When the apocalypse started, I thought I was Ryan.
From the other side of a pile of debris, I watched helpless as my best friend in the world, Susie, was devoured by creatures who emerged from the ground. “Go on without me,” she pleaded. Feeling alone, I steeled myself with her words and went to work surviving.
I searched a nearby dumpster in a panic, keeping an eye on the massive buglike creatures. They had already killed Susie, and now they were slowly chipping away at the wall of refuse separating me from them.
I found a flashlight. Ok, that’s something. Nearby, an engine idled. A red four-door sedan with just enough gas for a wish and prayer sat there, abandoned, and at the moment, it was good enough. I hopped in and drove off, leaving Susie’s lifeless body and the bugs behind.
On my journey, I met another survivor, Lloyd. I found out he had just quit his job, right before this all started, and that got me thinking about endings and beginnings.
We picked up a dog, Gretchen, a good girl with a fiercely loyal personality and a loud bark to match. I found a red bandana in the trunk of a car while looking for more useful supplies, and I tied it around her neck — not for any sort of tactical advantage, mind you, but because it felt like the thing to do, in the apocalypse, to grasp at some remaining sense of normal domestic life.
And that’s how things were, for a while. The three of us scavenged our way across the country.
But soon, something strange happened: I left Ryan behind.
Here’s how it went down. Lloyd was scrounging for gas when he heard a rumbling under the ground. A horde of the bug-like creatures popped out of the dirt as Gretchen growled and raised her haunches. They were here now. At least Lloyd didn’t stray too far from the car while scavenging.
But Ryan did.
Ryan walked almost a block away from the car. He had spotted a flare on the ground and, seeing the coast was clear, decided it was worth the risk. He was uninjured, after all. If something ambushed him, he’d be able to hold his own and fight back.
But Lloyd was hurt. He got hurt the last time we stopped, and he never had time to lick his wounds. He was limping. He was in pain. And he was low on weapons, fuel, and morale, and now the bugs were rumbling at the surface. Ryan was prepared for the chance that the noise of his scavenging would attract the bugs. He had taken inventory of his options should he become surrounded, but he didn’t consider that Lloyd might be.
But the gas Lloyd siphoned from that rusted blue minivan would last the entire rest of the trip. If he just got in the car and left — if he just drove off — he’d have an honest-to-God shot at getting out alive.
Gretchen had already hopped into the car. Lloyd inched his way into the vehicle as Ryan looked on, realizing slowly what was happening. The ignition fired, and Lloyd and Gretchen drove off as Ryan sputtered a curse. The car peeled out into the night as Ryan was swarmed. And suddenly, I was Ryan no more.
So who was I?
Overland, a post-apocalyptic survival roguelike, facilitates stories like this through its mechanics. After a quick scripted introduction (in my case, Ryan leaving Susie behind), the game tosses you squarely in the deep end of the pool, leaving no time for tutorials or indeed a learning curve of any kind.
Overland is a brutal experience. It’s often frustrating just by virtue of being so unforgiving; a fog of war at night takes away your ability to cancel moves, for instance, and the action economy feels esoteric and sometimes arbitrary, punishing you for choices you sometimes didn’t actually choose to make.
But those unforgiving mechanics are the core experience. Overland is a game about losing, and that makes it maybe not-so-fun as a game, but as a tool for creating short stories with a real sense of ownership, it is nearly unparalleled. This is the strength of roguelikes as a genre, but nowhere is it more purely distilled than in Overland.
The randomization of names and descriptions leads to less carefully curated narrative beats, but on the whole, it makes up for it in the way it gifts those stories to players.
In other words, I was frustrated with Overland when I thought of Ryan as my avatar, as a part of me. When I left him behind — when I left him to die on that street — and the game continued, I realized that I was never Ryan. I was observing him in his isometric little box, yes, and I was moving him back and forth across the map, telling him when and what to scavenge, scrounge, and attack, but the whole time, I was someone else. I was the player. Not the author, nor the director, nor a character, but a player. And my objective here, in the wasteland, in post-apocalyptia, was not to survive, but to collect stories.
Due to the very nature of randomization, the stories I experienced, the characters I met, the decisions I saw in my little isometric box, existed only once and only for me. Scripted games present players with almost entirely binary scenarios. You pass or fail based on your performance or choices, and when you share stories of those experiences with other players, it’s more or less like comparing notes.
In Overland, as with other roguelikes, that experience is wildly different. You cannot compare notes because you won’t see the same beats, characters, or choices. When you tell a story, it is wholly yours.
Unfortunately, the dissonance in Overland’s design comes about in the way it begs you to experience it as a linear narrative, despite its loose open-ended structure and abbreviated haiku-like play experiences.
For some reason, every random character you meet, no matter what playthrough you embark on, wants to get across the country, to the West Coast. This overarching objective feels pretty arbitrary in the face of certain annihilation, and because this is a capital-v Video Game the difficulty curve must rise as you get closer to your goal. It’s baffling to imagine why these characters thing salvation lies on the Pacific coast, even as they encounter stronger and stronger enemies on their trip.
The core experience in Overland is startlingly deliberate in its vision of the apocalypse. You can feel the despair and hopelessness in every single choice you make, and it makes you feel actual guilt and regret for your decisions — these characters will die permanently, after all, and you’re the only one who’ll remember them. And yet the game seems to labour under the assumption you’ll succeed, that This is The Run, that this is the group that will make it, all the while having such an apathy towards its characters that you can literally leave them dying in the street.
Overland’s failures aren’t caused by ludicrous difficulty or lose-lose situations. That’s an intention of its design.
It’s a dual identity that Overland can’t escape, a need to present you with a flagpole at the end of a level, a necessity of structure As A Game that prevents it from being something truly, truly special.
Play it knowing that you will fail. Give yourself 20 minutes with its characters, getting to know them only briefly. Don’t succumb to despair as the bugs close in on them. Don’t feel guilt as their car begins to sputter and smoke, just before bursting into flames. Don’t let fear of the unknown keep you from venturing further into the night to look for fuel. You’re not here to collect survivors. You’re here to collect stories.
