If you habitually put on a podcast for your commute, for walking the dog or doing the dishes, chances are you’ve been told that you need personal therapy in the few seconds before you manage and mash the skip ahead button 8 times. Therapy and counselling can be good for your soul, it’s true, but it can also take time and work to find your way through the troubles you’ve faced in your life. Virtue and a Sledgehammer proposes a different kind of therapeutic release. Can you guess what it is?
The body of Pratelle’s mother, Merche, is in the trunk of her car, and she so damn angry about this that she want to break stuff. How about her hometown? How about taking a sledgehammer to her past? Venting her emotions at how much has changed by tearing it all down?
That seems to be the plan, but she’s crashed it in the process of bringing Merche back home – running over two humanoid robots in the process. For the rest of the way, Pratelle needs to go on foot if she’s going to find her sister. Good thing she’s got that sledgehammer with her.
As a game, Virtue and a Sledgehammer is barbarically simple. You stomp purposefully through the world and wield a sledgehammer to smash through things that are in your way. Initially it’s your standard brick buildings and old walls, but then you come to a house with an android stood out front, contemplating life, and talking about who they are. Stand there for a few moments and they’ll talk about their own mother, their temper, how often they masturbate and eventually confess a desire for their life to be ended.
I stood there for a while, letting them cycle through missives. Is this a person? Or, just a loosely programmed automaton. In the end I lifted my sledgehammer and slammed them down into the ground. The second robot that I found, though, gave me more pause. The Warden addressed Pratelle by name in a cutscene, suggested that she see a doctor after the car crash. Questions if you crashed on purpose. Pratelle’s thoughts are simply to smash them out of the way, refusing to take counsel from a glorified microwave, as she puts it.
“We’ve always found a lot of these connections between the intentions of the character and the empathy that people project onto the robots,” Creative Director Jordi de Paco told us. “They are just robots and the character explicitly keeps saying that these are just tin cans, talking microwaves, toasters, but even with all the statements from the character, when people play they are like ‘Oooh, I don’t want to hit this!’ and I don’t want it to be like that. I mean, I hate that because it happens, but I understand it’s a characteristic of the human experience, and we later on in the game try to exploit that.
“We understand you are feeling compassion, but you shouldn’t.”
I continue to have mixed feelings as I carry on through the demo. All of these robots look the same, with boxy white bodies and limbs connected with black tubes for joints, and then with a 3:4 text display on their head, but they all act differently. Some will cower and run away, others will immediately come at you and fight, there are those trying to backup data in one building, there’s one that claims ownership over a small parcel of land. There’s non-zero chance that these are people, and Pratelle cannot see that anymore. She can only blame them.
She also can’t use doors. The only way to get through the world is to smash everything, whether it’s a wall, a window, a generator powering a locked gate. Jordi said “We considered it, but we actually like how instinctively it marks and it informs the level design. People are drawn towards doors, but they cannot interact with them. The only way is to smash them because the game is about that. It’s also a statement – this character would never go ‘Hello? Is anyone there?’”
Virtue and a Sledgehammer absolutely leans into representing the more destructive ways that people try to cope with their traumas, and it comes out the other side allowing you to indulge the typical behaviours of gamers, pushing the boundaries of what you can do, searching nooks and crannies for secrets and so on. That’s something new for Deconstructeam.
Jordi said, “Deconstructeam has in the past released pretty narrative, text-heavy games like The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood or The Red Strings Club, and for this one, it really helped that this last year I was hired to help on some other projects – I wrote Ninja Gaiden Ragebound, and I wrote for Denshattack! – [….] and the director of those games always kept telling me that I need to communicate all of this stuff, and I only have, like, five lines to do it. So I brought that experience back to Virtue. […]
“Before that, we didn’t want to resort to video game gimmicks, like collecting stuff, but now I understand why developers do it – it’s really hard to populate a whole game only with fully-fledged narrative stuff. But at the same time, it’s not a matter of if you can do it, because it just kept destroying the pace of the game to just get questions and stuff like that. We want to reward people for exploration, but we don’t want to stop them with text all the time.”
As you explore, there’s various points that Virtue starts to reveal the roots of what is driving Pratelle on. Glassy shapes can be found and smashed, the white ones immediately dropping you into a memory, while the red ones flash an image on screen and adding a pip to a counter, eventually dropping you into a strange memory palace with a giant vision of Pratelle’s sister watching over, leading into another story moment.
These memories play out and give you options for how to act, allowing you to self insert into Pratelle’s character. For example, Nina asks Pratelle what she wants to be when she grows up, and the instinct is naturally to choose between a handful of jobs. But that doesn’t satisfy Nina. What does Pratelle want to *be?* Happy, maybe? But even that is merely a state of being, and she’s pushed for further introspection.
In another moment, Pratelle finds Merche stood out in the woods, naked and begging for forgiveness. It feels surreal, like a dream for Pratelle, but it’s actually finding her mother sleepwalking at best or losing her grasp on reality and her person at worst. Do you listen in and find out what she means, as she talks about her children? Or do you interrupt and bring her back home. It’s a more simple compassionate decision to make, but at this early point in the game, we’re still trying to figure out what has led Pratelle down her most destructive path.
There’s a pleasing balance between these sides of Virtue and a Sledgehammer. Yes, there’s smashing things and delighting in the way that building crumble, but you’re drawn into the various ways that the robots react to you, potentially listening in on their conversations before you smash them to bits, and the shifts to memories and choosing your input into a fractured relationship add depth and meaning to the experience.
“It was an iterative process,” Jordi said about finding this balance between destruction and story, “and it wasn’t like this until maybe three or four months ago. It has been two years in development and it was only recently that we cracked the code. We were super worried for what we were going to do to save the pacing of the game, and suddenly tried this idea and it’s like, OK, this is it. Finally, we managed to make it work.”
You can play Virtue and a Sledgehammer now with a demo available on Steam ahead of a planned release later this year.