Daniel Podgorski is a Californian author, essayist, researcher, and web developer. On The Gemsbok, he provides art analysis (on literature, games, and films) and philosophy articles. His areas of expertise are literature and philosophy, with most of his academic research (as well as most of his informal research) focusing on intersections between the two. He has had poetry, short stories, and articles published in various academic and literary journals—and his short fiction has placed first in both competition and conference settings.
The King of Comedy—a financial-failure-turned-cult-classic about an obsessive aspiring stand-up comic who decides he is owed an appearance on the late night talk show hosted by his idol—represents a uniquely excellent demonstration of the power of ambiguity in art, and of the way that ambiguity, uncertainty, and indirectness are in fact fundamental attributes of art in general, and narrative art in particular. I’ll be drawing once again on my background in literary theory here, to pursue this angle.
Specifically, where I intend to focus is on the sequences in which protagonist Rupert Pupkin engages in elaborate role-playing and daydreaming regarding future social and professional events, and on the structural, narratological consequences that the presentation of those sequences has for the film’s ending.
Mewgenics is a tactics games, meaning it resides in a subgenre of turn-based strategy games in which you move a team of units around a (usually grid-based) battlefield. That’s a type of game which has captured a lot of my time and attention over the past decade. A sampling of the titles matching that description which I’ve played to completion at least once in that time includes XCOM: Enemy Unknown, XCOM 2, XCOM: Chimera Squad, Phoenix Point, The Banner Saga, Ikenfell, Advance Wars, Advance Wars 2, Wargroove, Tactical Breach Wizards, Invisible, Inc., Chroma Squad, Civilization V, Into the Breach, SteamWorld Heist, SteamWorld Heist II, Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, and both the physical and digital versions of Gloomhaven.
And the games by Edmund McMillen and his collaborators that I’ve played through on a similar timescale include . . . all of them. All of them on Steam, anyway. Even Fingered, The Legend of Bum-Bo, and everything in The Basement Collection. I’ve also played Tyler Glaiel’s most famous project apart from his collaborations with Ed, the puzzle game Closure.
So, the question I’ll be answering here is: where do I find the time? Just kidding. The real question is: from that vantage point, how does Mewgenics stack up? How does it measure up to its peers in the tactics genre, and to the impressive catalogs of its creators?
Hollow Knight offers one of the most engaging and intriguing experiences in the medium. Its engagement comes in equal measure from its sweeping orchestral music; intricate-yet-open level design; grand-yet-unobtrusive narrative; precise-yet-flexible mechanics; and charmingly illustrated and densely layered art. Its intrigue, on the other hand, derives principally from the fact that Hollow Knight is an interrogative text, meaning that it asks many more questions than it answers.
Some of its deliberate mysteries pertain to the history and plot of its world, but others are open thematic questions. The former group has been combed exhaustively by the game’s community since its release, but the latter have received comparatively paltry attention. The focus here, then, will be Hollow Knight’s oft-overlooked thematic questions, which predominantly revolve around the topics of intelligence and consciousness. To draw out what these questions are, why they are important, and why so many of them remain unanswered (in both the game and reality), in this analysis we will be primarily employing resources from the philosophy of mind.
Philosophy of mind is the field that covers (obviously) the mind—what it is, what it does, and how or if it relates to everything that isn’t the mind. Frameworks and concepts developed by those working in the field will help us to clarify Hollow Knight’s treatment of topics such as intellect, memory, thoughts, dreams, and, well, hollowness.
In narrative, setting, and artstyle, Stardew Valley and Spiritfarer are very far apart: the former is about rejuvenating a grandparent’s abandoned farm and embracing a rural lifestyle in pixel art; the latter is about coaxing souls onto a boat and ferrying them to their final rest in high-res illustration. But in terms of tone and mechanics, they’re extremely similar. They’re both laid-back 2D indie management sims with farming, ranching, crafting, cooking, fishing, mining, beekeeping, foraging, rigid day-night cycles, base building that involves resource checklists, minigames for basic actions, optional co-op, slow traversal with fast travel nodes, and a cast of quirky NPCs that give quests and offer benefits if you make them happy.
Yet it is a stark fact to me that the implementation of the individual mechanics in that list is done, by and large, far better in Stardew Valley than Spiritfarer. For immediate clarity, I’m not here to point out that Stardew Valley is the more complete and varied experience. It’s true, but it’s also a trite, obvious, and uninteresting observation. Spiritfarer hasn’t received the boundless support and resources which allowed Stardew to steadily expand in features across the past decade. It is (of course) impressive that Stardew Valley, in a manner reminiscent of Terraria, has been subject to so much free expansion since its release. But that’s simply not what this article is about.
The comparison I’m here to make is between the handling of specific mechanical elements in Spiritfarer and the handling of the closest corresponding elements in Stardew. The quantity and variety of such elements in each game will be, for this exercise, ignored. Their aesthetic and narrative differences will also be mostly ignored here. They could swap themes and artwork and I’d be writing the same article. In fact, they could swap practically everything other than the details I’m about to discuss, and a session spent playing Stardew Valley would still be preferable—due to the mechanical functioning of many basic interactions with the gameworld.
Both Mini Metro and the studio’s more recent iteration on the formula, Mini Motorways, are a noticeable step up in execution from similar chill takes on the strategy genre such as Islanders and Reus. Unlike those other games, Dinosaur Polo Club’s mini city sims have a deceptively high skill ceiling, bear cohesive and striking visual styles, and include randomized elements in a way that offers a worthwhile challenge and texture rather than a source of frustration.
More than anything, though, what impresses me about Mini Metro and Mini Motorways is their elegance: the restraint of their visuals, including plain flat polygons and muted complementary colors to evoke utilitarian subway maps and route guides; the way their entire soundscapes are reliant on context-dependent sound effects and almost no music, starting things calm and naturally transitioning to a unique and sonorous cacophony later in a round; and the understated deftness of how the complexity of the playfield increases (in part) simply by zooming out the camera at a glacial, almost-imperceptible pace.
But the two games are not created equal. When the developers returned to the drawing board after Mini Metro and altered the design, I feel they took full advantage of that opportunity. Mini Motorways is a great example of what a video game sequel can and should do; despite feeling like an incredibly similar game in terms of both style and substance, it is a noticeable refinement of the template established by Mini Metro in numerous ways, five of which I’ll cover now:
![[Work: The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker, 1973] The Denial of Life: A Critique of Pessimism, Pathologization, and Structuralism in Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death](https://i0.wp.com/thegemsbok.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Ernest-Becker-Sketch-by-M.R.P.-Presentable-1.jpg?fit=254%2C415&ssl=1&resize=200%2C200)
![[Game: Dark Souls, FromSoftware, 2011] Unchosen Undead: A Thorough Existentialist Philosophical Analysis of FromSoftware’s Original Dark Souls](https://i0.wp.com/thegemsbok.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Dark-Souls-screenshot-with-Darksign.png?fit=722%2C406&ssl=1&resize=200%2C200)
![[Work: A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, 1962] Burgess' Myopic Morality: Why Anthony Burgess' Infamous A Clockwork Orange is Stronger Without its Original Last Chapter](https://i0.wp.com/thegemsbok.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/A-Clockwork-Orange-book-cover.jpg?fit=257%2C377&ssl=1&resize=200%2C200)
![[Game: Darkest Dungeon, Red Hook Studios, 2016] Inordinate Exsanguination: On the Design Decisions Bloating Red Hook's Otherwise Terrific Strategy Game Darkest Dungeon](https://i0.wp.com/thegemsbok.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Darkest-Dungeon-screenshot-with-fearful-affliction-applied-to-crusader.png?fit=722%2C406&ssl=1&resize=200%2C200)