The Dystopia for Our Times

NieR: Automata’s opening hours are an eerie parallel to our post-virus world

Everything is changing. The advent of COVID-19 is transforming how we live now — and how we might live for years to come. The world we knew yesterday won’t be the world we know tomorrow.

In NieR:Automata, everything has already changed. The sun shines on a desolate land, a place where tranquility makes the world feel immediately safe yet forever in peril. A sunstricken cityscape once teeming with people, now littered with machines waiting to be slaughtered by androids, built and controlled by humans who retreated to the Moon.

It’s a premise you can’t quite trust. We’re told the machines roaming the Earth are dangerous automatons whose murder needn’t be second guessed. Yet in NieR’s opening hours, they show love, they show fear, they show culture — they show humanity. It’s a message the game iterates time and again, reminding you why these machines are meant to die. Each iteration, though, only reveals the absurdity of that initial claim.

This is where NieR and our new world align: both are covered by a blissful curtain that masks suffering, historic and present.

In both NieR and our new world, there’s a shared sense of warped familiarity — a weird kind of normal. Each…