Forsaken Denizen

Forsaken Denizen is a survival horror game taking place in a far-future space monarchy. An extradimensional investment group has corrupted everyone’s cybernetic implants, and now most people are trapped in the roots of a giant golden tree, while monstrous figures roam the city. Left to stand against the Accretion Group are Doris (the PC), a member of the noncitizen underclass who’s clawed her way up to being a regular working stiff, and her girlfriend, Princess Cathabel X (the narrator). (They met when Dor tried to rob Cath at gunpoint. It’s a long story.)

The gameplay is simple: you shoot at enemies; mostly you hit, sometimes you miss, even more rarely you crit. They attack you; mostly they hit, sometimes they miss (I don’t think they can crit, which is good because you only have three HP). On a first playthrough, at least, you don’t really get any meaningful upgrades or additional options or anything that would change the formula. There’s some strategy involved, but it’s mostly “do I have enough bullets that I feel OK expending them on this enemy or should I move one room over and hit Z until said enemy leaves?” (Of course, this is more or less typical of survival horror, but I think the thing that gets me here is that it’s all RNG-based and there’s no way for the player’s skill to come into the equation the way it usually does in graphical examples of the genre.)

I have to admit that I wished there were a little more dimension to it, but you know what, it doesn’t matter that much, because I loved the vividly weird setting, loved scouring the map for missable tidbits of lore, and, most of all, loved Dor and Cath and the relationship between them. Dor is scrappy and wary and already well accustomed to doing what it takes to survive at all costs, but she still manages a surprising degree of compassion for others. Cath is spoiled and naive and not really used to thinking of the masses as people, but she genuinely loves Dor and that ultimately enables her growth.

And this growth is, really, the core of the story. There’s a lot of sci-fi worldbuilding and some very straightforward sociopolitical allegory (to the tune of “you can’t fix an unjust system by playing by its rules, and you especially cannot do this in a top-down way as someone highly privileged by this system”), but the real meat of the thing is the emotional journey of a young woman who has her general worldview (and the power dynamics of her romantic relationship) first unsettled and eventually upended entirely and has to cope with that.

(And if you tilt your head at a weird angle to try to see outside of Cath’s point of view, it might also be a story about a woman who’s gotten a little complacent about letting her girlfriend take care of things, perhaps because that was a pleasant novelty after years of having no one but herself to rely on, and has to regain a little of that self-reliance and find a better balance in the relationship as well. Since we don’t get to peek at Dor’s thoughts, it’s a lot more ambiguous—it’s entirely possible that she just spends most of the game in shock and eventually snaps out of it—but I do like to think that she has her own arc going on.)

So although I didn’t find the gameplay especially engaging on its own, I quickly became invested enough in the characters and their relationship that I never considered giving up, and I was absolutely satisfied with where their story went and on the whole felt like my time was well spent.