Promise me this, Flesh
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Flesh is a 2009 Half-Life 2 mod developed by “Flesh HL2 development group” and published through Moddb. Here are Flesh’s inspirations in order of increasing infringement: I have the vague idea that my avatar is supposed to be a middle-aged man in a dirty suit, but he’s a bit off. I can’t find any desire to control any of his inhuman, uncanny limbs. But! But he has a car and that’s a mighty good thing, because at least he’ll look normal some of the time tucked away at the wheel. This is my only connection to him. He can’t fight, but he’s not especially scared of the world around him. The best, the very best he can do is hide. This is all he can do actually; this is all you can do too. Introduction: This nameless hero stops at a gas station bathroom and stares into a mirror. Nameless hero wishes he had the physical aptitude to move those disjointed fingers of his. He wishes he could move them across his face and sigh and pull out a letter addressed to James. He really wishes he could solemnly read it as the camera moves back and pans away. Instead, he stands there and stands and stands staring. Then you realize it’s time to play the game. Maybe that’s the first puzzle. Or maybe installing the game was the first one. This was the second then. There are puzzles.
Frosty pavement cracks and icicles droop outside in the night where your shit-brown Ford collapses under the weight of an invisible wall. The world around here is awkwardly dark. “In dark trees,” like that. Sometimes the lights fade away too fast and the color palette hurts the back of my eyes and the pressure builds and I have to look away. Piles of dead, stretched skin don’t help and I take breaks because of them too. But nameless hero just stares. He waits for enemies to move and waits and stares behind strangely lit shacks and frozen trees. His numb stare makes me numb to the entire experience. Tell me what to feel, damn it! You chose to put a face on the person I’m playing, so show me a grimace or some bags under his eyes. And if that’s too much effort, why is there a third-person perspective in the first place? Short answer: why not? Seems like that’s the overarching theme anyway. Things I learned from Flesh: Like in some blistering Silent Hill fantagasm, the dead are eroticized and some old man in a mansion just wants to fuck his dead wife. Being the bad guy that the old man is and all, your hero really would like to murder him, but (and here’s the catch) you can’t murder him with violence. Uphold chivalrous moral ambiguity instead. Do it and the game lasts a bit longer than five minutes. Don’t, and that means the game is off and you’ve gone to do more important things. Play it for that five minutes, though, and something becomes very apparent. Something is missing. Really, it doesn’t matter that one of the main characters only speaks when the wind whooshes and some high-frequency ringing from god-knows-where makes my ears bleed. It doesn’t matter that characters are tossed side to side, dumped on the world to fill it with substance and stuff. What matters is that Flesh is filled with shit that I just can’t understand. And that’s very much so intentional. I can easily forgive the aleatory mess that video game mods tend to be, but I can’t forgive the persistence to alienate me with some supernatural vision of human pain. Just tell me how bad it hurts and I’ll get some help. I have empathy and bandaids and the agency to put them together. It’s not even Flesh’s singular fault; it’s trite and stupid, sure, but that means it’s everywhere, and in all mediums.
Pure navy blue is the color of the very first room. Nothing like that exists anywhere in the world for any practical reason. It hurts, is why. If there’s a point to the absurd color use all over everywhere, then maybe this is it: that we’re so far below the recommended dose of reality, even the lights are complaining and warping to whims. Maybe this is where your hero drops acid like in some sketchy venue bathroom. Maybe Flesh is about drug abuse. Or maybe it’s not. Probably not. Flesh, I get the impression that you’re trying to ask me something profound. I don’t know what it is that you’re asking so I’ll ask you a bunch of questions instead. Flesh, In your world, what does it mean to be human? Are outsiders incapable of understanding through violence? Is that the idea? Instead, should we find runes and glyphs and busts and place them in order on shelves to unlock hidden passages lit by grieving sconces? Is the key to understanding others hidden by layers of puzzles? Is there really a formula for that? Can I approach any random stranger and will re-arranging their key-ring keys show me that inner light? Nah. Flesh, why make me walk through your world if the only thing you have to offer me is the experience of being thrilled by your story? I already know. It’s not the masturbatory routine that you’re getting at. I already know the beauty left to chance thing and how well you employ that – yea, irony – and I know that that doesn’t matter to you. You kind of just exist there in your own league, neither high nor low, sometimes lauded, sometimes hated. But you don’t know why. And everything you do, you do because… why not? Why not write a ballad and walk the player through it? Why not? Why not color this room purple and that one green? Why not display racks of human flesh as seen fit by a tailor? Why not…? It’s that lack of purpose and what it creates that makes me want to love this game, but there’s a limit to how much crudely-drawn everything I’m willing to plow through. It all stains the experience with some tainted cast of resin resembling some mainstream games that I adore. And before you tell me that I’m being unreasonable… why shouldn’t I compare Flesh to its inspirations? Flesh, after all, tries hard to be like those games – Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil – instead of staking out its own jungle to prune. To me, Flesh will always be straddling that line between overly-ambitious homage and unintentional mastery of fanfic and that’s about it. Promise me this, Flesh: that you’ll stand by that ambivalence for a long, long time. And promise me that you won’t shudder when the realization of this comes back, after you’ve grown accustomed to everything you are and the strange steps you took to achieve whatever it is that you are. Flesh, you’re unique in one way: you just don’t give a shit. So maybe you’re really asking me if I’d mind taking a look at what you vomited up. And my answer: not really. What’d you eat? |
Now THIS is a review! I really enjoyed this. And I dont mind harsh words if they are true, and this did give me stuff to think about, thats great.
Mm, I guess since Im the developer (of this mod), I could try to comment of a few points..
The player´s avatar is something I always struggled with. At first, I wanted to give him a backstory, dialogue, more reactions, but it just felt unnecessary.. At one point he was some crystal ball psychic that was drawn there, dunno why I scrapped that, it sounds cool now. I guess it was always too recognizable to me that, he was just an entity, with two functions, “hide” and “use”. So I decided to put emphasis on that.. that he´s sort of supernatural, or fabricated. The ending even implies he sorta disconnected, from the world, or you, stopped existing. There´s no more story to this character than what is in Flesh. He´s not a robot or a program, he´s flesh and blood, but he doesnt exist beyond this structure. Im not being over-analytic now, its just the way I intented it, or the way I thought of it back then. Im happy with the decision but it IS pretty flawed, it probably disconnects the PLAYER too much.. and especially the self-made animations, I animated most of the mod since I didnt want to hassle with extra developers. I should´ve focused on these animations the most, since you see them all the time.
Third-person view. I wouldnt go with this again. Dont know why I did it, I guess I was too blind on following my influences, and wanted to look different from other Half-Life mods. Actually, the first alphas were in first-person. The third-person did hurt just about every aspect of the design, it made everything rigid and half-assed. Oh well, tried and done now, I guess.
Strong colours and the lights. Those Im actually proud of, and wouldnt change at all. I guess its a matter of taste. I love old movie colour designs (when people used green and red lights without fear!), theathre designs, vibrant expressionistic art, its all about feeling or emotion to me, not realism or connection to what we see everyday on the street. Muted, realistic, held back, it just feels lifeless to me, or, unmotivated, it doesnt tell anything apart from “Im bleak” or “Im real” (–which again, “real”, I dont value). Not everybody enjoys vibrant hues, but its a concious decision, not abuse.
Flesh was an ode to those Playstation 1-2 horror games, that are rigid, flawed, but have their own charm. And to all the cancelled stupid silly horror mods. From all the feedback I get (yours included) seems like it did exactly that, its rigid, flawed, but has some charm.
Now thanks for the great thoughts man, like I said I loved reading this, it´ll help me on my future developing. I figured I´d atleast write a good long comment for all your effort!
PS. The bathroom strong blue light.. Its a drug-light, never seen those? In public bathrooms, they sometimes have these overstrong blue lights, so you cant see your veins in there to take a shot. That was grounded in reality. =D
Hiya! I’m glad there’s some worth in all my fustiness. One thing that I never got a chance to sit down and think about very much was the overall sound design. I really enjoyed the music, but it never especially stuck out. And as far as that mantra of “notice when’s something’s wrong, not when everything’s right” goes, I think that might be a good thing. As you can probably tell, though, I’m more obsessive over visuals than sound (and have no idea what I’m talking about, ever).
Anyway, thanks for your response!