Summer Research Remnants: Moments/Quotes from The Last Campfire that Made Me Stop

Once all forlorn have been rescued and guided back to the first campfire area, Ember heads towards the next campfire section. On the path to the Crossroads section sits one lone forlorn, and I headed towards that forlorn expecting another puzzle section (having become accustomed to that series of events based on all of my previous encounters with the forlorn up to that point). However, the forlorn states that the player cannot assist them, for “Not all problems are puzzles that can be solved.” I would then encounter several other of these types of forlorn, with various reasons that the player could not assist them—not feeling ready to continue on, being unresponsive despite your attempts to interact, being scared, or even simply not wanting to be helped by the player. All of these reasons are presented without fanfare and the player has to respect their decisions and move on, no matter how hollow they may feel abandoning those forlorn. This invites important introspection about why the player wants to ‘help’—to appear heroic, to ‘end’ suffering, simple altruism?—as well as whose sense of time the player is following and universally applying to those souls they meet—is there a defined timeline for grief, and how can we enforce it for ourselves while leaving space to respect others with different conceptualizations of time (outside of colonial British, efficiency-driven, capitalist-sustaining linear time; especially so in the context of bereavement)? Players are forced to learn to settle with the tension inherent in going against that instinct (be it altruistic or ultimately self-serving) that can come with respecting someone else’s agency (a sentiment that can be further explored when looking at consent of NPCs in the next few weeks). In doing so, the traditional, teleological, player-centric narrative is queered, as the game “achieves its power by carving out a livable, affirmative space within the boundaries of what is traditionally defined as failure” (Lo 2017:190).

“Queers in Love at the End of the World rejects this relationship between time and victory...To understand respite in a game as satisfaction, one must assume that satisfaction is possible. In a more traditional game, satisfaction may come as a result of completing a quest, advancing the plot, or gaining levels or points...Players seeking narrative resolution or an ending hit dead ends with nothing to click...they are the only closure available. But because of the predetermined outcome of the game, reaching an end is not the same as winning. It can provide satisfaction in that there will no longer be anything to click...Embracing loss and failure is the only way to stretch out these ten seconds, suspending the moment and the text. Advancement is unsatisfying, or, at least, the reward of advancement is always at risk of being snatched away” (Lo 2017:186-188).

No matter what the player does or how many embers the player helps, the player cannot change the outcome of the game—Ember and the others remain dead, regardless of whether or not they move out of limbo. Though this would read as failure in traditional game narratives, again the player is forced to seek closure over resolution.

The game ends with the player encountering the other lone traveler, who destroyed all of the available boats and had been posing as the Forest King in an attempt to isolate/keep the other Embers in one ‘safe’ space to try saving them from becoming forlorn, either due to being overwhelmed by personal trauma or by giving into the hopelessness caused by the knowledge that nothing lies at the end of this final journey. The other lone traveler ultimately succumbs to the latter after the player goes against their orders to bring hope to the Forest King’s subjects and leads the charge of rescued Embers to the end of the journey. The player is initially given the choice to take the remaining boat and escape by themselves, but I followed the other lone traveler, solved their puzzle and spoke with them to convince them to join me in the boat. There’s a specific option to reassure the lone traveler that ‘it’s okay to be scared’ after they divulge the terrifying revelation that there’s nothing after this journey, and that dialogue option seems to also be a comfort to the player—in the game’s canon, the comfort of any sort of afterlife/spark is abruptly ripped away and they are able to understand the other lone traveler’s initial desire to remain in limbo. Just as Nietzsche warned in On the Advantage and Disadvantage of a History for Life, without any deity to externalizations your helplessness/attribute your lack of being able to predict the random happenings of the universe, the nihilistic knowledge of the vast, uncaring entropy of the universe is enough to paralyze the common man. Any action seems pointless in the face of the void, so like Hamlet, instead of deciding one of two equally futile paths, doing nothing at least yields a more predictable prolonging of the current conditions. When applied to grief and trauma, this speaks to the tendency of trauma processing and ‘stages of grief’ to be iterative, but the danger in stewing in these feelings is the inaction it can drive people towards.