Cart

Cart is a choice-based game where you play a night-soil man (baldly: someone who collects human excreta and sells it for fertilizer) trying to eke out an existence at the margins of a brutal society rife with classism, racism, and brutality. The most impactful choices hinge on how far you’re willing to stick your neck out for a Roma boy who, at least in my playthrough never exchanged a single word with me. And it’s all rendered in ornate prose that takes a bunch of big swings that hit much more often than they miss. Yes, everything about Cart appeals to me, except for one tiny word in the blurb: the genre is listed as “allegory.”

It’s not that I’m completely allergic to them. Sure, when done lazily they can be witless exercises in matching a thin fictionalization to its real-world counterpart, with nothing to offer but a mildly-enjoyable recognition. But there are plenty of richer examples, too, where translating an aspect of everyday experience, heightening and recontextualizing it, helps us see more clearly: think of Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmares, or the cannibalistic Stalinism of Animal Farm. No, the trouble is that right now, allegory feels besides the point, since whatever you can say about the current omnicrises roiling the globe – of governance, of the environment, of simple human decency – lack of clarity isn’t a complaint you can levy; we all know exactly what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what horrifying consequences it will have, it’s all spelled out for us every day in pellucid detail. What could allegory possibly add to this picture?

Fortunately, while per the above summary Cart clearly has plenty of present-day resonance, there’s more to it than simple this-for-that transposition of current events. First off, there’s something appealingly mythical about the protagonist. A victim of circumstance, he actually takes on the night-soil man’s trappings and identity when his predecessor is killed by a crackdown on some “undesirables”; that this degraded job is his by choice underscores his previous desperation, and takes him more to the realm of folklore than allegory. Then there’s the prose, which is written in a complex, convoluted style that serves to conceal what it’s doing until just before the whip cracks:

"They cannot in their own conscience pay you enough to forget that you aren’t servicing the arse end of society. Perhaps this is why your predecessor was a gambler rather than a drunk —- this amount of coin can merely buy hope, not ignorance."

Or:

"Around the corner you hear the confederated slap of guard boots against the road. Probably two guards, judging from the banter. You do not open your eyes. You do not move. While you lack many things, chief among them is the need to invite attention."

It’s not all aphorism, though – the dialogue of your chief tormentor’s henchmen is positive Deadwood-y (says the guy who’s never seen Deadwood, but I know it by reputation). Here’s one reminiscing about a particularly enthusiastic session of keeping the hoi polloi in their place:

"It was a bountiful feast for a hungry truncheon!"

Inevitably, there are some stumbles – at one point, the game informed me that “a dark rumination descends upon you” – but they’re easy to overlook when the average is as good as it is.

The game doesn’t immerse you too much in the abject routine of your profession – though the occasional reference to “the warm, variegated latrine slurry” is enough to evoke a shudder – which is perhaps part of the allegory we’re warned about; it’s enough to establish that the protagonist is a pariah, but that’s not what Cart is about. The set pieces where you must navigate a series of choices are where its interest truly lies, and these are presented as moral dilemmas without pat answers: do you defile the dead to help the living, how far will you go to deflect attention from that Romany boy without drawing too much to yourself? It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the very first choice is about whether to eat an apple…

Cart is at its rawest in the climax. Partially that’s because the pacing feels a bit abrupt; I was settling into the game’s rhythms and enjoying seeing its world slowly expand, so while I understood this story would have a violent end, I didn’t want or expect it to come so soon. Partially that’s because when the antagonist is a nativist orator ranting about racialized others eating pets, we’re straying into the ponderous sort of allegory. But the ending sticks the landing: you’re confronted with another tense choice with unclear but high stakes and then get crushed down by despair, before the epilogue offers a tiny sliver of light by presenting a flat-eyed view of what the end of fascism actually usually looks like.

This, I think, is where the allegory is successful: it’s not about showing us anything new or unique about the villains, because we know all about them already and they’re banal, empty figures. Instead, Cart explores the way that our actions in a time of oppression at the same time matter very little, but also matter enormously; the dream of escaping degradation and overturning an unjust order with the power of words or the revelation of elite corruption in a single redemptive moment is just a dream, after all, and it’s important to recognize that, just as it’s important to know that not everyone will survive persecution. But it’s just as important to know that evil does come to an end, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad, and the decisions we make can determine who’s there to greet that new day, and what they’re carrying forward to meet it – and that’s an allegory that helps us look beyond to the horrors of the news cycle to bigger, true things.