Overland: The Unsalvageable Run
Contains plot spoilers for Overland by Finji towards the end. This is a partner essay to Nick Murray’s ‘Overland — Unknowable Anthropofauna’.
Nick Murray introduces in Overland — Unknowable Anthropofauna the haunting truism of Finji’s title; ‘Overland is a long string of permadeaths’. Playing the game becomes this quantum exercise of returning to the same limited, procedurally generated maps and trying not to die as you did before.
The burden of my previous decisions lay heavy weights on proceeding runs. It shouldn’t be this hard. The ‘American’ goal of its narrative is simple; get from A to B. Make it to the West Coast. Persevere and hope the RNG rolls in my favour. Survive. Keep my morality intact in an amoral apocalypse. Prevail over an unfeeling enemy.
I became hung up on the idea that the gasoline tanks I kept coming across were relics of my hundreds of unsalvageable runs; as if the game’s engine procedurally recycled the ghosts of past maps I never made it to; to then spit up the relics in my current timeline.
The historical artefacts of Overland; abandoned knives, torches, gas tanks and bottles. Campervans and pickup trucks. Paraphernalia for survival. Perhaps each run through is a simulated museum of my failure? The only memories the game keeps are records of how far I get; all falling short of the coast, all the people I lose on the way.
Overland is both a prophecy and an archive of the punishing apocalypses we have ahead as a society. It replays how much we can survive with; it documents how well those who survive will live; it laments with the regretful decisions it took to get ‘here’. I get a new party of characters each time I lose. I forget, eventually, who dies.
How does a run become unsalvageable? Once the pressure of survival becomes too much and I click out of the game window; or I willingly walk into danger or press on with my characters, as their dwindling party dies one by one.
If I choose the wrong stop on the highway, I face the consequences. Opting to stop for supplies over gas, might result in having to abandon the car a couple stops along. Opting for gas over for another traveller in the party could result in resource scarcity at later stops — inevitably, a lack of being able to defend / heal / repair my crew or vehicle. The game operates on serial punishments contingent on random external factors. Soon, my morality as the player is contingent on random external factors.
Did I live this before? I arrive at a scene with a character who is armed with a flare gun, neatly clearing some aliens for me. The stranger doesn’t want to join my crew, but takes the gas tank I need. I could push on and abandon this stranger; or I could kill the stranger and help myself to the gas — save the people who wanted to travel with me. The game forces my hand. The quantum roads ahead materialise.
I choose to abandon the stranger and the gas. I run out of gas two maps later. I lose my crew.
In another timeline, I kill the stranger and loot the gas but I am injured in the process. This world punishes those with injury. My character’s actions are severely reduced and my time on the map accumulates. More time on the map slashes my rate of survival per turn as more complicated Anthropofauna appear, hungry and encroaching. I can’t make it to my car in time. It takes damage and explodes. Fire all around. I lose the crew.
Two permadeaths that were perhaps never avoidable. The lack of permanence in rogue-likes always appeals to me — that abandonment and failure are key to future survival. How much that differs to reality.
What if the whole game is an unsalvageable run? On a lucky night, myself and Nick play Overland together and find ourselves on the West Coast, moments after our car is swallowed by the symbiotic landscape. All we have are the relics of the journey — knives, petrol bombs, crate shields. The world is to be consumed by the Anthropofauna.
The characters build a fire and share fragments of story that were procedurally generated with them into this world. Do they hear the ghosts of runs that never made it this far? Do they join quantum realities where we all make it to the West Coast? I wait for the game to memorialise this run and step back into the unsalvageable run of the world I live in. After I say goodbye to Nick and shut down the computer, the lack of permanence seems louder tonight.
