Tag: science fiction

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“Achtung. Achtung.” The first line of Rose Engine’s 2022 science fiction survival horror game Signalis isa distress signal repeating a single German word over an interstellar radio, flashing over a dramatic glitching red CRT screen. The opening is an obvious deep space horror trope meant to denote the game’s membership in the lineage of other SF and survival horrors such as Alien Isolation, Dead Space, and Silent Hill. However, it’s not long before this genre allusion is betrayed. Signalis proves through its referential prowess and surrealist mechanics as not only an SF survival horror, but a psychological text that challenges the delineations of genre, and engages with transmedia cultural, historical and philosophical discourses on the nature of personhood, death, and memory. The game opens with the player journeying out from a crash-landed spaceship into a strange deep hole in the ground where a nightmarish mining facility spirals impossibly deep into the earth and the laws of time and space become distant memories. As the title cards flash, so do lines from Chambers’ The King in Yellow,a shocking rendition of Bocklin’s painting The Isle of the Dead, and several lines from Lovecraft’s The Festival. The message the developers telegraph with this intensely convoluted yet beautifully referential introduction to the game world is clear: this game is not what you think it is. Achtung. Achtung. Danger. Danger.

Signalis is set in a dystopian future where humanity has spread across the solar system under totalitarian militaristic rule. Even in deep space, the long tendrils of fascism exert their crushing grip on the last vestiges of humanity and its replicas. The player follows one such “Replika”, Elster, an android created using edited memories copied from a long-dead human. The plot follows her on a nightmarish cosmic journey after her ship, the Penrose, crashes and its only other inhabitant goes missing. Most of the game takes place in the strange underground government mining facility stuck in a dreamy time loop that shifts to reflect the repressed memories of Elster, her originator, and her missing friend. The developers have woven themes of identity and memory throughout the game world and many have speculated the plot itself is a living memory, an existential crisis, or the melting dreams of an artificial being whose concept of ‘self’ is coming apart at the seams. The possibilities for exploring the notion of personhood are plentiful, and Signalis knowingly presents these themes at the forefront of its game world inviting speculation meant both to enhance the player’s experience and to incite a deeper consideration of the genre themes at play in games centered on artificial protagonists.

The game’s survival horror mechanics are directly reminiscent of Resident Evil and Silent Hill—a limited 6-item inventory, a stash box only found in safe rooms, a sprawling puzzle-filled map requiring continuous doubling back and detailed exploration, and enemies that deal high damage compared to your very limited health. Stealth, exploration, survival and purposeful confusion are the driving forces of play. These classic mechanics weave expertly alongside a story of surreal complexity that requires a constant re-exploration of the environment, and a science fiction setting that blurs the lines between the possible and the otherworldly. In the era of infinite inventories and mechanics that encourage larger and larger amounts of time spent in menu optimizing status over in world exploration, Signalis’restrictive inventory system is a refreshing callback that forces the player to stay in the scary enthralling game world and boosts rather than breaks immersion.

Interspersed throughout the story are interactions with literary works that at first glance seem out of place in the science fiction world, but which upon further examination serve to situate the game within genre traditions of cosmic horror and the problematic nature of some of the genre’s more historically prominent creators. It is likely no coincidence that the player is invited into the deeply fascist dystopia of the mining colony with the words of HP Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers, authors whose prominence gave rise to the cosmic horror and weird fiction literary genres, and who in equal measure were notorious racists who wielded white privilege to enable their rise to literary fame. Working in cosmic horror has troubled creators for generations: how do we reconcile these deeply problematic authors with their contributions to the genre and all it offers as a space for creative and horrific expression? Here Signalis gives us an engagement with cosmic horror that future developers should note—treating these ‘fathers’ of cosmic horror as themselves horrors. Where it could have been easier to make cursory allusions to the cosmic horror genre in the setting of Signalis using similarly aligned aesthetic tropes, Rose Engine has made a concerted effort to engage with the authors themselves in the game world, framing these works as fascist, hellish, and problematic objects that trouble the player, protagonist, and NPCs alike.

Mechanically, Signalis is definitively retro-tech. From the HUD and UI to the limited player mechanics, to the creation of a gameworld where analogue technology dominates over digital, the metallic and plastic clicking and clacking of mechanical interaction are a key element of the game’s design and play well with the game’s use of low poly modeling. Although the game is cross-platform, it is best described as a PlayStation 2 throwback. This is common in many retro-style survival horror AA games that seek to emulate the Silent Hill and Resident Evil style, Another comparable release much like Signalis in its recreation of this look and feel is Headware Game’s 2024 Hollowbody which likewise relies on a limited inventory, low poly modeling, fixed camera angles and surreal horror elements. Even though the developers likely wanted to re-create the visuals of the bygone era of 2000s survival horror, the graphics of the game also speak to the developers’ ability to write an intriguing story. Where modern AAA releases rely on ‘good graphics’ and impressive animation, Signalis pulls off the same impact with low graphics fidelity and uncomplicated mechanics. What keeps the player entranced in this retro space is the strength of how the retro technical look plays into the expertly crafted storyline and atmosphere, which is only enhanced, rather than undercut, by the limited and vintage quality graphics. This is perhaps one of the reasons for the current appeal of the early 2000s or Playstation 2 era survival horrors: a desire to push back against the supplanting of well-written and truly surrealist stories with impressive visuals as seen in the AAA industry, and instead return to narrative-driven horrors that work with what technologies are available to tell compelling stories.

Perhaps most impactfully is Signalis’engagement with an array of musings and histories related to death and dying. Arguably, we can consider the entire story as one drawn-out death played and replayed through memory in the mind of two decaying minds clinging to each other in the depths of space. More specifically, within the facility, death constructs both the environment and actions of the NPCs—Replikas wander the halls in a zombie-like state, molding, and slowly crumbling. The walls of the facility bleed and turn from metal to cancerous flesh over time. It’s no coincidence the developers chose Japanese as one of the dominant surviving cultures and languages in their distant society, with their depiction of mass death in the facility often showing ashen shadows of bodies imprinted on walls and floors, calling to mind the tragic imagery of victims of nuclear fallout. Bocklin’s Isle of the Dead is not only a painting found throughout the game, but makes its way into the game as a location visited by the player, inviting us to situate the game alongside the symbolist tradition of depicting death through lenses of oblivion and the surreal. At one point the player explores a literal hellscape, and encounters rituals of death and funeral whose names are long lost. Through and through death lingers over the entirety of Signalis,keeping it unrelentingly on the mind of the player.

Signalis is a challenging game, not only because its mechanics are unforgiving, its puzzles challenging, and its environment deeply upsetting, but because it demands a level of analytical, philosophical and historical engagement the player may not anticipate from a Playstation 2 homage. However, Rose Engine’s work is worthy of playing, and replaying, as it offers multiple points of entry for analytical engagement and is unique in both the survival horror and science fiction genres. Overall, Signalis is a work that delivers on the key elements of both deep space horror and retro survival horrors, is an expert return to 2000s aesthetics and modes of play, and layers in unique and compelling storytelling that touches on themes of personhood, death, and memory in completely unexpected and deeply evocative ways.

Bryn Shaffer is a graduate student at the University of British Columbia School of Information, where she holds a SSHRC award for her thesis work on information video games, and is an ALA Spectrum BIPOC scholar. Her research interests are in video games, HCI, horror and capitalism and labour studies. When she isn’t writing her thesis, she’s writing video game reviews and essays for the internet, or playing video games with her cat Salem.

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Scholar and translator Jeffrey Angles notes in his recent translation of the original Shigeru Kayama Godzilla novellas, that Kayama used the massive, irradiated reptile as a driver for suggesting that “humanitarian values, especially when coming from the postwar generation, will be what Japan needs,to guide the country through its ethical dilemmas” (Angles, 215) That observation could just as equally apply to the 2023 film (and most recent franchise reboot) Godzilla Minus One, in which the realization of ethical commitment to a new future, to a new generation, is brought to bear by a traumatized and shaken population emerging from complete catastrophe. Godzilla’s use as a metaphor for the atomic bombings of Japan and the existential fear of nuclear war is already well-known, but much of the genius of Godzilla Minus One is an explicit coupling of that to the deep trauma produced by the American firebombing of Tokyo and immense conventional destruction levied against a civilian population in the course of war. The people of Tokyo near the end of World War II did not experience an atomic attack, but no less than the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered incomprehensible loss and the end of everything and everyone they knew, believed, and loved. It is in the aftermath of that loss that Godzilla arises. The 37^th film in the Godzilla franchise—and the 33^rd by Toho Studios—Godzilla Minus One strips away layers of backstory, titanic battles between kaiju, and many of the traditional Godzilla tropes, to create an ultimately simpler story of character and the ways in which humans not only process and learn to cope with shock, but transform it into constructive, beneficial action.

Both the trauma of war and the human failure war signifies suffuse the entire film, centered on pilot Shikishima Koichi (Kamiki Ryunosuke). At the very end of the war, Koichi lands his plane at a garrison on distant Odo Island, claiming technical problems. Mechanic Tachibana Sosaku (Aoki Munetaka) quickly realizes Koichi’s true motive—to avoid fatal service as a kamikaze; a realist, Tachibana supports Koichi’s choice to live in a world when the outcome of the war is patently obvious. But war, in the person of Godzilla, is not done with Koichi; the monster rampages through the garrison, which is decimated after Koichi freezes in terror and fails to turn his plane’s gun on Godzilla. Once Godzilla departs, only Koichi and a wounded, enraged Tachibana are left amid the bodies and the wreckage. In an example of Godzilla’s ongoing metaphorical shifting throughout the film (and, indeed, the franchise), Koichi cannot escape modern war’s destruction, which knows no limit and which indiscriminately creates victims, no matter how hard he tries or how remote the location to which he flees. War, like a giant monster, is relentless in its progress. The film, interestingly, presents a monstrous and deadly Godzilla from the outset—the 1946 US atomic bomb tests that in previous incarnations of the franchise create Godzilla, here simply amplify him, both in size and destructive capability (i.e., his radioactive heat ray); Godzilla Minus One suggests that war to a great extent is only a continual evolution towards greater and greater harm, but that in some form has always been a part of the human experience.

Koichi returns to a devastated, defeated Tokyo, carrying only the family photographs of the men on Odo for whose deaths he feels responsible. The scenes set in the ruins of the city are powerful in their presentation—a once-thriving capital is a place of shacks, shanties, food lines, and the ghosts and memories of the countless dead slaughtered in the firebombings. The dead include both Koichi’s parents and the children of his embittered neighbor Sumiko (Ando Sakura), who rages at Koichi for not having sacrificed himself as his duty to try and save the nation. Her reaction only compounds his survivor’s guilt, yet he discovers a motive for living when he encounters Oishi Noriko (Hamabe Minami), a young woman, left utterly alone, carrying baby Akiko (played by Nagatani Sae as a toddler) through the ruined streets. By 1946, the three have become a found family (overcoming Koichi’s terror of closeness and its concomitant risk of loss), imagining the possibility of hope and renewal, both on the personal and the national level. The strength of human connection proves powerful even in the face of existential oblivion—when Koichi tells Noriko he has obtained risky work on a ramshackle boat charged with destroying American mines, she grows furious and terrified, ordering Koichi not to get himself killed.

The minesweeping crew represents different elements of the postwar Japanese generation—
Koichi, the traumatized veteran, wracked by guilt-ridden nightmares of Godzilla; Noda Kenji (Yoshioka Hidetaka), the former weapons designer wrapped in his own introspective remembrances; Akitsu (Sasaki Kuranosuke), the cynical captain bitter at his government’s history of using and silencing the common man; and Mizushima (Yamada Yuki), too young to have seen service but anxious to prove himself. Akitsu counterbalances Mizushima’s youthful enthusiasm, telling him at one point, “To have never gone to war is something to be proud of.” Following reports of Godzilla sinking American ships, the crew are posted with orders to stall the monster until naval reinforcements arrive. Their encounter with Godzilla reveals his new mutations—increased size, deadly heat ray, and his regenerative powers that let him rapidly recover from both naval artillery and a mine jammed into his mouth and then exploded by gunfire from Koichi. But this defeat proves a turning moment for Koichi in his journey towards redemption. In a desperate plea to Noriko that he be able to “put all this to rest”—his guilt at being alive at all—she responds, “Everyone who survived the war is meant to live.” Koichi gains newfound purpose and determination; he is reconstructing himself just as the Japanese nation has begun to reconstruct itself after the war, just as the Ginza district of Tokyo, where Noriko now works, is busily rebuilding itself. A new and horrific attack by Godzilla on the city, though, levels much of Ginza, kills 30,000 people, and apparently kills Noriko just after she pushes Koichi out of the way of the blast wave caused by Godzilla’s heat ray. Koichi is left with a renewed sense of trauma and guilt, castigating himself for daring to try and live when his redemption remains unfulfilled.

At this point, the film begins to center on a collective popular effort to stop Godzilla from returning to Tokyo; the struggles of the Japanese people as a whole become signified by a concerted endeavor by men at the lower end of the social order to save their nation. Unlike previous Godzilla films, there are no labs full of white-coated scientists developing high-tech solutions to eliminate the monster, only Noda putting together a desperate plan to entrap Godzilla with freon gas and destroy him via rapid underwater descent and reascension. There are no masses of generals and other officers in war rooms and bunkers planning stratagems and massive responses, only a single former naval captain, Hotta (Tanaka Miou), asking for former naval personnel as volunteers to steer four disarmed destroyers into harm’s way. There is no help coming from either the Japanese government, which has no resources to muster, or the occupying Americans, who fear military action might antagonize the Soviets—in this, Tokyo’s desperate hour, victory and the end of years of prostration will come through the mutual efforts of ordinary men—navy veterans, engineers, and tugboat crews. Years of feeling betrayed by a neglectful and abusive government, and without agency in a newborn world, are to be superseded by a chance at preserving, not taking, life. As Noda says to the assembled group of volunteers the night before the attack,     

Come to think of it, this country has treated life far too cheaply. Poorly armored tanks. Poor supply chains resulting in half of all deaths from starvation and disease. Fighter planes built without ejection seats and finally, kamikaze and suicide attacks. That’s why this time, I’d take pride in a citizen led effort that sacrifices no lives at all! This next battle is not one waged to the death, but a battle to live for the future.

  The hope of a better world becomes the engine driving the war against Godzilla, who represents at this one moment both the endlessly destructive past and the potentially devastating atomic future
—Godzilla Minus One posits that the legacy of the one and the looming danger of the other are effectively countered only by a common human effort, one that looks unselfishly to what might come after. As the volunteers, including Noda and Akitsu, board their ships, Mizushima—enthusiastic to help—is purposely left behind; over Mizushima’s protests, Akitsu mutters, “We leave you the future.” Stopping Godzilla has transformed from the simple killing of a monster into, instead, a dramatic step in the process of Japanese societal rebirth and restructuring, and another progression towards exorcising the trauma of war. It is an emotionally resonant return to the original postwar ethos of the Godzilla saga –a turn away from the frequent positioning in the series of Godzilla as Japan’s protector rather than its destroyer and back towards his symbolic image as the terrible power of war and nuclear destruction. (The film also, I note, supplies a psychological complexity and thematic value absent from the recent American “Monsterverse’ Godzilla series, which would rather ape traditional disaster movies and add unnecessary backstories than confront the real human traumas and costs inherent to Godzilla.)

Koichi also finds in this battle his own restoration, and an end to his crippling guilt. He pilots a late-war experimental fighter to lure Godzilla into position in Sagami Bay—the plane is repaired by Tachibana, one of the ghosts of Koichi’s past, reconciliation with whom is vital to Koichi’s healing process. And before Godzilla can use his heat ray to eliminate the volunteer fleet, Koichi flies the bomb-filled plane directly into Godzilla’s mouth, destroying him from the inside. He survives because Tachibana had installed an ejector seat, demanding of Koichi that he must put aside his guilt and live. And so, Koichi does, indeed, live, having given himself, his adopted daughter Akiko, and his nation, a new chance for life. It is telling that the film’s final line of dialogue, from Noriko (who has survived and is in hospital) to Koichi, “Is your war finally over?”, references the psychological struggles that have defined him, his friends, his country, and, indeed, the film as a whole. What Godzilla, a monster whose metaphorical nature has been a fundamental part of the character since his 1954 inception, represents in this impressive and striking film above all is the collective ordeal of the Japanese wartime and postwar experience. That trauma is both a shared experience and shared uniquely by each individual Japanese; much of the strength of the impressive Godzilla Minus One comes from its recognition of the psychological journeys that both societies and individuals take in overcoming guilt and trauma inflicted by the vagaries of catastrophic war.
 

WORKS CITED

Angles, Jeffrey, translator. Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. By Shigeru Kayama, University   of Minnesota Press, 2023

Jeremy Brett is a librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is, among other things, the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection. He has also worked at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. He received his MLS and his MA in History from the University of Maryland – College Park in 1999. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.

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In the late 70s-tinged seventh episode of illustrious writer-director and auteur-tastemaker Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, “The Viewing”, we are innocuously introduced to the anthology’s thesis. Upon being asked ‘what was the best song you ever heard?’ by his insidious host Lional Lassiter (Peter Weller), comedian Eric Andre’s blaxploitation-esque, funk troubadour character Randall pensively remarks that, “1969. I’m in Greece and I … fall in with these freaks making psychedelic music. One of them played this song one night. Never been recorded, something they knew. It made me nostalgic for things that never happened”. This is also the perspective we are invited to share as an audience—beholden to del Toro’s series of hauntological, liminal spectacles which are scripted, animated, performed, recorded, and or otherwise “things that never happened”

At the helm Cabinet of Curiosities coming from the same director of Cronos (1992) and  Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), it should be no great surprise then to see how or why classical motifs collide with Victorian ghosts, microwaveable hot wings, or deep cuts from the 20th century’s speculative fiction and horror to create an anthology rich with anachronistic gestures. These selections range from H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), Henry Kuttner (1915-58), and Michael Shea (1946-2014), as well as adaptations (or teleplays thereof) from del Toro himself and contemporaries like Panos Cosmatos and Emily Carroll. This anthology series creates a different dialectic of aesthetics and mores while paying homage to many of del Toro’s formative influences. Perhaps it is for the best that he is not looking through rose-tinted glasses to Lovecraft—tempting as it may be for any fan of horror, sci-fi, and related genres. Instead, the show’s relationship to nostalgia is complicated.

For Randall, nostalgia—whose inception in ancient Greek poetry was characterized as Odysseus’s longing for home—appears in contrast to the German fernweh, “far-sickness”, or in more archaic English, “far woe”. For a horror hound audience this is a devastating conclusion because del Toro’s manipulation of nostalgia and its oppositional forces like fernweh is what not only drives the aesthetic overtures of Cabinet of Curiosities, but uses the audiences’ sentimentality against them. This tension is central to the series. His take on the gothic, macabre, and the monstrous is pointedly different from other anthology series that have been quick to cash in on their own self-referential nostalgic tropes. Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story, for one, though pioneering in several different ways including a stellar inclusion of LGBTQ+ talent, is guilty of producing seasons and storylines that cannibalize past ones in the name of early 2010’s tumblr nostalgia for the first three seasons. While Cabinet of Curiosities so far seems to just be a standalone season, its internal and nearly randomized structure precludes anything like its immediate predecessors (or future competitors)—one of the shows’ many strengths.

In terms of nostalgia’s embodiment, there is more represented than just the ‘specter’ that Derrida posited from Marx’s sediment in the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto (1848)– —Cabinet of Curiosities presents visceral alternatives. This is seen plainly in “The Autopsy” as well as “The Murmuring”—literally parasitic in the former and neurodivergent ruminations in the latter. The alien forces entering the miner’s bodies in “The Autopsy” need human bodies to demonstrate their vision of humanity’s future. And as the episode crescendos, their argument about their natural embodiment versus the humans they ‘possess’ is as convincing as it is unsentimental. This is not unlike the motion towards the bodies of the dead as resources in “Graveyard Rats” by Masson. In both instances, the script propels the viewer to sympathize. But from overhead in both episodes initially evoked here (or rats underground, for “Graveyard Rats”), nostalgia strikes back. At the climax of “The Autopsy”, Dr. Winters (F. Murray Abraham) reaches for the scalpel just off the exam table and kills the alien inside Allen (Luke Roberts).

Similarly, from overhead in “The Murmuring”, it is only after Claudette’s (Hannah Galway) apparition is carried off by a classic of (folk) horror, a huge flock of birds, that Nancy (Essie Davis) can confront the pushed back grief of the loss of her only child Ava with her husband, Edgar. The grieving has been subdued by them both—and from the onset of the episode the marriage appears both unromantic and anti-nostalgic. Their internal and external grief’s dam is filled given the release of catharsis through the parallel ghost train that Nancy is witness to over the course of the episode, spanning the events of Claudette’s son being drowned and her subsequent suicide. Her husband, however, is not privy to this. Nonetheless, both episodes end optimistically if but on the precipice of confession—the alien plot will be unfoiled from a tape recorder in Dr. Winter’s lab and Nancy wants to talk to Edgar about the feelings surrounding their daughter’s death—and perhaps revive a ghost of their own lifetime: an emotionally open and vulnerable marriage.

Furthermore, Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities as an anthology series resists easy classification, and the manipulation of nostalgia and fernweh can be argued to operate on an uneasy hauntological fulcrum that even contests the arguments of Fisher. Mark Fisher lamented in his 2012 “What is Hauntology?” that, “The future is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production. What hauntological music mourns is less the failure of a future to transpire—the future as actuality—than the disappearance of this effective virtuality” (Fisher, 16). These cultural theories on hauntology are useful to highlight the series’ often contradicting and (not but) multivalent takes on sentimentality and temporality. Consider the second episode, “Graveyard Rats” and the sixth, “Dreams in the Witch House”, and their attitudes to the departed. In the former, the cadavers of the mortuary and those already buried in the nearby cemetery (and their valuable belongings) are bargaining tokens for the intrepid graverobber Masson’s (David Hewlett) conflicting Protestant work ethic and theological guilt: how can a graverobber go to Heaven? If this rhetorical question stands in doubly as a set up for a joke, a punchline may roll out as “He gets buried alive”. His rationalization of graverobbing for profit disrupts the sentimentality around burial within the wider Christian tradition, burying any guilt accrued from religious or scrupulous guilt—a haunting which remains unresolved as he is exhumed in the same grave he dug, eaten alive by rats and discovered sometime later by other graverobbers. 

Conversely, “Dreams in the Witch House” has a disruption of the dead that is heavily and/or overly sentimental: researcher Gilman’s (Rupert Grint) teleological drive to ghosts, spirits, séances and other antiqued Spiritualist ephemera is endemic of unresolved trauma over his twin sister’s childhood death. His obsession to re-animate her body becomes the de-animation of his own.  It is worth noting that this episode is based on a Lovecraft short story originally a part of the Cthulhu Mythos—an embedded narrative whose inclusion would not fit the scope of this series at all because of the Mythos’ own concepts of continuity. So instead, our protagonist is situated in the 1930’s at the end of the Spiritualist movement. This framing is emblematic of the series writ large, and how it deals with the pernicious afterlives of its socio-cultural subjectivities. This contrasts with Fisher’s conceptions of hauntology (Derrida’s notwithstanding), which necessitate the need for a haunting to come within one’s lifetime.

The Spiritualist movement and its aesthetics no doubt ‘haunt’ our understandings of ghosts and the corporeality (or lack thereof) of the dead in media. Tarot cards, deliberate conjuring of the dead, and uncanny salons, galleries and basements are all in the backdrops of several episodes. This hallmark set of aesthetics is not only showcased in del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, but in contemporary adaptations of media which depict the dead made before the peak of Spiritualism circa the latter half of the 19th century.  The “Dreams in the Witch House” not only lampoons the decline of Spiritualism (nearly ‘dead’ by the 1930’s), it dispels that conjuration ‘fixes’ the past or that lofty aims to revive the dead are conducive to the human condition of grief. For our cultural moment that is rife with a renaissance in astrology, tarot, and practices this take is refreshing. Cabinet of Curiosities does not deny the existence of ghosts, hauntings, or even aliens—it does affirm though that there are several approaches, materialist or “Spiritualist”, to how nostalgia is processed as an inhibition or disinhibition for characters like Gilman.

From my scholastic methods used to conduct this review, these three episodes—“Lot 36”, “Graveyard Rats”, and “Pickman’s Model”—did not manipulate sentimentality, nostalgia or fernweh effectively and sparingly used the dark, macabre, hyper temporalities and realms that lies at the heart of del Toro’s work. This is evidenced from the episodes’ near-unison clamor on the locus of the archive—be it a storage unit (“Lot 36”), cemetery underground (“Graveyard Rats” or even an art gallery (“Pickman’s Model”)—these are dangerous places that will eat you alive if given the chance. From a theoretical point of view, Fisherian hauntology may offer some potential answers as to how and why the hauntings are constructed and conceived.

WORKS CITED

Fisher, Mark. “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, 2012, pp. 16–24. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16.

Alice Fulmer (she/her) is an MA/PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, educator, and poet. She is pursuing a Medieval Studies emphasis, and planning a prospectus on disability and gender in the Canterbury Tales. Her debut collection Faunalia (2023), is available from Ritona Press. Aside from reviews in SFRA Review, other academic publications include an article on Sir Launfal (c. 1400) in UCLA’s Comitatus. In February 2025, an arts & comedy podcast co-hosted by her and graduate students, Cunterbury, will debut on all major podcasting platforms.

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Starship Troopers: Extermination is a 2024 first person extraction shooter developed by Canadian studio Offworld Industries. An official entry in the Starship Troopers franchise, the game sees players assume the role of soldiers in the Mobile Infantry battling an insectoid, hostile alien species known as the Arachnids or “Bugs” across a series of planets. While based on Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 novel, the game is set in the universe of the 1997 Paul Verhoeven film and adopts a similar jingoistic, satirical tone. While offering fleeting moments of fun, frenetic gameplay, Starship Troopers: Extermination largely misses its target as it fails to deliver on the rich world building of its source material or offer a compelling gameplay loop to keep players coming back for more.

As of January 2025, Starship Troopers: Extermination offers two gameplay modes. The first is a brief, single-player campaign across 25 missions that place the player in the boots of an elite special operations squad of the Mobile Infantry. These missions are narrated by the voice of Casper Van Dien who reprised his role as Juan “Johnny” Rico, the protagonist of Verhoeven’s 1997 cult classic sci-fi action film. These missions see the player and three NPC (non-player characters) squadmates traversing bland subterranean and planetary surface environments to complete singular, simplistic objectives such as eliminate specific enemies or hold key areas. There is little to no character development of these squadmates who only offer brief and banal exclamations. Before each mission, a static rendering of General Rico briefs the player on the upcoming mission with monologues that offer little narrative development or meaningful additions to the Starship Troopers cannon. These missions could have been strengthened in both narrative and gameplay if multiple objectives were combined into longer missions. This would provide an experience closer to a proper single-player campaign than an extended tutorial.

The other game mode, and the most compelling experience Starship Troopers: Extermination offers, is a cooperative, 16-player PvE (player versus environment) mission-based extraction shooter. Before the mission, players choose one of six trooper classes, each with their own weapon, equipment, and ability loadouts. So far, the six classes included in the base game are Sniper, Demolisher, Guardian, Engineer, Medic, and Ranger. Each mission starts with players deploying from a dropship and completing various objectives which typically culminate in tower-defense style gameplay as players collaboratively spend mission specific currency to build base fortifications, turrets, and ammo caches. After the base is successfully defended, players must make a hurried rush to the extraction point to complete the mission. This extraction sequence is one of the most engaging parts of the game as persistent enemy corpses litter the battlefield and transform the planet surface into a labyrinthian hellscape of explosions and green Arachnid blood. This leads to some truly cinematic moments as frenetic gameplay combines with visual spectacle and desperate cries from fellow squad members.

Unfortunately, Arachnids are not the only bugs one must battle while playing Starship Troopers: Extermination. Various technical issues have plagued the title through early access and 1.0 release. Performance issues persist on consoles and higher-end PC hardware as swarms of enemies on screen see frame rates plummeting. Hard crashes are frequent and odd textures or visual glitches are rampant. These issues contribute to a sense of Starship Troopers: Extermination being an underdeveloped project attempting to cash in on franchise affiliation. In 2022 players created a mod for Squad (also developed by Offworld Industries) called Squad Troopers. This mod introduced PvE gameplay and Starship Troopers skins for the Squad engine, gameplay, and weapons. It was well received by players, becoming one of the most popular and well-reviewed mods in the Squad community (Steam). It appears that Offworld Industries ran with this concept in their development of Starship Troopers: Extermination.       

Starship Troopers: Extermination had the great misfortune of releasing the same year as another wildly popular squad-based, cooperative bug shooter inspired by the Starship Troopers universe. Arrowhead Studio’s Helldivers 2 was a massive and surprise hit for publisher Sony, breaking sales records and overwhelming game servers shortly after its release. In many ways, Helldivers 2 succeeds where Starship Troopers: Extermination fails as it actualizes a compelling game world and supportive community immersed in roleplaying dispensable “divers” who are fighting to spread “managed democracy” across the galaxy. Despite not having the rich lore of a storied franchise to draw on like Starship Troopers or Warhammer 40,000, Helldivers 2 offers players the opportunity to explore various worlds with scattered tidbits of environmental storytelling, and participate in a live service Galactic War moderated by dungeon master “Joel” who controls enemy tactics, in-game events, and the game’s metanarrative. The community has enthusiastically embraced the heavy-handed, tongue-in-cheek satire of Helldivers 2 producing videos, fan art, and other content that mimics the fascistic and jingoistic tone of in-game propaganda.   

However, such satirical treatment of fascism, colonialism, and militarism as seen in Starship Troopers: Extermination and Helldivers 2 has created an online discourse around the public’s ability to differentiate satire from genuine endorsement (Rosenblatt). Even the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, was mocked for seemingly missing the satirical message of the Starship Troopers film (Greg). This disheartening lack of media literacy calls into question the efficacy of satire in video games for the purposes of social commentary. The concern is that satirical games may only serve to platform problematic ideologies as some players may relate acritically with the game’s toxic protagonists and themes.

This is further complicated by the unique nature of how satire is presented and interpreted in video games. It appears that satire works differently in video games than other forms of storytelling. Firstly, live-service games like Starship Trooper: Extermination or Helldivers 2 are intended to be played forever. Theylack a traditional narrative arc that offers a didactic resolution to punish the protagonist for their abhorrent behavior. Without the comeuppance of hedonistic, satirical novels and films like Fight Club or American Psycho, games generally lack true moral resolution as players are simply rewarded for their deviant behavior by progressing the game and earning greater abilities, weapons, and in-game cosmetics. Secondly, satire typically requires ridicule by the audience of a character or situation. Given the participatory and immersive nature of video games, the players actually become the intended object of ridicule and may lose the ability to critically view the characters as parodies of themselves. Video games, perhaps more than any other media, see the audience sympathizing with the protagonist whether or not they are the hero. Games don’t always prompt the player to wrestle with the question, “are we the baddies?” (Mitchell and Webb). Successful satire in games must adapt to the idiosyncrasies of the genre. A standout example of this adaptation is The Stanley Parable which cleverly satirizes interactive storytelling as a whole by subverting the conventions of narrator and player choice.

While Starship Troopers: Extermination was largely a commercial and critical flop, it serves to spark the same ideological debates as its original 1959 source material. Themes of militarism, fascism, and moral decline, are just as prevalent across the media landscape now as they were over sixty years ago. However, concerns about declining media literacy and video games’ unique ability to allow the player to inhabit, and sympathize with, the protagonist, call into question the efficacy of satire as a method of social commentary in video games.

WORKS CITED

Squad Troopers, created by xpe and Devlikeapro, 2022, Steam Workshop https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2830905314&searchtext=

Rosenblatt, Kalhan. “A video game has reinvigorated a long-running debate about fascism and satire.” NBC News. 28 Feb. 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/helldivers-2-fascism-satire-debate-rcna140653

Evans, Greg. “Elon Musk roasted after missing ‘painfully obvious’ message from 1990s sci-fi classic.” The Independent. 16 Nov. 2024,  https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/films/news/elon-musk-trump-starship-troopers-meme-b2649528.html

Mitchell, David, and Robert Webb. That Mitchell and Webb Look, season 1, episode 1, BBC, 2006.

Drew Adan is an archivist with the M. Louis Salmon Library at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). Before coming to UAH, Drew worked for ten years in the Yale University library system at the Lillian Goldman Law Library and Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. He holds an MLIS from Simmons School of Library and Information Science and a Master’s degree in History from UAH. In 2024 he published a book chapter entitled “Space City, USA: The Theme Park of the South that Failed to Launch” in NASA and the American South and has presented on various archival and history topics at national and international conferences.