Severance: Interactive Narrative in Adios

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Adios, Depression Quest, and The Transformers: The Movie, and moderate spoilers for Paratopic.

The terms "first-person narrative game" and "walking simulator" don't beam a lot of information into your head. That's because the media they name shirk the challenge-centric play of their buddies, leaving them with only an interactive story and environment. Any descriptive label would, therefore, have to relay what the content of that story and environment are. "Walking simulator" and "first-person narrative game" are not phrases that describe either.

Take the two first-person narrative adventures written/creatively directed by Doc Burford: Paratopic and Adios. Sure, they're both software in which you walk around Stygian non-places getting to know the macabre souls bound to them, but Paratopic is all filth-encrusted paranoid urbanity, whereas Adios has us retire to Elysian pastoralism. Paratopic lets us soak into a scene long enough to feel comfortable and then slits the throat of that comfort with a hard cut, but Adios's scenes slow to a gentle rest before transitioning. Paratopic is about an alien conspiracy that ensnares multiple people in an illicit supply chain; Adios is about one man's life-altering, or rather, life-ending decision. They are not cut from the same cloth.

Adios's protagonists go unnamed; we know them only as "The Farmer" and "The Hitman". Players of Paratopic will recognise that this is not the first Burford game with a contract killer. The Hitman works for the mob, and transitively, so does The Farmer. You've heard organised crime euphemistically referred to as "waste disposal", but sometimes it also involves literal waste disposal, and that's where The Farmer comes in. The Hitman brings in shipments of mulched corpses, and The Farmer covers the mob's tracks by feeding that offal to his pigs. We, the audience, arrive on the day that The Farmer decides to call off their agreement, knowing full well he'll be made into hog feed for it.

During his last hours on Earth, The Farmer tends to his animals, gets his affairs in order, and even finds time for some R and R. Although, I'm not sure developer Mischief honed in on the right engine for a day on the farm. My athletic crouch and jump make me wonder if I should be slithering through air ducts on Shadow Moses Island as opposed to caring for livestock. The food prep segment near the end of Adios, where we must fetch ingredients and dump them into a pot, has a clumsiness that makes it feel like it belongs in Job Simulator rather than on a self-imposed death row.

The Hitman, who is the angel, or maybe devil, on The Farmer's shoulder, spends the day urging the protagonist to reconsider his sentence. The conversation meets the immensity of The Farmer's decision head-on and yet remains genial and free of short-breathed desperation. There's one scene where The Farmer and Hitman both try their hand at some target shooting, and my hair stood on end. The Farmer could have raised his rifle and blown The Hitman's brains out right then and there, but some unspoken code, professional or platonic, meant that The Farmer would never stoop that low. It's a testament to the protagonist's resignation to his fate. Every time The Hitman tries to pull him back from the ledge, he stands firm, not out of rudeness or in hopes for an analgesic for his pain, but out of unshakeable devotion to his choice. He has the wise confidence that can only come with age and is so committed that he doesn't need to spend time defending his decision. This means there's no voice of doubt that The Hitman could appeal to.

Many texts on game design commend interactive systems that give users meaningful control over the outcome of play. I do it all the time on this blog. But interactive media doesn't have to have branching states to have value, Adios being one proof of concept. In this story, you can't feed the horse or pay remembrance to your dead dog in a way that will move The Farmer's head from the bullet's path. But the doing of those tasks is an end even without a gauge in the background they switch. Given our experiences of non-interactive art, this shouldn't come as a shock. We have no method to force deviations in paintings or films we view. I can't save Optimus Prime's life when watching The Transformers Movie or customise the earrings on The Girl with the Pearl Earring, but that doesn't subtract from the character of these works. The same can be said for fishing or milking the goats in Adios.

And if The Farmer isn't dead from the second we press play, there is no Adios. The fulcrum of the game is that this mob collaborator accepts his expiation, allowing him to have relaxed conversations even with the man who will be his executioner. He can handle a rifle around the reaper without giving in to temptation. We can't roleplay that acceptance if we're trying to pull our neck from the guillotine. Although, just because The Farmer can accept his death doesn't mean he's got every concern in his life squared away. Before his fuse burns down, he must make his final calls to his neighbour, Edie, and his son, Bill. There is only agony in the wires.

Late in life, The Farmer's wife, Sadie, was struck with dementia. She became scared of The Farmer and, believing he could no longer take care of her, The Farmer booked Sadie into a care home. To his son, this was his father abandoning her when she needed him most. Visiting his mother, Bill witnessed her pining for The Farmer, crying herself to sleep. He has not forgiven his father, nor will he get the chance to. For the phone conversations, Adios perverts a mechanic from Zoe Quinn's Depression Quest. On each screen of Depression Quest, we can see all the options the player character can theoretically take, but some of them will be struck through. They are locked out because our psychological disease has taken the confidence, willpower, or energy we'd need to execute on them. Engaging in activities that reinforce that illness cancel out more options while balming your mental health increases your range of actions.

During your phone calls in Adios, the lines you can select are laconic and opaque. We're shown other sentences that The Farmer might speak in their place that bare his soul, but they are greyed out, and we will never be able to "unlock" them. If this man had more time, maybe he'd be able to practice emotional availability and mend his relationship with his son, but unlike the protagonist of Depression Quest, The Farmer has no future above him to grow into. Choosing death means not being able to resolve what you haven't resolved so far. And then there's the ending. That ending.

After an honest day's work, two non-goodbyes, and cooking dinner, The Farmer places his food on the table, a shotgun by h- Bang. Dead. The Hitman enters and, before either man can get a word out, sends The Farmer back to his maker. The game cuts off without closure, daring us to run over it with a fine-toothed come to find some conclusion for ourselves. The inference stuck in my teeth is that death is inevitably sudden and violent, no matter how much you might try to soften the blow.

The victims of the mob met a grisly demise and were buried in troughs; Sadie cried herself to sleep in shared accommodation until, one day, she slipped away. Far from such depravity, The Farmer imagines he'll be afforded grace in death. By his reckoning, he will get to choose the time, place, and cause of his departure and where he will be buried: under the chestnut tree in his garden. He approaches the culmination of his life with tenderness and forethought, trying to give it all the time it deserves. The whole pace of the game is measured, and the protagonist believes death will arrive as a friend, one he can sit across and eat a meal with as he has many a crisp morning. But he doesn't get his last meal or to die by the gun he picks or to say goodbye when he's ready. Death happens in a muzzle flash, and in the end, the best friend reveals himself to be what The Farmer has always known he really was: a ruthlessly effective killer. Thanks for reading.