Violent Delight

Violent Delight, by Coral Nulla

This is a game that’s impossible to discuss without going into a fair bit of detail on how the mechanics work – and where the surprise of figuring those details out is a big part of the experience – so as a result, if you’re spoiler-averse, this might be a review to come back to once you’ve given it a go yourself.

Though to be brutally honest, this is a review that you might want to skip even if you have played Violent Delight, because while I always strive to come up with some insights or analysis or at least jokes that make reading my takes worthwhile, in this case I’m unconvinced that I have much of interest to say. Not to get all Marxist, but that’s because the material conditions under which I experienced the game were completely mismatched with the mode of production by which it generated that experience. Let me explain!

So this is a game with a series of interlocking gimmicks, and they all revolve around a temporal see-saw: either you’re waiting, desperate to kill time, or you’re desperately clicking around and speed-reading as the clock ticks down. There’s a robust narrative framework around this that we’ll get into in a sec, but in many ways that’s downstream of the experience of being crushed by this chronological trapjaw. Even under best-case circumstances, playing Violent Delight would be stressful, and you’d be inclined to miss stuff.

But I did not manage to achieve those best-case circumstances. See, I’d been spoiled on the first section of the game, which involves bidding on a video-nasty style video game on an eBay-alike and then waiting for an hour of real time for it to ship to you. And since I need to manage my game-playing time pretty aggressively to get through the full Comp, I figured I’d start things up and get the timer running in the background while I finished up my work day, so I could play it in earnest once I was done. Except just as I was about to put in my bid, my boss texted me about something, and while I was writing him back, the auction expired and someone else bought the cartridge, ending the game with nothing having happened (when I told this to the author, I found out this is considered the “good ending”).

Undeterred, I tried again, and managed to get into the meat of Violent Delight – once the cartridge arrives, there’s a gameplay loop of playing the thing – this involves clicking around low-res graphical mazes as occasional people or signs spout some text when you interact with them (it’s implemented in Decker) – before a timer runs down, your console overheats, and you need to wait for another timer to count down allowing you to play again. During these two-minute interregnums you can mess with the age-limiting chip you discover on the cartridge, which initially makes the game seem quite anodyne; as you dial it up, things get unsurprisingly sinister, and the increased intensity makes the console overheat even more rapidly once you get back into the cartridge.

Again, this is all in real time, and even after my work was done, it was very hard for me to play with the extended focus the game requires: my son’s been home sick and was bouncing off the walls, so I was popping up to do Legos with him or otherwise distract him, I had a couple late work emails come in I had to respond to, my wife came into the room and it would have been churlish to completely ignore her… this is kind of how my life goes these days, which is one reason why I play a lot of IF and turn-based games, and basically nothing real-time, since my son was born. As a result, the frantic sections of gameplay got even more frantic, my ability to connect the fractured elements of the intentionally-obscure plot was more or less shot by the constant interruptions, and I completely failed to take adequate notes, much less capture the game’s actual prose to ponder later (there’s a printer function that lets you dump text sections from the cartridge, but it strips them of context and the interface for retrieving them later is unintuitive, so that wound up just confusing matters further). Like, here is the stuff I have at my fingertips as I’m trying to construct a review:

electric volleyball, people not wanting to see attractive people

Ramping up snowstorms, hell to psychological testing vs. dreams of testing while dying (?) to hospital administration. Layers but also age

21 now! Time in each layer decreasing. Age rating?

Code?

Down, base, fall out? All you can say is I’m sorry. Breaks at 31?

This is very disappointing to me, since I think there’s some interesting stuff going on in Violent Delight beyond the mechanics – each time you tweak the age-rating, you unlock another level of the game, which seems to advance things temporally (the earliest stages have characters playing with toys in a park or taking tests in a school, later ones are set in offices or hospitals) as well as dialing up the horrific elements (there’s a hell-layer, terrible experiments are happening in another; people who find highly-abstract pixelated gore upsetting may want to steer clear) and playing with the structure. It’s elusive and downbeat, but there are good jokes too, especially in the time-wasting initial hour, which features some dead-on parodies of the Comp (though you can’t play any of them due to UK geoblocking).

If I can’t trace out all the nuances, though, I can maybe close with one big-picture thought, riffing on Violent Delight’s claim that it is “an experiment in withholding.” See, I think regardless of the semantic content of the game, it may be the alternation of bored waiting with desperate zooming around, with each cycle promising to get you closer to the truth concealed at the heart of all things, that’s the core theme of the game. This dynamic has all sorts of resonances – given the retro nature of the cartridge, it put me in mind of swapping urban legends about video game secrets on the elementary school playground, counting down the hours until I could go home and see what I could discover in the short window my parents let me mess around on the NES between homework and dinner. But you could equally draw similarities with social media, politics, consumerism and capitalism writ large, undergoing medical treatment… and the game touches on some of those themes, too. There’s definitely an element of trolling to the way Violent Delight deploys its interlocking timers, to cruel effect, but I don’t think that’s all it’s doing: I think it’s also lampooning the way we fritter away our lives, convinced that there’s some final point where all the busywork stops, our disparate experiences cohere, and it all makes sense.

Or it could be that’s just a delusive interpretation I dreamed up to try to wrestle my scattered understanding of the game, deformed by the stop-start nature of my distracted attempts to play it, into a plausible shape that retroactively gives meaning to the time I spent with it. If that’s the case, I guess this review is part of the joke too.