Demon Game for Sophie.

Demon Game for Sophie fuzzpedals heavy metal: “Manifest nightmare. A lake of fire, a brimstone pyre, the smoke thrown out by acts of eternal, never-resting torments reaching up and out into eternity. Rivers of blood, non-euclidean corridors, bodily fluids leaking from walls of mashed genital-shaped flesh.” This is a place where symbolic scenes in staining glass imbue you with devilish powers of the four menhorses of the apocalypse, “where darkness masquerades as light, where suffering is painted as a virtue,” where your climactic duel liturgies its impieties: “The smells are rose, frankincense, myrrh, and human piss.” Such high gothic has some successes, like “an icicle headache”, and plenty of grandiose gestures at nothing: “For something born deep beneath the earth, the light builds slowly.”

What you quickly notice though is a flippancy of tone, which sometimes errs on the side of voice, “They say ‘curiosity killed the cat’. But why? What do they not want the cat to learn?”, and which othertimes crumples up the paper pouting, “The knife is simple, a kitchen knife. A / It’s covered in blood. You’ve got claws and stuff so there’s no point taking it.” The sharp “A” into a fragment is not unique, passages wear their typos as sneers perhaps to the exacting concept of proper forms: “The room around you is blood. / bodies lie broken and scattered around you, flesh and stained black robes torn, bone slpintered, fractured, organs ruptured bloodvessles burst, brain lumps spattered onwooden walls.” Written in an urgency that can’t be made more correctly so, could this be the problem…

Flippancies ooze out of the prose down into the mechanics, which attempts a kind of D&D it can’t be bothered to texture: “Your disguise – desperate young maiden, harassed holy man, a simple voice in the mist – hardly matters. Neither do your words: be they a plea, a promise, or a threat. Neither does your tone, your bearing, your movements. What matters is what they all come together to make this man - a tired, bleary-eyed trader in sight of home – feel.” Hardly the dungeonmaster, more the dungeontemp. While you can die and lose, actually you can’t, why bother, what’s the point, ensu(r)e the selfbarrage: “You see, this could be my fuck up. I want to think that it’s yours, not that I think anything at all because I’ve no idea who ‘you’ are or if there ever even will be a ‘you’ listening to this. But I also worry that there’s a chance I’ve balanced this wrong, or explained it wrong, or just put in a bug somewhere that just kills you. I don’t know. So here’s an out. You’re already on the bad ending, it can’t get worse. So in the spirit of agreeing that Souls games probably should have difficulty settings, you can keep playing, same as before. But you can also know that you failed. Or I failed. I don’t know. It’s up to you. And if you die again you’ll get this again. Just play till you win if you want. I’d turn off achievements at this point but I don’t fucking have any. / Fuck it. Ship it.”

This contempt, the need to punch through the canvas to reach where the picture lies, ostensibly follows from a despair of reception, trying to channel Weltschmerz into “something worth saying. Something now forgotten.” which makes the attempt to try again feel hopeless: “It means nothing to me. Almost nothing. There’s just this little fizz of resentment. You might have picked up on that earlier. I’m pre-emptively angry that people might like it. That there might be people out there who play through that whole story and kill the archpatriarch, and then come and listen to all of this, or vice-versa, and think that story was the better use of their time than this one. / How dare they. It’s an insult to art that Call of Duty sells better than Disco Elysium. And it’s an insult to reality that people will watch all the Marvel movies but not watch the news. The real news, not the ‘entertainment’ bullshit they have in the states. / I thought this time I’ll write something easy, something fun. Because for once my life had meaning, so maybe my art didn’t have to? Well here I am. / I’m not proud of myself.” And this goes on into threads I shall gently leave in situ, contortive memories of sacrifice desperate to summon a sacrifice more noble, guilts which should be shared but aren’t, and are here, and aren’t, until finally dizzied misanthropic repulsion harangues the very humanity of memory: “Burial takes up land, cremation wastes energy.”

Drowning in these moonbound tides of bloodshed, can we learn to hurt some estranging way? “Most fundamentally and most ephemerally you are that which binds you to this place. You are your manifest, your connection to this plane which will never be your home. Each time this world strikes at you, your connection to it will waver and your manifest will reduce.” Recession, from those you must address, from the causes which must matter to you because they matter more than you, unbecomes defeat before the systems claromancing how the dies roll, your role in the masquerades of our “non-paradoxical mix of hope and despondency.” And what’s wrong with a little erasure? Perhaps it will blot out the fact that we’re within it. “You teach the child to close his eyes to the darkness, that if he sees horror, then all he can do is look away. It is a lie he would learn anyway, eventually.”