Wintermoor Tactics Club: How Our Hobbies Offer Solace and Encourage Connection
It would be a disservice to call EVC Games’ Wintermoor Tactics Club (WTC) cute, despite this tactics and visual novel mashup title aiming for a cozy theme of snowball fights and school club rivalries. While this game is a bit on the simplistic side, WTC is very upfront about this being a game about empathy and inclusion. So much so that there’s even a clause reassuring players in the options menu that they “won’t gain or lose access to any game content” if they adjust the settings. A far cry from indie games like Furi, which followed the opposite approach and disparaged players for wanting to make the game more accessible via difficulty modes. Not to mention the recent controversy with a prominent Kotaku editor claiming that FFVII Remake’s easy mode was too easy. The user interface (UI) is also a straightforward and elegant top-down isometric with lovingly rendered character sprites.
WTC’s charming tactical visual novel is about three friends (Alicia, Jacob, and Colin) who run a Curses and Catacombs (a.k.a. D&D, hereafter C&C) campaign in their school’s Tactics Club. Alicia, the player character (who’s also a thoughtfully-designed girl of colour), explains that the Tactics Club is how she was able to find friends and a safe space on the authoritative campus of Wintermoor. But the Tactics Club will, of course, become a much more formative experience in the protagonists’ lives when the school’s Principal Enfield calls for a bizarre snowball tournament that will decide the fate of every school club at Wintermoor.
Wintermoor is a northeastern, alternate 1980s boarding school that at turns is considered overly authoritarian and just straight-up absurd; Jacob, the resident anti-establishment rogue of the Tactics Club labels it “fascist”, “militaristic”, and a “junta.” The game is delightful at capturing the tone of teenagers who often define problems in hyperbolic and absurdist terms. Fans of shows like 6Teen or Gravity Falls will find a lot to chuckle at, narrative-wise, with clubs named things like “The Psychic Detectives” or “The Reckless Bakers”. The lighthearted tone extends beyond dialogue options, however, and into the mechanics as well, which is always a good sign in my books. For instance, the snowball tournament is envisioned as a tactical battle that references not only the C&C portion of the gameplay, but (in my opinion) is directly inspired by classic tactics console titles like Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, and calls to mind the early internet browser game Snow Craft. The music is certainly a nod towards the former.
The tactical battles are fairly easy, and I did find Alicia’s C&C character Anjaya a little bit overpowered. Her Spark spell can cause chain damage to enemies and takes off a chunk of lower enemies’ HP with each turn. Most of my battles were won by her, or a combination of her and Colin’s Paladin Eodwald’s tank attacks. I did not find the battles were uninteresting, however. One can adjust the difficulty level via player health and so on after all. This game struck me as a great gateway to tactical gameplay for players like me who don’t often play the genre or for young gamers who want to learn about the genre. By increasing accessibility for a variety of players, WTC’s gameplay experience demonstrates its themes of empathy and inclusion in a holistic manner. Although it’s tangentially related by way of tabletop roleplaying and encouraging young players to learn about story-driven gameplay, WTC reminded me of Together Tales.
So, to return to the plot, why is the Principal so invested in forcing the Wintermoor clubs to duke it out with snowballs? Meritocracy! Or to put it in Enfield’s words, he wants to see the reasons that the students want their club to earn the title of “The Ultimate Club”. Every club that loses in the snowball tournament must disband forever, which complicates our protagonists’ view of their opponents. Especially in Alicia’s case.
Alicia’s easily my favourite character of the game so far. She shows empathy for the clubs that have to disband, even ones like “The Young Monarchists” who have the humble goal of wanting society to return to monarchy. The first battle you have against this fanatic club acts as a divisive moment for the Tactics Club, with Jacob calling monarchy “fascism with fancy lipstick on” and equating them as a symptom of Wintermoor’s problem with oppression. But Colin acknowledges that Alicia’s not wrong for feeling sympathy for the disbanded club since they could’ve suffered a similar fate. Considering that this is set in 1981, before the internet age, disbanding the Tactics Club (or any of the clubs really) means preventing students from connecting and expressing themselves. Understandably, such thoughts give Alicia nightmares (a quick but significant aside: being able to play as a girl of colour who goes to sleep with a protective head-wrap warmed my diverse representation-deprived heart).
What sticks with me the most throughout my play-through of the first chapter are two elements: the idea of hobbies offering us a sense of catharsis and connection to like-minded individuals, and how the lessons we learn in games can often translate over to real life. There’s been a lot of literature in recent years about how gamers experience the “bleed effect” from their fictional experience to their everyday life. Audrey Anable’s Playing with Feelings, which posits that games allow players to rehearse real emotions and scenarios comes to mind, as does Brendan Keogh’s A Play of Bodies, which discusses how games physically impact player experience. Counsellors and local gaming groups are known to use tabletop and live-action role-play (LARP) games to help people of all ages come to terms with various life issues, oftentimes incidentally in the case of the latter.
The first thing that the protagonists do when they hear that their club may end via the Wintermoor snowball tournament is to seek comfort in completing their current C&C campaign. Later, this seemingly last club meeting delivers them from their first snowball battle by reminding them that they could view the clash as if it were one of their climactic campaign battles.
The release of this game is perfectly timed during this period of self-quarantine and social distancing. WTC reminds us of how right now cozy things like hobbies and any form of social connection, even in abstract ways goes a long way towards keeping the chill of isolation at bay. The friends who play together, stay together.
