There's a moment in NaissanceE, the 2014 game by Limasse Five, in which the words "Not this way," appear at the top of the screen in front of a hallway. Proceeding down this hallway causes the game to shut down. There's no cute narration. There's not even a soft quit to the game's main menu - it just kills the program entirely. And this isn't the climax of the game, or its final moments, or even some culmination of a grand statement within. It's just one opaque moment in an aggressively avant-garde piece of art. But that hallway - that statement, "Not this way" - it serves as a neat little microcosm for the entire experience. NaissanceE is a world that's not meant to be inhabited. [character gasps] I want you to try and remember something for me. Do you ever go to a play, or a book fair, or something at your elementary school in the evening when all the days normal events were done? Do you remember how weird the school felt now that it wasn't filled with all the activities it was built for? I remember a time like this vividly. A couple friends and I broke free of the crowd in the gym and ran wildly down the dim halls of the building, free to jump and yell and do all the other things we couldn't do during the day. Like many childhood experiences, our mania was partially driven by fear. We could be caught and dragged back to the gym, of course, but more unnerving was the feeling of the building itself. The purpose of the school was to house hundreds of us for hours a day, to compartmentalize all of us into classes and maintain order with separate rooms and neat lines. Without kids or teachers the size of the school felt purposeless and unsettling. Why are these hallways so wide? Why are all the doors closed? Why did the bathroom have ten stalls if I was the only one using it? Those feelings of confusion and mild terror - they're absolutely pervasive in NaissanceE. It's a game, like many games, in which you must progress from one point to another, but those points are so obscured, the world between them so alien, that NaissanceE feels totally separate from its contemporaries. And the point you quickly realize isn't the gameplay or the story - it's the world. The world was not built for you. But you must survive it all the same. There's enough recognizable geometry across the levels of the game to resemble human structures. There are stairs, there are lights, there are fans, but those familiar aspects of the environment are far outnumbered by everything else. The game's environments often go straight from dimly lit to blindingly bright, and claustrophobic to impossibly big. Stairs and walls twist around each other, defying anyone who would try to map their surroundings. As a result, any sense of play feels secondary to the world itself. The game has platforming and it has puzzles, but the space hardly feels designed for them. In most platforming games, it's obvious what parts of the world should be navigated and what's background decoration. Mario can jump to this platform, and I know that before I even try. Mario could never jump to this one, and it wouldn't make sense for the game to ask me to even in first-person. Platforming is often lenient enough to be clearly readable. Players are usually given tools to assist their jumps given that judging distances and heights can be difficult from this perspective. But not only does NaissancE not give you any help, it seems to actively fight against you. This is one of the very first rooms in the game, a sprint against a rapidly darkening series of jumps, chasing a light that always seems to move faster than you. And it only gets more obtuse from there on out. Navigation is frequently awkward
and sometimes a near pitch-black, with no hint system or guide. There are puzzles, but I often found I'd
solved them by accident after just wandering around and bumping
into enough things. Once I was wandering around for ages in this giant area with no obvious exit. Following a well-lit tunnel, I suddenly found myself in a room filled with what appeared to be graves - brutalist concrete mounds with blazing white light coming from above. I wandered that room for minutes, completely disoriented, and it turned out I could have missed it entirely. It was completely irrelevant to my progress through the game. But I still think about that room a lot. It looked like it stretched for miles. Part of what NaissanceE gets across is that being dwarfed by architecture feels fundamentally different than being alone in nature. Nature, at least, isn't designed with
a singular purpose in mind. Being lost in nature almost has
a sense of solidarity to it. I didn't plan on being there, but neither did the trees or the grass around me. I, and everything else, are collectively alive and shaped by only the most general of plans. But there is no collective in NaissanceE. There's only this extreme alienation. The world feels massive and entirely designed
and yet I had no place in it. All other life seemed to have been gone so long it barely made a trace on the architecture. It was like I missed the rapture, or something. Maybe everyone else left their bodies eons ago and so there's no reason for anything to be made for the organic. The game traffics in existential dread. I felt like an outlier on a graph that didn't even have other data points. There was nothing but axes left. NaissanceE's designer, Mavros Sedeño, is open about the games primary influence. It's a 1998 manga called "Blame,"
a 10 volume work by Tsutomu Nihei, and when reading Blame, that influence is immediately apparent. The manga follows a man named Killy, looking for something called "Net Terminal Genes," and encountering plenty of foes and unlikely allies along the way. He has a really cool gun! [science fiction blaster noise] But it's not really about that. That might be the text of Blame, but it's absolutely secondary to the art, the feel, the vibe. Blame, like NaissanceE, is about unbridled uncontrolled architecture. Long ago in Blame, humans lost control of their construction AIs, and now there's nothing but the mega structure. It's just artificiality for no other purpose than to exist, stretching far beyond the limits of comprehension. Nihei has tossed out guesses at the structure's scale. It's maybe the size of a Dyson Sphere - a creation that would encircle a Sun and extend to around the orbit of Jupiter. The specific numbers aren't really important though. The mega structure is, for all intents and purposes, infinite, and as such the vast, vast majority of Blame is Killy, alone, traversing environments that just barely hold together. I was hiking with a friend recently when we came unto a long strip of open air, all the trees cleared to make a path for power lines to run through. And, looking at the towers, we couldn't help but laugh at the implication of a ladder built into it. Just a few thin metal rods sticking out far enough to wrap one's hand around. It seemed like a joke. Who would ever actually climb this? Blame is full of these architectural anachronisms. Look at this set of stairs, built inches out of the wall. What human would design a world like this? It's a flimsy gesture at a tradition that's been long irrelevant. Their use, their purpose, is gone. But they still exist. In NaissanceE, of course, those stairs are present. You have to climb up them to proceed. Sedeño was asked about the stairs in an interview with the architecture zine Heterotopias. His response is telling for how he looks at the game's world and how he views the player. "When you see these ridiculous, impractical stairs, you really wonder what they are used for. I thought it would be interesting to give it a meaning, but as a game element." So the stairs do have a meaning within the game. They're a game element, and a game element only. Their meaning is the player must ascend them. Sedeño makes no attempt to contextualise them within the scene, within the architecture, because that's just a fundamentally impossible task. There is no place the stairs lead to, just as there's no place they lead from. It's all just empty structures and you, the player, hopelessly wandering them. "We never know exactly what is outside and what is inside," says Sedeño, "because we only observe at a certain level of matter, and when we think about these things,
we are actually so lost. We don't understand so much." NaissanceE relishes in never giving us perspective.
We are only ever lost. We are only ever just holding on, and fittingly NaissanceE is also challenging. It's a hard game, and a punishing one, nut that harshness makes us confront the games vital question: What happens when the world we've created no longer makes room for us? Whether by algorithm gone mad, or some calamitous necessity, NaissanceE's world has so over-designed itself that any sense of its purpose has moved far beyond our grasp. "Naissance" is the French word for birth, and fittingly NaissanceE is a weird palindromic distortion. it adds a letter and an unexpected capitalization making the word more symmetrically pleasing, while simultaneously stripping it of meaning. The game's title, taken from a literal standpoint, is unpronounceable. And that, in a word, is the game's design philosophy. It warps architecture for architecture's sake, made more endless and beautiful by discarding any sense of practicality. Our contemporary view of future cities is firmly planted in the Bladerunner tradition, choked by smog and 50-story ads, they're posed as the grim future that awaits humanity if we continue on our current path. But as hellish as they are, they're the worst of a world that's still unmistakably human. There are no advertisements in NaissanceE, no pollution. No capitalist plots or human exploitation. There's... nothing. Maybe there's some horror that hides in the buildings. Maybe it all makes sense from a cosmic perspective. But there's only one thing for sure
in the world of this game - humanity has simply slipped through the cracks.
