At The End Of The Road
I’m in the promises we made to break.
I don’t know why I keep writing these articles.
Ok, I know. Half of it is my desire to keep writing reviews. I like being pretentious and talking about things I like (or sometimes don’t like) and imagine someone out there could find my ramblings interesting. The other half is a cry for help. Not even gonna try to pretend it’s something else — I have this unyielding need to scream into the void and nobody willing to listen, so instead I’m leaving the words stuck in my throat on a random page on the Internet, hoping someone will find it and… well, that’s the part I don’t know. I know what I want, but what I want is not gonna happen, so all I can do is put the words down and leave them there. My “legacy”, if we want to be dramatic.
So how about we split this in half? Half review, half rambling. Clean 50/50. Come for opinions no one asked for, stay for the ramblings of a loser. A terrible deal for everyone involved except me. Sounds good? Excellent.
The idea for this piece comes from a soundtrack, more than a game. A game that is definitely worth talking about, hence the article, but the main reason is that the soundtrack has become a part of my daily routine. The game is called Laika: Aged Through Blood, and if you haven’t heard of it it’s probably because it came out between Super Mario Wonder, Alan Wake 2 and a bunch of other big names that basically overshadowed its release. Big shame, because it’s a really unique take on an oversaturated genre. That genre being, of course, metroidvanias, especially the ones with clear Souls-like inspirations. You know what those games are missing? A bike. And guns. And Laika has both. My kind of game.
In Laika you play as, uh, Laika. Motorcycle-riding, revolver-shooting coyote, mother of one and bearer of a curse that makes her immortal. The perfect war machine to deploy when the Birds kill one of the kids from her village and the kid’s father decides to rush in and get himself killed, officially declaring war between the Birds and her small village. It’s up to us, as Laika, to kill as many of them as we can and to basically destroy everything they’ve built in an effort to single-handedly win the war.
In gameplay terms, this plays out as one of the most unique metroidvanias out there. Yes, there is a big map to explore, sidequests to complete and all that, but what’s interesting here is that during this whole time you’ll be playing on a motorbike. The bike controls similar to Trials: press a button to accelerate, move the stick back and forth to do a wheelie or to rotate in midair. The second stick (or the mouse) handles the gun. So far so good, but things get interesting when you throw enemies into the mix, since every element of the gameplay comes into play in different ways. The bike, for example, can be used to shield Laika (who dies in one hit) from projectiles, so angling the bike correctly during a gunfight to protect yourself from the enemies (who also die in one hit) is important. Not only that, but reloading the gun requires you to do a backwards 360°, which means airborne time needs to be maximized for efficiency.
The result is, well, pretty damn badass. Jumping on a bunch of Birds, quickly shooting two, blocking the third one, reloading and then finishing the last one in one swift motion never gets old. The core loop of Laika is honestly strong enough to carry the game all the way to the end with even the most basic enemies, but the game has a lot more than that. As expected you unlock multiple weapons, the most notable one being the shotgun with its ability to propel you upwards for a “shotgun jump” of sorts, useful both for intended purposes and for all kinds of advanced platforming skips that will attract the attention of veteran metroidvania enjoyers. Enemies will similarly evolve over time, starting with additional firepower like rocket launchers (the rocket tracks, so you’ll need to shoot it in midair or dodge it somehow) to obstacles like armored turrets you’ll need to jump over or otherwise get past in order to be able to kill its user. And yes, that involves running into it at full speed shielding the bullets with your bike.
The game’s level design is generally excellent, striking a perfect balance between the smooth but challenging terrain a Trials-like movement system requires and the need to hide little secrets and exploration bonuses a proper metroidvania always offers. There’s less than ten total areas in the game but each one is unique in both the way they’re traversed, the atmsophere they ooze and the challenges you face. The fast travel system also only reaches certain points of the map, so traversing it will become familiar pretty fast as you backtrack for the sidequests.
Speaking of, not every aspect of the game is a success. A lot of people mention that the sidequests require a lot of backtracking through previously seen areas, but I personally had no issue with it — running around in your bike is one of the main aspects of the game after all. What I personally had issues with, rather, is the game’s lack of visual clarity at times. Between having to block bullets and reloading I often found myself landing on my head and instantly dying, which caused a decent amount of frustration. There is an indicator on your crosshair showing your current orientation, but when you’re focused on blocking bullets and reloading I found myself focused more on the bike itself, and to put it bluntly I couldn’t see squat. Then I land, bonk my head and whoop — back to the checkpoint I go. Frustrating!
But not nearly as frustrating as the obligatory Dark Souls money mechanic. When you die you drop half the money you have and need to retrieve it. Here’s the thing: if you lose your money in Dark Souls, unless you just came from a fat PvP session, it really doesn’t matter. You’ll make the money back just by killing mobs in the area you’re in. In this game losing half your money is a big fucking deal. Money income is mostly the same from all enemies, and you need it to buy everything, from new guns to collectibles (the game lets you listen to the beautiful soundtrack as you travel, which is nice). Luckily you can drop up to 2 bags of money before losing them forever, so there’s some margin of error, but in a game where dying happens very frequently it becomes irritating very quickly. There’s also a few issues with some of the main quest (one of the first main quest adventures features a triple repeat of the same boss fight — not exactly the most exciting idea for a game that otherwise thrives on its variety), but these are rare and far in between.
Oh, and one last thing: I really hate that you need to get ready to shoot to activate bullet time. Sometimes I just want to assess the situation without shooting my gun, especially in a game where I need to do a backwards 360° to reload. You know?
Overall, Laika ended up being one of my favorite games of 2023 (that is big praise, by the way). I’m always a fan of fresh takes on a genre that I feel has already said everything it had to say in its traditional form (ironically some of my favorite metroidvanias from the last few years, The Messenger and Knight Witch, are kinda hated for their metroidvania aspect), and Laika delivers not only on the metroidvania aspect, but every other part. The simple gameplay loop of jump, block and shoot never gets old, whether you’re at the beginning with your two shots revolvers fighting normal infantry or at the end, shotgun and gatling ready to go, racing against an army of rockets and turrets. Add to this some unique and memorable level design, a brilliant soundtrack and some fairly decent writing and you got yourself a game to remember for a long, long time.
Oh, yeah, the music and the writing. This is the other half of the article. The one where I ramble and get depressed. Let me put a disclaimer up.
This next section contains spoilers about the plot of Laika: Aged Through Blood. It also discusses depression and related topics.
Goodness gracious, doesn’t that just give the article such a serious, professional vibe? I’ve been writing garbage for ten years, I know what I’m doing. Right. Let’s talk about Beícoli, regrets and mistakes. And boy, do I have a lot to say about mistakes.
The key to Laika’s plot lies in her lineage’s curse.
When the females of Laika’s family bleed (the female kind of bleeding, not the getting stabbed one) for the first time they become feverish. Then one of two things happens: they gain immortality or they die. No in between. As a bonus, the mother of the now immortal child loses her own immortality.
Laika’s mother built her like a warrior the moment she survived her bleeding. Laika has a daughter of her own, Puppy. Not her first daughter, mind you — the first one bled when Laika wasn’t there for her and, unfortunately, died later. Laika’s immortality forces her to be the guardian of her village, a role she frankly hates. When Jakob (the father of the kid I mentioned at the beginning) goes and get himself killed, Laika is forced to wage a one-woman-coyote war against an army because she’s the only one who can. Her mother won’t shut the fuck up, the elders want her to go and kill a bunch of Birds and all she wants is to make sure her daughter is safe.
During her journey, Laika encounters a lot of people. In one of the main quests, for example, she meets Orella, a historian who’s been hiding among the Birds working on the Big Tree, a huge cathedral built in a tree (duh) that holds an important spot in the Birds’ religious nonsense. Laika comes in with the objective of destroying it, and Orella reluctantly agrees, slowly regretting it more and more as Laika barrages her way through the Tree, eventually killing the Birds’ Pope. By the time she gets outside, she finds out Orella couldn’t handle the fact she helped destroy something so important and killed herself.
As someone living at the edge between life and death, Laika has one more trick up her sleeve: she can speak with the spirits of the recently deceased for a limited time, before they pass away for good. Orella asks Laika to leave her alone, and the coyote decides to bury her next to the Tree. To Orella, the Tree was pretty much her whole life. Destroying it, even for a “right” cause, was too much. This is where my favorite song of the game, The End Of The Road, starts playing.
Many words are written about the ones who made it,
The ones who made it…
While you are asphyxiating
Like a rope around your neck,
Say you’re not good enough.But we’ve done enough….
To cover for a lifetime
To cover for our sins,
For the good we have done
At the end of the road.
The soundtrack was made by Beícoli, and for this game she produced, as the kids would say it, some “real bangers”. She explained her thoughts on some of the songs in the game on Twitter, so definitely check that out if you want to see how her personal life intertwined with the game’s story and led to the production of some of the songs. Much like a lot of the most memorable songs in games, these tracks often extend past their meaning inside the game itself and translate into something that has a meaning of its own, amplifying both the game’s story and the impact they have on people.
Because people have their own stories, of course. That’s one of the beautiful things about music and songs: everyone can take something out of them, because they will relate to them in their own, unique way (please listen to The Trapeze Swinger if you haven’t — not really related to the game, just putting it out there). Laika’s music talks of Laika’s story, but also of Beícoli’s and beyond. The writing of the game is surprisingly good, don’t get me wrong, but the overall narrative wouldn’t have the same grip without the soundtrack bringing it to another level. And this is why the rest of the story ends up hitting harder than, I feel, would’ve otherwise.
As the game progresses Laika ends up focusing on the war and ignoring the requests of her daughter, who eventually gets fed up and goes out on her own, ending up captured. Laika goes on a rampage to get her back, but on the way home Puppy starts suffering from fevers, meaning it’s time for the immortality curse to kick in. This puts the coyote on a timer: either Puppy lives, and she loses her immortality, or she dies and Laika no longer has a reason to go on. Either way, she loses (well, technically she could end the war before Puppy recovers or dies, but we all know that wouldn’t be a very interesting ending).
This brings us to the ending, where the Birds have prepared a surprise for our village: a big-ass nuke, to be dropped onto the wasteland with the purpose of killing everyone. As Laika kills the final boss, the Birds’ leader, Puppy contacts her saying she’s bleeding. The immortality has officially been passed to the daughter, which means Laika is now mortal again, with a nuke in front of her, a couple hundred angry Birds that want her dead and a gun in her hand — the only way to stop the nuke from dropping. As she drops after the nuke in the climax, as you shoot at it in midair enduring through the bullets piercing through your now mortal body (for some reason you can’t block them with the bike in the ending, which ultimately doesn’t matter but takes away from the cool factor), she has one last thing to say to Puppy before sacrificing herself for everyone else.
“Just… learn from my mistakes, will you?”
What mistakes she’s referring to is a bit open to interpretation. There are, of course, the ones she made as a mother. She feels guilty for the death of her first daughter and for ignoring Puppy’s wishes, leading to her being put in danger. But I’d like to think it’s not that simple. There’s a lot more that went wrong: everyone that helped her in this lonely crusade died, whether they wanted to or not. She chased a war she didn’t believe in, following orders she didn’t agree with, neglecting what she cared for the most in the process. She ended up dying as a hero, but for a war she didn’t want. At the end of the road she looked back, and she only saw what went wrong and died with regret in her heart.
Don’t cry my love, don’t cry my love.
It’s okay, it’s okay.
I’m not gone.
Don’t cry my love, don’t cry my love.
It’s okay, it’s okay.
I’m not gone.
There’s a point… well, multiple points in one’s life, when all is said and done, where you can only look back and choose what to take away from what happened. Because some things can’t be changed: they happen and you have to live with them. I’ve been at these crossroads multiple times now, and every time I look back all I have to bring with me is a baggage of regret and sorrow. Because I can’t remember the last time the consequences of my actions have been positive. I’ve destroyed everything I’ve had, and I have nothing to show for it.
I’m in the flowers, I’m in the trees,
I’m in the same air you breathe.
I’m in the fire, I’m in your bones,
I’m in in the fingertips of lovers I don’t know.
I’m in a very dark place right now. I feel like I’ve been frozen in time for months, waiting for something to happen to help me move forward. But nothing happens: I’m stuck at the crossroads, with all these regrets chasing me that I can’t shake off. Because if nothing changes, how can I expect to move forward? My motorbike has run out of fuel a long time ago, and my revolver only has one bullet left.
I’m in the water, I’m in the moon,
I’m in the lies someone told you were true.
I’m in the earth, I’m in your words,
Oh, I’m in the raised fists that fight for a better world.
So maybe it’s not some crossroads I’m stuck at. Maybe I’m just at the end of the road. There’s a voice stuck in my head, telling me maybe it’s time to wrap things up. I feel like the only thing keeping me here, aside from cowardice and lack of willpower, are fantasies. Fantasies of how people would react to if I decided I was officially fed up with it and decided I didn’t want to suffer anymore. Because right now I don’t hear the voices of the people I’d like to hear to remind me that I matter, and I’m too scared to expose that side of myself to others because I don’t want to end up living with even more regrets, broken friendships and baggage to carry until cowardice is no longer enough of a reason to keep going.
I’m in the sky, I’m in your feet,
I’m in the fishes dancing in the sea.
I’m in the sinners, I’m in your prayers,
I’m in the promises we made to break.
And if I am at the end of the road, I’d have liked to know my life mattered. A selfish thought, maybe, but I’m writing this article because I feel like I have no one willing to listen to me scream about these things, so I can’t even say I feel like I can “rationally” prove my feelings wrong. I hate this feeling. I have no more distractions to keep me away from my thoughts, so I have to write about it on a page nobody will read because nobody wants to deal with it. How am I supposed to be ok with that? I don’t know, but I’m not. All I can do is go to bed and hope that tomorrow these thoughts won’t be as aggressively intrusive. At the start I wrote about how these articles I’ve been writing are a sort of “legacy”, but if this really is the titular end of the road, maybe it’d be best to not be remembered at all.
But if there is anything to remember, it has to be what to learn from my mistakes. If you’re reading this… do that for me, will you?
