get peppered with small hits, but a one-hit kill is always around the next corner.

Repeat After Me

Roguelike games offer more than an adjustment of control. After devoting thousands of hours to these games, repetition becomes a large factor in the gameplay loop. Every journey starts out the same way, each try becomes another attempt at beating the same situation. Repetition is a powerful tool to those in desperate need when struggling with grief and anxiety. A recent study by Tel Aviv University states this on repetition, “people often act in these ways because they help increase a person’s belief that they are managing a situation that is otherwise out of their hands.”

Discussing the power of repetition, Dr. Jill Owen, a chartered psychologist from The British Psychological Society, says this, “repetitive behaviour and rituals can be very effective in increasing focus and reducing stress”. Over the years, the discussion points of videogames and their impact on mental health has begun to change. In the 2000s we saw many up in arms on the damage these games did, now we realise these were knee-jerk reactions to an emerging technology becoming mainstream.

Videogames offer us solace, they offer us peace when it feels like the world is against us. More than that, they offer us a different view, through first-hand experience or playing a role. They allow us failure at little to no cost; they can help build an emotional resilience; games create a sense of community and they can aid in rebuilding a life slowly, step by step, item by item.

Nowadays gaming is celebrated for having a positive effect on our mental health. Once society began to look past the violence which dominated the 2000s and developers began exploring our own psyches, games took on a new role. Psychologist Roy Sugarman explores the aid of videogames in those dealing with grief with Wired where he says, “Games put you in a metaphoric world where you can express a range of stuff honestly, where you can express grief.”

This is it, but What if?

I still gravitate towards roguelikes above all genres. Mostly because I still feel lost a lot of the time. My world is still fragile, the cracks still show. Sometimes I still need that sensation of organised chaos; that possible control over the game. The Binding of Isaac is still the answer I give when someone asks “what’s your favourite game?” I give this answer because it did save me in some way. It turned the lights back on, helped me rebuild my shattered world. Plus, it’s simply a masterpiece of game design.

Of course, over the years, my passion for gaming came back. I rediscovered what it was that made me fall in love with games in the first place – a sense of belonging and escapism. Whether it’s in a cyberpunk strategy, a World War shooter, a colourful battle royale, a mobile idle clicker or a roguelike, my enjoyment returned, along with some of that lost control.

In the same year I discovered Isaac, I also played Minecraft for the first time and used the creative side of the game to express myself, to be more mindful and to relax the thoughts of my busy and broken brain. Minecraft also offers that aspect of control; the deliberate placing of blocks, building shelter from the darkness, equipping your character with the means to survive.

Now I revel in the lack of control some games give, because it reminds me that life is not designed to be controlled. That fate, if you believe in it, cannot be changed or altered. In some ways, failing in videogames has begun to have more impact, because it reconnects me with the fact that life is filled with ‘what if?’ – that life can change in an instant and while that may be out of our control, it doesn’t mean we can’t wrestle it back.

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What Has gmw3 Been Playing?: March 2022

As gmw3 continues to grow and expand our coverage so too does our team of writers, all of whom love tech, videogames, Web3, and anything else with a digital signal. We’re all continually playing videogames for fun (and for work) so now seems like the ideal time to see what everyone has been passing the time with; from epic blockbusters to fringe virtual reality (VR) titles, here’s what we’ve been playing during March.

Elden Ring

William Smith

Elden Ring

This month I’ve mostly been playing Elden Ring. Although playing might be a strong word for someone whose play style mostly involves summoning spirits then dodging around frantically until they kill the boss for me.

That generous summoning mechanic is partly why I find myself getting much less frustrated with Elden Ring than in previous entries in the Dark Souls series. It’s also because, being open-world as the game is, Elden Ring encourages you to bypass the tricky bits. 

Indeed, one of the first enemies you meet once emerging into the game proper (Tree Sentinel for those in the know) seems designed to ram home this message by ramming your face into the floor, repeatedly, until you learn to simply walk around them. Cue many happy hours of running past enemies, whether on foot or on my trusty steed Torrent, taking in the many wondrous sights of the Lands Between. Except Caelid. We don’t talk about Caelid.

Tunic

If you’re interested in playing Elden Ring but wish much of the eldritch horror was replaced with cute foxes, the charmic Tunic is surely the game for you. While it takes much more than a leaf out of the Elden Ring book, with unlockable respawn points, nail-biting boss fights, and one opportunity to recover your experience points upon death, the best thing it replicates is the sense of mystery.

You’re dropped into the game with almost no information and, in a very meta twist, are required to work everything out for yourself by finding pieces of the manual scattered throughout the world. Even these are mostly written in a mostly indecipherable language, so establishing exactly what you are being told becomes a puzzle in itself.

There are doubtless people who will be put off by Tunic’s obtuse nature, but it is skillfully designed to (mostly) avert frustration and make you feel smart for figuring out its secrets. Tunic has served as an excellent side dish to the Elden Ring main course this month.

Walkabout Mini Golf

In VR, meanwhile, I’ve been whiling away the hours in the supremely relaxing Walkabout Mini Golf VR. This is undoubtedly the VR game I find myself coming back to more than any other.

Why? First, there’s the music, which is much better than mini golf game music has any right to be (particularly the theme for the pirate world, which is pretty much playing non-stop inside my head at all times). 

Equally as good are the gorgeous environments, from wild west saloons to Japanese gardens to weird candy fantasias. Every time I look up to curse the heavens regarding my latest triple bogey, I’m distracted by some lovely piece of detail and all is once again right in the world.

Pair all this with some lovely swinging physics that ensure the ball always seems to go where you intended it to and you have a supremely enjoyable package. I mean, who hasn’t wanted to play crazy golf in space?

Gran Turismo 7

Daniel Lipscombe

Gran Turismo 7

Like much of the games playing public, I’ve spent tens of hours playing Elden Ring. I chose a sorcerer, it’s dope. But you all know how great it is, so I’m going to tell you about Gran Turismo 7, AKA the best racing game for years that is being abysmally handled by creators Polyphony Digital. Gran Turismo is known, for one thing, gorgeous car models. There’s something wonderful about starting the GT journey in a clapped Mini Cooper and working up to a Ferrari F40. But that’s damn near impossible for casual players since Polyphony is only interested in our micro-transaction money.

Want that Aston Martin? Grind this race multiple times. Fancy hopping into a McClaren and tearing through the countryside? Well, open your wallet and make it rain. Recent news shows that the developer, and Sony, are willing to shift this balance. Apparently, we’re getting better rewards for finishing races, which is handy because, despite all the drama, Gran Turismo 7 really is the best racing game to emerge for many years.

The actual driving is a delight and, as expected from the PlayStation 5, it looks bloody glorious. A special shoutout must go to the DualSense controller which elevates the experience beyond a basic rumble of tires and picks up the smooth changes in asphalt and dirt in America, or chatters over storm drains in Tokyo.

The Binding of Isaac

The Binding of Isaac is my favourite game. No other game holds a candle to this McMillen masterpiece, so I’ll preface this entry with some useless stats. On PC I’ve played 846 hours. On PlayStation (across Vita, PS4 and PS5) I’ve stacked up over 500 hours. Now playing on Nintendo Switch my total currently reads 921 hours. I’m a fan.

Isaac has become a comfort game for me. That’s right, a game about religious institutional murder, Munchausen’s syndrome, faecal matter and gore, is a comfort. I’ve played this game in my low times, my high times and those moments in life when nothing made sense. The addictive gameplay loop of discovering items, pairing them with others to create an overpowered character is, to me, as moreish as crack cocaine.

With the latest DLC, Repentance, the game has become a whole new beast. It’s maddeningly difficult, features intricate routes to secure success and some of the new character variants are punishing. Many times I’ve wanted to launch my Switch across the room as I pick up an item that breaks my progress. But I still love it. It’s still my comfort. My favourite.

VVR2

Coral Cripps

Virtual Virtual Reality 2

The metaverse has pretty much just been born — and yet we’re already fantasising about its collapse. In this fun-filled, brightly-coloured comedy-adventure game adapted for Meta Quest 2, it’s easy to forget that the premise sits on top of some dark undertones. With that being said, however, the juxtaposition is perfect — and the tongue-in-cheek humour featured throughout the game is also on-point.

The game starts off with, well… basically your character dying and being recreated inside a new mech body situated inside the fictional realm of Scottsdale. In short, you are tasked with using your new body to save avatars and digital identities from a metaverse on the verge of collapse. It poses the important question: “When a metaverse shuts down, what happens to the avatars left behind?” After spending the last few months creating a surplus of avatars inside various games and ecosystems, it’s a fitting inquiry.

Through becoming more acquainted with my Meta Quest 2, it’s been exciting to start a game with a great metaphysical backstory. These types of things are my bread and butter — as a fan of other storylines like Ghost in the Shell and Fullmetal Alchemist, I love a good cyborg storyline. However, what’s more notable is that VVR2 also does a great job at poking fun at the absurdity of our current transition into the metaverse and the fragility that could follow it. If we’ve one day put all of our stock into virtual worlds, how catastrophic might it be to see them collapse? At this point in time, I suppose the best thing we can do is laugh.

Pokemon Shining Pearl

I’ll admit, I was a bit late to the Nintendo Switch party. However, making a move from Canada to the UK and being subjected to steep baggage fees meant I was best off leaving most of my consoles behind. It was also the perfect time to finally get my hands on the one, more portable device that would overcome a transatlantic barrier.

Pokemon Shining Pearl was an easy choice. A remake of Pearl and Diamond for the Nintendo DS, it’s a formidable reinvention of the 2006 fan-favourite and a perfect bridging gap between classic and modern games, equipped with the right level of nostalgia. The reinvented Sinnoh region looks bright and crisp on the Switch’s display, with a simplistic and colourful art style that doesn’t feel too bloated.

The gameplay mechanics are also great, with just the right amount of additions to differentiate it from its predecessor. Amongst the coolest new features are definitely the Hideaways — areas where players can find more powerful and exclusive Pokemon. These can be accessed through the Grand Underground — a reworked version of the Sinnoh region’s more challenging underbelly seen in the earlier titles.

Hades

Peter Graham

Hades

Now, this was one of those random picks from Xbox Game Pass. You know how it goes, you vaguely recognise the name and might take a look at a screenshot or two but in reality, I wanted to pick something at random to while away a few hours.

What I got was this epic roguelite dungeon crawler from Supergiant Games that I’ve been ploughing hours and hours into during spare moments when I’m not reviewing VR games or heading to events like GDC. And it has got me hooked, easy to master gameplay mechanics allow quick access to the rich world of Hades and the huge amount of lore the developer has put into it. I almost love simply unlocking all the narrative and info on each character as I do storming through the underworld killing wave after wave of monstrous creatures.

Plus there are plenty of upgrade options to play with, altering my character each time to try a push that little bit farther. I’ve come to realise that I’m a bit of a roguelite fan having enjoyed VR versions such as Outlier, YUKI and In Death: Unchained. I’ll likely continue playing Hades for quite a bit longer.

Cosmonious High

There had to be a VR game in here somewhere as I do spend a fair amount of time using the tech. I’ve spent a fair chunk of time in Owlchemy Labs’ latest project Cosmonious High – of which you can see the full review here – because it’s quite a laid back experience in all honesty.

Sure it’s a brightly coloured intergalactic high school with daft students, and even dafter names for everything but that silliness offers a welcome break from things. I can use my hands to paint the walls, freeze random objects or step into the chemistry lab to mix up random ingredients to see what they do. There’s no time limit on anything and I find completing some of the side challenges more enjoyable than the main campaign itself.

The only downside is that there isn’t a proper challenge to be faced. As a veteran VR player, I appreciate the technical achievement when looking at aspects like the water effects but I honestly don’t see myself playing it much longer; unlike Hades which has hooked me.