Violent Delight

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.