The Archivist and the Revolution

Woof. This may be the most wholly discomforting game I've ever played. You need to try it, right this second.

In some ways, I feel unequipped to write this review; the Archivist and the Revolution is a dizzyingly deep experience, and in reaching the end credits I feel I've barely scratched its surface. Nine endings, heaps of lore about the world, probably hundreds of decodable documents, not to mention all the games, TV shows, Tweets (they aren't called that but they are absolutely Tweets), and incidental dialog. Seeing any of it requires expending energy, and that is far and away your most limited resource. Suffice it to say, if I fail to mention something important, that's probably because I either missed it entirely or was so caught up in worrying about making rent that it slipped my mind.

The last game I reviewed, Every day I get emails by Emery Joyce, I thought would have been well-suited to a filing or document-analysis mechanic. Somewhere out there, a monkey's paw must have heard my plea and curled in upon itself to bring me to this game, because Archivist has exactly that, and it's absurdly stressful. Every document is labeled with a letter and set of numbers, with no real indication of its contents until you decode it. Once decoded, each article has to be filed as one of five extremely arbitrary, frequently overlapping categories. Oh, and you can only decode about three of them in the average workday. Mislabel something? Oops! Ten bucks deducted from your pay. Decode a document that's unimportant? We're only willing to part with half your usual rate for it. Your rent is late, you're out of food, and your immune system is currently waging a civil war? Bootstraps, bootstraps, bootstraps.

While it's not listed as a direct inspiration, the game Archivist reminds me of most is Papers, Please by Lucas Pope. Besides the grim, dystopic settings and general classification as "paperwork simulators," both Archivist and Papers test the player's willingness to maintain their principles in the face of economic ruin. The biggest difference, meanwhile, is that a run of Papers, Please can be decently optimized by a skilled player, to the point that running out of money may never be an issue; in the world of the Archivist and the Revolution, everything always sucks all the time. You'll never make enough to be comfortable, rent is always going up, food is always running out, and the only way to maybe (maybe!) get enough to skirt by is to beg your ex-lovers for funds, which they could rescind at any time. It's not fun exactly, not satisfying in the way that Papers can be, but it is starkly effective.

The most central theme of the Archivist and the Revolution is that of the destructive power of transmisogyny. The world it takes place in is a wasteland, a barely-held-together dystopia, but it sometimes seems like you're the only person you know deep enough in the quagmire to see how bad things have truly gotten. History is being, at best, censored, at worst, erased, right under your nose. Everywhere you look, you are confronted with the way the world sees other trans women ("women like you" is a major thematic remark), and all you can do is try not to make yourself more of a target. On a cosmic level, the game seems to imply that this is merely another era of regression, that the pendulum won't stay this far right forever, but it's small comfort for the here and now. The world of Archivist isn't one completely devoid of hope, but it makes it clear that your life in it will not be an easy one.

And it is very specifically transmisogyny that drives all this, not just transphobia. There's a movie you can watch on the in-game television (Spoiler - click to show)that depicts a heroic guardswoman who disguises herself as a man in order to save a group of children from a pedophilic caricature of a trans woman. The message is clear: the transgender man, while still not to be encouraged, is a justifiable response to extreme circumstances; the transgender woman can only be understood through the lens of perversion. If this makes you uncomfortable, good! This is exactly how most real transmisogynists think, and it's exactly why so many of them seem more willing to give trans men a pass. So long as we tow the party line and acquiesce to being called "biological females," we can be accepted into the fold as wayward sisters. Archivist isn't throwing trans men under the bus; it's trying to explain that we don't face the same specific, deadly intersection of bigotries our sisters do. Hey, who put this soap box under my feet?

If it seems like I'm struggling to make a point here, that's because I am. The Archivist and the Revolution had such a profound emotional impact on me that even recalling its plot details sends anxiety through my lungs and dread into my belly. The closest I've come to this feeling from another game was The Last of Us Part II, and that was my favorite game of all time (my feelings on it are are...more complex now). So now maybe Archivist is my new favorite? But I also kind of never want to touch it again.

So yeah. Two thumbs up.