Edited by Sarah Stang and Diana Moreno Ojeda
Surreal, dreamlike themes and visuals are central to some of the most striking works of art. As digitally rendered and immersive experiences, video games also thrive when representing the unreal and are truly at home when they delve into dreamlike themes and imagery. After all, video games are simulating a pretend reality all their own, so it often behooves developers to lean into the fantastical. What’s more, video games can offer an incredibly diverse range of dreamlike experiences. They even can focus their usage of the dreamlike to comment on the nature of games as a medium, whether through their themes, aesthetics, or narratives. As I will demonstrate, video games can engage dreamlike themes by following in the traditions of either magical realism (fantastical elements grounded in reality) or surrealism (completely fantastical and dreamlike).
In this essay, I will compare some of the different ways games can leverage dreamlike design elements by looking at how two games approach the surreal, with a specific focus on how they juxtapose the real and unreal to communicate something about our world. Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer, 2013–2020), on one hand, takes a grounded, magical realism approach; inserting fantastical elements alongside mundane things to meld the real and the surreal together, thereby exploring themes of debt and alienation. Anodyne 2: Return to Dust (Analgesic Productions, 2019), on the other hand, uses surrealist techniques to weave a semi-allegorical narrative of tension between indoctrination and breaking free of religious orthodoxy. The ability to reach outside of reality to highlight truths and feelings is an incredibly valuable aspect of art, and games like these are superbly positioned to highlight the juxtaposition between the real and the surreal.
Magic in the mundane
Magical realism and surrealism are two distinct artistic movements that allow for diverse explorations of dreamlike themes and imagery. According to EssaysUK, the key distinction between the South American tradition of magical realism and Europe’s literary surrealist tradition is in the kind of world the work is grounded in. Magical realism has fantastical elements throughout but is set in the real world. The juxtaposition between the fantastical and the mundane allows for interesting ideas and emotions to be conveyed. Surrealism, meanwhile, is fantastical to the point where the world itself is fictional and dreamlike, which provides creators a freer template to explore a more dreamlike state.
The works of Haruki Murakami stand as some of the most recognizable examples of magical realism in modern literature, and they work because the fantastical elements are treated as if they are as mundane as the details of the world we know. For example, in Murakami’s Kafka By the Shore (2002), a strange incident is written in the style of a declassified military brief, interspersed with a story of a young man who runs away from home to start a new life. Shortly after, a talking cat is introduced, conversing with someone as if it were nothing special. Kentucky Route Zero follows Murakami’s approach to magical realism. Set in an area surrounding Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave National Park, the game follows a man named Conway as he attempts to make a delivery and becomes intertwined with the lives of the people he meets along the way. While this premise is not particularly magical, the game incorporates several strange events and concepts meant to remove it from the reality we know. For example, you start out exploring a normal-looking highway map, but once you find your way to the titular Route Zero, navigation becomes infinitely more inscrutable. Seemingly a road that operates on one big, closed loop, the Zero is impossible to navigate without specific instructions. Every so often, what looks like a constellation appears, and this constellation must be navigated as though it were a combination lock to be opened, revealing the path ahead.
Daniel Schindel from GameCrate (2018) puts the juxtaposition most succinctly when he says that the magical realism in Kentucky Route Zero is made up of “strange, impossible things” in a down-to-earth setting. One of the first encounters you have in the first episode illustrates this, as you discover a Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) game played by a group of ghosts inside a gas station shaped like a horse’s head (fig. 1). The juxtaposition of uncanny scenarios and imagery (the horse’s head, the ghosts playing D&D) with a grounded setting (a gas station) allows the game to focus its themes in the tradition of other magical realist works. Developer Cardboard Computer isn’t shy about discussing the influences they have relied upon. Talking to Rock Paper Shotgun, developer Jake Elliot counted among his influences the film Being John Malkovich, perhaps one of the most popular examples of cinematic magical realism (Grayson, 2013). Being John Malkovich mixes the real world with an uncanny premise — the ability to go inside of John Malkovich’s body and control him. Elliot also emphasized the importance of performance to Kentucky Route Zero’s success, with improvisation guiding players’ responses to the weird stuff they encounter. Most of the gameplay occurs through branching dialogue trees, which can have subtle effects on how things play out in the future. As you continue through the game, you get to dictate how each character reacts more and more until you’re eventually effectively having a conversation with yourself. This puts the act of performance in your hands, but it’s most powerful when it takes that ability away. When Conway goes to drink the expensive whiskey that will put him in debt to the Hard Times Distillery, text prompts give you the option to resist, but to no avail. The inability to stop yourself alludes to Conway’s alcoholism.
The game is grounded in a very relatable story that engages with themes of debt and alienation. You don’t have to understand all the weird, out-of-place elements going on around the characters to feel Conway’s pain, his loneliness, and, finally, his surrender to the brewery he owes money to as he resigns himself to becoming a faceless, nameless, glowing skeletal worker called a “Stranger.” The supernatural elements allow Cardboard Computer to better communicate the themes they’re playing with, while the real-world setting of Kentucky in particular, and roadside Americana in general, keeps the game grounded and relatable even in the face of the impossible. As Riley MacLeod of Kotaku (2016) points out, by Act IV, the penultimate episode of the game, every character is losing themselves to something; most notably, Conway surrenders to his alcoholism as he falls into debt with the distillery. This is emphasized because, as an audience, we’re always grasping for the familiar to get a better grip on the unfamiliar. Because of this, the juxtaposition of the magical and the mundane only makes these themes stand out further as we’re encouraged to grasp onto them.
What’s more, the magical elements of Kentucky Route Zero can literally make themes stand out due to the game’s graphics and performances. Conway’s glowing leg represents the past he’s trying to leave behind yet which lingers like a throbbing pain. The introduction of the skeletal Strangers foreshadows Conway’s transformation into one, a scene that represents him as fully falling prey to his debt and being engulfed by the corporation that put him there. By the end of Act V, even Conway’s complete absence is felt during the funeral scene, which feels like it’s meant for Conway even though it’s staged for two dead horses. Magical realism has the power to point to things that are important to the lifeblood of the story just by making a work’s magical elements representational.
Surrealist orthodoxy
Surrealism still features the fantastical, but in a setting completely removed from reality. As you can represent whatever you want in games, you can pretty much make a game as unreal and inscrutable as you want, though that does not necessarily leave the game without meaning. Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931; fig. 2) is the pinnacle of surrealism in the art world thanks to its unreal imagery. Kelly Richman-Abdou (2019) attributes this to specific fantastical elements, such as the melting clocks and the anthropomorphic form, which although ambiguous in terms of meaning, became iconic enough to be a recurring theme in Dali’s oeuvre. Games are potentially more adept than paintings at representing the dreamlike thanks to the interactivity that allows you to wander in these worlds. For example, the original Anodyne (Analgesic Productions, 2013), a Zelda-inspired game with a retro look, feels like playing a stream-of-consciousness. Environments start and stop suddenly with no apparent rhyme or reason, and your character’s motivations are purposefully obscured just to the point where you can almost grasp what’s going on, but not quite. Anodyne continues in the tradition of older games like EarthBound (Ape, HAL Laboratory, 1994), indulging in nonsense levels or enemy designs, though it leverages that design philosophy more purposefully to create a series of concepts that form a sort of dream-like stream-of-consciousness experience.
Games are incredibly good at vague abstraction because of how much everything revolves around the perspective of the player, allowing for things more in the fringes to be left up to interpretation — another element that is shared with dreams. But that doesn’t mean that it must be nonsense for nonsense’s sake. Anodyne’s sequel, Return to Dust (Analgesic Productions, 2019), has a much more pronounced clarity of purpose while at the same time turning up the volume on the strangeness. While the top-down perspective from the first game makes a return, the main traversal takes place in a fully 3D environment. The kicker is that all the graphics in this perspective are PS1 quality, with blurry shapes and textures dotting every part of the game. This is done on purpose, as the graphical style makes for some truly strange-looking creatures, like a being named Gustine Papellum whose entire body is made up of tongue (fig. 3). There’s a method at work here that utilizes the inherent weirdness that video games wrap themselves in regularly to make a point. In Eurogamer’s review of Anodyne 2: Return to Dust, Edwin Evans-Thirlwell (2019) explains that, by wrapping older ideas in progressively newer ones, the game rejects a status quo of symmetrical gameplay in favor instead of a more experimental, messy approach.
Surrounding the odd creatures and landscapes of Anodyne 2 lies a narrative that’s focused on rejecting orthodoxy, demonstrating the weight that dogma has on people brought up in it, and highlighting the freedom of being raised without it. The main character Nova is created by the omnipresent Center and is tasked with ridding the world of Nano Dust in order to bring order and harmony. Soon, however, Nova comes across a village built among the dust that changes her perception of the world. Because of a seed that was planted in her head at birth, she can never be free of the influence of The Center. But, by defeating the seed in her replacement’s head, Nova ensures that they will be free of that conflict within themselves and free to make their own choices unpolluted by The Center. Throughout the story, you’re greeted with odd dialogue such as a worm who says “If only I had a football made of my own skin…then it could never truly be pulled away from me…” The constant switching between chunky PS1-era visuals and top-down 2D pixel art also throws you off balance and makes even the gameplay feel extremely stream-of-consciousness.
The orthodoxy surrounding The Center and the themes of breaking away are a clear parallel to modern religion, and like Kentucky Route Zero, the strangeness makes the themes and narrative stand out. But since it’s exploring such big, high-level topics, Anodyne 2: Return to Dust opts to take a more allegorical approach, making its themes fully representational through dream logic. I argue that its narrative is easier to digest when the details are fantastical because you can just filter out anything that doesn’t make sense to you, and still be left with the themes as they apply to your reality. The scene with Gustine Papellum has a practical application too, as you’re tasked by The Center with cleaning all the nanodust out of the creature’s head in order to dull the sensation of pure taste. This directly compares to how orthodox religion forces its members to repress their wants and desires in service of a higher power.
Because Anodyne 2: Return to Dust is so soaked in the surreal, the more human elements of the game’s characters come through even stronger than they would have in a more grounded game. You can feel your guardian Palisade’s maternal nature as she tries to nurture and protect Nova, even though the orthodoxy-minded Nova mistakes her playground for a sort of ritual chamber. What’s more, when Nova finally finds her voice and faces a world without The Center, her conflict is directly comparable to that of someone in the real world losing their religion. But since it’s all several steps removed from the player’s reality, the themes that the creators are playing with are much easier to isolate and understand.
In the end, surrealist and magical realist works all operate on the principle of playing around with the status quo in different ways, either by selectively pruning away the normal and replacing it with magical elements, or by transforming the setting to an unreal one, while still keeping the themes relevant to reality. By warping reality, these pieces reveal something about the way things are or communicate a strong emotion about the world we live in. They use juxtaposition to highlight these themes and emotions, and games are uniquely qualified to make these juxtapositions even more pronounced. And as counterintuitive as it seems, sometimes changing the context around an issue or feeling can make it ring far truer than it would in a more grounded portrayal.
References
Analgesic Productions. (2013). Anodyne. Analgesic Productions.
Analgesic Productions. (2019). Anodyne 2: Return to Dust. Analgesic Productions.
Cardboard Computer. (2013–2019). Kentucky Route Zero. Cardboard Computer.
Dalí, S. (1931). The Persistence of Memory. Museum of Modern Art.
EssaysUK. (2018). Comparison of Magical Realism and Surrealism. EssaysUK.
Evans-Thirlwell, E. (2019). Anodyne 2: Return to Dust review — Zelda and Psychonauts combine in a bewitching formal experiment. Eurogamer.
Grayson, N. (2013). Interview: Kentucky Route Zero’s Mountains of Meaning. Rock Paper Shotgun.
MacLeod, R. (2016). Kentucky Route Zero’s Last Act Is Everything That’s Great About The Series. Kotaku.
Murakami, H. (2002). Kafka on the Shore. Shinchosa.
Richman-Abdou, K. (2019). Exploring Salvador Dalí’s Strange and Surreal The Persistence of Memory. My Modern Met.
Schindel, D. (2018). The Magical Realism of Kentucky Route Zero. GameCrate.
About the Author
Jeremy Signor is a freelance writer from Pennsylvania whose byline can be found at USgamer, PCGamer, GamesBeat, PCGamesN, GamesRadar, Unwinnable, and elsewhere. He lives alone in a cabin in the woods. How cool is that?
