Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
Last week gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun ran a series of features for their rather brilliant Survival Week, a week devoted to survival games and mod conversions. With a full week's worth of articles published it can be tricky to catch up, but here are four recommended starting points:
First up, Angus Morrisson dialed up the difficulty in Minecraft with a suite of survival mods that do everything from altering the games physics to raising the stakes of combat. Much of what he details in his survival diary is familiar to anyone who's played Minecraft's much kinder vanilla survival mode, but with a fresh layer of intensity on top. As his character slowly starves, he writes:
Hah, “wait it out”. My earlier unkosher feast left me snackless, and like a newborn I require feeding again. I have to brave the storm.
Three shanks remain on the food bar.
By divine grace, the tornado has passed over, but the storm is still in force. I skirt the lava I encountered on Day 1. That seems so long ago now. It brings me some comfort in the dark.
Two shanks left.
Creepers are gathering behind the treeline. If there’s food that way, it’s not destined for my plate. I’m moving slowly now, each step a marathon. “Starving”, Hunger Overhaul tells me. He always has the right of it.
One-and-a-half.
Jack de Quidt's survival diary in Eidolon is slightly less brutal, but much of that is in de Quidt's ability to find comfort and relief in the small, beautiful moments the game provides. Full disclosure, I'm internet friends with Jack and we stream games together regularly, but I think you'll agree that his soft, poetic Eidolon diary is still a must-read:
Sometimes I encountered things in the wilderness.
An object on the ground some distance away.
Sometimes my discoveries were fun.
It was a little fox! Maybe this was the coyote I heard. I am reassured and starving.
Sometimes my discoveries were assuredly not fun. One of my notes just reads:
i got attacked by a horrible cat.
(I never encountered Horrible Cat again. There was, however –
Saw a bear and ran away.
And -
I can see either a deer or one of those Horrible Cats some distance ahead. It certainly has hooves. I don’t think Horrible Cat had hooves.
It’s probably still waiting for me.)
Brendan Caldwell has his fair share of animal related tragedy in the chronicles of his heavily-modded Skyrim save. He embarked without Dovahkiin magic, without powerful armor, without any of the comforts most of us have accumulated in the 3 years since the game was originally released. He set out with a dog and a slight chill, and lost one of the two quickly:
The faithful animal companion of Hollywood always dies at the end of the movie, to popcorn-flavoured tears. The animal familiar of literature always dies during some climactic moment of judgement and sacrifice, in passages blazing with meaning and symbolism. Meeko died on the first day of a 10-day journey, after I accidentally skewered him with my scimitar. He had charged into Robber’s Gorge — a camp of bandits — and, in my hurry to keep by his side, I ran into the fray swinging extra hard, slicing not only his attacker but the dog’s own flank too. He flumped to the ground and I froze. Meeko was dead and I had not even travelled a mile. I frowned. And then I murdered the rest of the bandits.
This final post may actually be the peak of the series, but I couldn't bear not mentioning it. Christopher Livingston has written a lot about DayZ. He loves it. He's spent dozens of hours playing since its early days as a mod, so he needed to do something truly special if he was going to write about it again. Something special like perma-permadeath, meaning that if (or should I say when) he dies, he puts DayZ down for good. It's a strangely stressful post to read with that in mind, especially when things like this happen:
The first few buildings I loot provide me with gloves and a red children’s backpack. There’s also a water pump nearby, and I start filling my belly, spinning the third-person camera around to watch my own back as I drink. I immediately spot a creeper zombie fast approaching, perfectly framed by the pump. Naturally, I can’t cancel the drinking animation, because this game is still so damn incomplete, so I’m forced to sit there, serenely sipping water and watching as my potential ever-death closes in.
You can find these posts and loads more, including several posts detailing how to turn some of your favorite non-survival games (like Skyrim) into life-threatening permadeath starvation fever dreams over in Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Survival Week archives.
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