Violent Delight

It's snowy outside. A great opportunity to drink tea and play a mysterious video game!

I am a big fan of games that present a mundane narrative only to peel it all back to expose something sinister underneath. Violent Delight is that kind of game. But unlike some games that simply strive to horrify their audiences, the gristle in Violent Delight is also embodied in societal issues that are their own kind of horror.

To get to the meat of this review, go to the Story section.

Remember: Violent Delight is a game about a protagonist playing another game called “The Playground.” A game within a game. Don’t get them mixed up.

Gameplay
Violent Delight begins with the protagonist buying a cartridge game off an online auction site and having it shipped to their home to play on their computer. Our screen is organized into three columns: The left for messages we choose to save, the middle for the protagonist’s thoughts, while the right column represents the protagonist’s own computer screen.

“The Playground” is explored in levels. Each level features a small, illustrated map that we navigate with arrows. The illustrations are clickable. Clicking on signs, screens, and faces brings up a black text box with white text that shares a character’s thoughts or displays readable content. There is also a DOWN and UP button below the protagonist’s computer screen that allows you to visit the levels as they become available.

When you turn on “The Playground” you have a limited amount of time to play until it shorts out. There are probably technical details that went over my head, but the jist is that the game’s cartridge can be opened and tinkered with to allow us to access more levels. Tinkering with it takes time, though.

Speaking of time, here’s a quality of the gameplay that may drive some players away:

It.

Takes.

So.

Long.

For things to load.

Each portion of gameplay is interspaced by wait periods in the form of a loading-in-progress bar. The bar is meant to mark the passage of time in the game, only allowing you to move forward once the bar has filled. Except this can take a while. Now, I understand the narrative merit of this. If the protagonist must wait for a package to be delivered, so do you.

…but for a whole hour?

Maybe not exactly a full hour, but pretty darn close. And no, demanding efficiency of the postal service has no result. I was amused to find that if you wait too long to answer the door the delivery man just leaves it on your doorstep instead having you sign for it.

I don’t necessarily see these waiting periods as a bad thing since they are tied to the story. It also helps that the other waiting periods are only a few minutes each at most. However, having to wait at all will likely be a turnoff for some. Yes, it fits with the story, but I don’t know if this is worth losing potential players. At least most segments can be managed by opening another tab and doing other things while you wait.

Answer the door.

Finally!

Of course, if I overlooked an obvious feature that circumvents this inconvenience, someone let me know.

A convenient feature of the gameplay is a “Print” button that saves any text from “The Playground” that sparks your interest. You can then read it while the game makes you wait.

Ultimately, I’m glad I stuck it out. In fact, I ended up playing this game more than once.

Story/Characters
Game within the game
“The Playground” begins in a place called “Park.” It predominantly features child characters, and while there seems to be no sole protagonist, it does give a lot of attention to a boy named Rupert. Rupert is quite fond of his duck toy Duckie and has an innocent whimsical view of the world. Soon that innocence gets chiseled away.

please Read our manifesto!!! The world isn't what it seems!!! We have to save our reality!!!

Even the characters know something is up.

Each level becomes darker and edgier, though this is expressed in different ways.

Blurring realities
Major spoilers in this section. Please play the game first for the full experience.

Recurring elements
Throughout “The Playground” we see recurring elements: Duckie, (Spoiler - click to show) wanting to play on the roof, a fearfulness of doors, someone named Carla. But the most common one is a ball. Somehow, things circle back to wanting a ball or having a ball and then losing it.

The significance of these is not entirely clear, but the ball and Duckie could be tied to the overarching theme of innocence lost, something that steadily occurs as Rupert and his peers move through each level.

“Park” is interesting because it is the rare level that allows us to alter the scenes themselves. There is a child in the upper left corner of the map with a ball, and a child in the lower right corner lamenting about not having a ball. You can actually take the ball from the first child and give it to the second child. Yay!

But then the second child loses it.

the ball's gone down there somewhere... isn't it amazing up here? you can see for miles.

I didn’t give this much thought at first, but (Spoiler - click to show)the phrase “gone down there somewhere” may- and this is just wild speculation- refer to the basement.

I would love to hear the author’s insights on making this game.

Visuals
I really like the game’s art. It’s crude in an appealing way. Reminds me of the art in the Quest game Space Punk Moon Tour but with less detail.

As I’ve mentioned, the game has three columns. They are colour-coded: red, bluish grey, and yellowish grey in that order. Font is stylized while also being easy to read.

Conclusion
Violent Delight is a potent example of surreal horror. Its cozy premise of playing video games amid snowy winter weather is flipped upside down as we’re drawn into the world of “The Playground” and (Spoiler - click to show)forced to witness it bleed over into reality.

I’m taking off a star because I think, for an IFComp game, the waiting periods (at least the wait time for the package) may be a lot to ask for players. But other than that, Violent Delight is one of my favorite games in this year’s IFComp.

Was I engrossed? Yes.

Violent Delight hearkens back to the creepypastas I used to read as a kid about haunted videogames and cursed cartridges: games that demand ridiculous effort to play, games that are impossible to win, games that suck the life out of the player. In those creepypastas, you play a cursed videogame that blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality, the terrors inside invade your actual life, The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You, etc.

A lot of those haunted games had unusual qualities that made them extremely difficult to play. In Killswitch, the titular game deletes itself permanently upon completion, can't be copied, and released only in a limited run: after the 5000 existing copies of the game are played, no one can ever play it again. In SCP-4054 (The Seventh Door), the titular game also can't be copied and requires the cartridge to be manually reset with transistors every time the player dies, causing more and more glitches to appear with each death until the cartridge becomes unplayable. Escape from Terminus is a solo TTRPG rendered unwinnable by the supernatural Minotaur at its center, passed down from player to player as each previous player loses and consequently dies. Having to wait an hour for The Playground to arrive (and a few minutes every time it restarts is nothing) in comparison, but it's delightfully reminiscent of these other creepypasta games.

The game also has several resonances with other SCPs I like: the glitchy cartoon horror/gore, made more distressing by the low fidelity that obscures exactly what's happening on the screen, is really similar to SCPs like SCP-5045 (Goat VR) and the overwhelmingly long SCP-8060 (Toontown). Plus, this game and Toontown both have themes of escaping into childhood nostalgia and cartoon worlds, no matter how much they might hurt you.

I'm a sucker for horror stories about fictional games in general. I really liked InGirum, another horror IF with metafictional elements about a game-within-a-game. In fact, InGirum shares a lot of concepts with Violent Delight, though it's much shorter, so I'd recommend it to people who liked this game.

All this is a long way to say Violent Delight hits on some of my favorite aesthetics and concepts in horror. So of course I liked it. Something about the fictional games described in creepypastas just gets to me, honestly. Maybe it's a combination of that corrupted retro/cartoon aesthetic and the blurred quality of the storytelling, where in-game and out-of-game elements merge together until they eventually become indistinguishable, with no way to distinguish between the "normal" and supernatural parts of the game, and no way to see the designer's original vision before something malignant nested inside it like it was born there - and maybe it was.

But I do think the game absolutely should have been a Spring Thing entry instead of an IFComp entry, since the timing mechanic works against the 2-hour rule in every way. The game is categorized as 1 hour, which is completely untrue in my view: you have to wait an hour to even start playing the fictional game-within-a-game, The Playground, and then gameplay is limited to short bursts that exhaust the cartridge and make you wait for it to recharge before playing more.

I didn't manage to finish the full thing before I had to submit my IFComp rating. By some standards, I ran out of my "2 hours of gameplay" before even starting the game proper, since I made and ate my dinner while the package got delivered, but I figured long breaks from the game don't count and paused the timer for that. I was taking short breaks for The Playground, though, to do other stuff like laundry, and didn't turn the timer off during those.

The forced waiting is an unusually player-unfriendly choice. In context, it's fantastic: the entry barrier makes the game abrasive towards the player in a way that perfectly dovetails with the tone of the story. It lets people know what they're getting into. Having a limited amount of time to explore The Playground also forces people to make judicious use of their time; the environment acquires that blurred quality I love, since you're forced to look at everything in a wide sweep and not spend too much time on any particular detail. You collect impressions.

The author has made a few games for Ectocomp with stream-of-consciousness writing and long, winding text. I bounced off those games sometimes, because the writing could be overwhelming and I felt obligated to read it all even if it was scattershot. But scattershot writing is great for scattered NPC dialogues, and here, the timed format allowed me to skim through those long text blocks and take in their contents through a kind of visual osmosis, absorbing the feelings behind each location and dialogue box more than any specific words. I didn't feel too guilty for missing anything.

The pixel graphics strike a great balance between being detailed enough to be evocative and simple enough to leave much to the imagination. The lack of detail works to the game's advantage because it contributes to the retro aesthetic and ensures you aren't missing too much by traveling quickly from room to room.

I have no clear interpretation of the story, but I do have some thoughts.

I wasn't completely sure the ending screen is an ending screen. The white bar in the bottom right made me think I might need to wait another hour to see more. But I waited a while and saw nothing, and the other reviews indicate it's really the end of Violent Delight.

The ending leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but that's fine. I feel like this game operates on a heavily symbolic level. The depictions of The Playground's protagonist being miserable in school reminded me of my own school days. The "real life" protagonist's ennui, solitude and boredom reminded me of certain periods in my own life too. The lonely winter night came through clear to me - the descriptions of the snow are evocative.

Two more things:

1. At the start of the game, there's a parody version of IFComp featuring such excellent titles as "Chanandler Goofer's Superb Man" and "Cartographic Adventures of Stiffkey Miltonkeynes". But you can't play any of the games since the protagonist of Violent Delight is British and fun has been made illegal in the UK. I thought this was hilarious. It also explains why the protagonist bought a cartridge game online: physical games are more difficult to censor.

2. Did I mention this game is made in Decker? It's one of the longest and most in-depth Decker games I've played, probably the most in-depth Decker game I've played. I tried Decker but bounced off it since the UI was unfamiliar and "I might as well just use Twine and JS/HTML5"; I didn't even know it was possible to do some of the things this game achieves. It's impressive.

Violent Delight begins with you ordering an old video game cartridge… and then waiting. For one hour, in real-time. This mechanic has been talked about a lot; mostly, people seem to be frustrated by it. But I think it’s definitely got a purpose in the game. For one thing, the player and PC are aligned in the wait, and it’s for lack of anything better to do that you’ll try to check out the “Iffy Camp” games on your simulated computer… only to receive the message, “Sorry, art can no longer be experienced in your country as a measure to protect the children.” We’ll come back to this. Besides that, I saw it as a commentary on our instant gratification culture. Imagine ordering something from eBay and having it arrive within one hour. We already have next-day shipping (and I think same-day shipping is a thing with some companies?), but this is next-level: the PC can purchase something and have a mere hour wait… and yet players are still going to be impatient, wanting it to come even faster. This is underscored by the option to “demand efficiency” from the already very efficient shipping company.

After the one-hour wait, the cartridge arrives and the meat of the game starts. Other reviews have described this part, so I won’t repeat it, but as we go down the layers of “The Playground”, we see the child characters from the first level get older, and as they do things basically get worse and worse for them. There’s a hell, but that’s an early level; just wait till you get to the office. At the end, the boundaries of the world of The Playground and the PC’s real life blur and merge. Because everything that’s happening in the game is just… life. School is cruel, hospitals are cruel, workplaces are cruel… the world is a shitty place, systems are evil, and we’re stuck inside them, getting beaten down and ground up.

Remember those geoblocked IFComp, I mean Iffy Camp, games? They’re blocked to protect the children, because god forbid children be exposed to violence… Except real life is violence, and that irony of hand-wringing fears about “the children” while the same governments let said children grow up in poverty and be dehumanized by capitalism and stripped of the things that give them joy is captured so perfectly by Violent Delight.