Transmutations: an owch analysis
Chloe Taylor, under the name owch, or occasionally OWCH, has been releasing video games on itch.io since 2014, accelerating from 2019 onward. Handling every facet of development, this talented creator has so far released no two titles in the same genre: LONG LIVE THE AXE (2014) is a sidescrolling action game, BEAT THE ART BREAKER (2018) a 3D open-world brawler adventure game, PALACE OF WOE (2019) a top-down puzzle adventure, and so on. The gameplay always manages to be tight and accessible, in concept if not in difficulty.
Despite its formal diversity, a tonal and stylistic consistency lends coherency to owch’s oeuvre, particularly a pattern of changes. Transformation is a theme through all of owch’s completed videogames as of the most recent, gloom reducer (2021). The qualitative value of these changes is not usually clearly positive, in fact often scary, but always necessary to reach the ending. While individually owch’s games can seem inscrutable, when viewed together their shared interest in transformation, dramatic change, and uncertain outcomes suggests deeper readings.
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PALACE OF WOE is the only owch game in which the transformation is obviously positive: a magical, metaphorical, and literal gender transition that allows the player character to escape the PALACE OF WOE. To assume, because the developer is transgender, that her own transition is in some way analogous to the transformations in her videogames overall is a limiting and somewhat essentializing perspective. However, PALACE is a useful starting point for the analysis of this theme, as its uplifting trans allegory helps contextualize the deeper abstractions of owch’s other games.
The window of the game executable is entitled “LOOK at the PALACE OF WOE,” and instead of “Start,” the title screen begins the adventure when the player selects “ESCAPE.” This minimal exposition (still more than usual for owch) gives the player an objective: ESCAPE the PALACE OF WOE. The player character is a masculine figure evidently trapped in a grim fortress. The player “sorts out” the boxes of the psychological labyrinth and the boxes used in the puzzle battles against enemies, slowly learning what is necessary to escape, paralleling the player character who “sorts out” how to reach somewhere less woeful.
In order to access the EXIT of the PALACE OF WOE, the consciousness of the masculine body conjures a feminine body, SWIM, from a previously unstable possibility into a physical being, transfering into the feminine body in a corridor of (estrogen?) pills. SWIM “was always waiting.”
The metaphor of this change is straightforward, enemies and bosses representing obstacles to gender transition, such as SINK, operating as the “Attractive Mask” of safe heteronormativity who prefers to keep the hero inside the PALACE OF WOE in contrast to the freeing metamorphosis of SWIM (“sink or swim”).
PALACE includes conquest imagery of a more typical happy ending (another rarity for owch): a sword-toting hero, SWIM, now outside the PALACE OF WOE, the transgender flag flying over the defeated, suggestively phallic fortress. Even here, the conquest fantasy is subverted in the nonviolence of her journey. Unlike the characters in earlier owch games, SWIM does not kill her enemies but only forces them to “step aside.” This transformation is as wholesome as it is unambiguous. The hopeful and optimistic treatment of transformation in PALACE introduces the possibility that the magical transitions in other owch games are less negative than they might appear.
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The change that occurs in LONG LIVE THE AXE is the most violent of any owch game. Far from merciful, the player character, whom I will call the bruiser, can do little but bludgeon, slice, and shoot, killing hundreds of other creatures. Enemy infighting implies three or four warring factions in the game world, but the bruiser fights them all using their own weapons and even body parts. The scarce narrative context has the bruiser hear that someone, Iron Mind, is looking for them at the church. After threatening and insulting the bruiser, Iron Mind vanishes, and the bruiser descends into the basement of the church and begins to carve their way through the levels.
Iron Mind reappears as the boss of the second area, the S. S. Beans. The crew angles and reels the bruiser out of the ocean along with their latest haul, hinting at a more negative situation. But if the enthusiastic fisher who addresses them as “captain” can be trusted, this is the bruiser’s own fishing vessel. Though still full of strange magic and violence, the ship is a place of plenty: the hull bursts with dollars, and the music track “long live the axe” affords a sense of heroic adventure. This status quo appears prosperous.
The major transformation of AXE occurs after the player defeats Iron Mind. A pink bug-like creature bursts from the fallen enemy and the player steps through the gate of its mouth, with the text “WELCOME BACK” emphasizing that it is a return to the S. S. Beans. However, the formerly lively ship is now desolate. The fishers hang dead from masts by hooks in their mouths. The roles are upended: the vengeful ocean creatures for which the S. S. Beans formerly angled now cast lures into the air to catch land-dwellers.
As the player advances, fighting fishy enemies previously only encountered underwater, the inversion continues. Melon Town begins as a peaceful village without a single enemy, its many talkative NPCs and beautiful falling leaves forming a welcoming contrast to the bruiser’s snowy, mostly deserted hometown. After the transformation, however, Melon Town swarms with enemies more dangerous and numerous than any the player has previously encountered. The former residents hide in their homes, asking the bruiser to save them, though owch provides no clear method to do so.
The stages after the Iron Mind battle heighten the chaos—goats switching from harmless animals to deadly gunslingers, tree leaves springing to life to attack like animals, enemy factions battling to the death—until the player reaches the final boss, Big Bait. After the battle, the bruiser enters another church, ascending to a supernatural height and encountering enthroned figures with hands for heads, the beings later identified in PALACE as DE-VOTEs. Each of the hand-beings speaks a cryptic line. Together, these comprise an overall thought:
“Chain of being has been broken[.] World as was will not come[.] No new order[.] No new chain[.] The axe remains[. …] Long live the axe[.]”
With the terrorized populace and escalating grotesquery, the transformation in AXE appears deleterious. However, these physical changes may represent a cosmological conflict. The inversion of oppressive religious authority through seemingly horrifying means is not uncommon: for instance, the appropriation of the devil as a liberatory figure in We Know the Devil (pillowfight, 2015).
The hand-beings represent religious devotees and clerical authorities, given their physical location in a church and the presence of a similar hand design on one of the first church’s windows. The hands suggest prayer, as with the worshipful DE-VOTEs in PALACE. The axe is the only weapon the bruiser finds that the player must utilize and can be considered an emblem of the bruiser’s journey. The DE-VOTEs chanting “Long live the axe” indicates an inversion of the world’s allegiance from the divine eternity of the church to the temporal, decaying axe of the bruiser, the transformations of material reality.
Both in metaphorical associations and in its real-world connections to oppression and imperialism, the church in AXE is a negative influence. It is associated with the cruel Iron Mind, who discloses there is no genuine spirituality involved:
“This is all about money[.] Dont [sic] get it twisted[.]”
Iron Mind’s throne sits beneath another DE-VOTE hand image in a room made of money, linking his brutality, the church, and material wealth. The peace of the pre-transformation world is no peace: the foundation of the plundering church is a vast catacomb of vengeful skeletons, the first enemies the player encounters. The church may be what depopulated the skeleton-filled suburb that appears around it, being literally built on corpses, many in place of masonry.
The “chain of being” alludes to the great chain of being, a European religious–philosophical concept of the early modern period that conceives of all living beings as existing in a chain of hierarchical gradations in relation to God. In AXE, this chain of greaters and lessers would seem to justify the fishing of the ocean people and the church’s faux-divine authority. The hierarchy of the DE-VOTEs’ “chain of being,” then, warrants defiance. By abolishing this chain, the bruiser ends the financially motivated violence against the ocean people and that the church carries out elsewhere, abandons the material wealth of the S. S. Beans attained by killing others, and empowers animals like the goats to resist oppressors—even if that means, ironically, the bruiser too.
Big Bait’s mouth spews enemies of all the different factions. Continuing their earlier infighting, they battle each other on the bridge before Big Bait as much as they battle the player character. Defeating the boss, then, also implies the end of the violent conflict that has so far predominated, ending the cosmic transition to a less violent form of being less focused on material wealth. In this way, the residents of Melon Town may be saved after all. AXE can be taken as depicting a metaphysical revolution, violent only insofar as any revolution is violent.
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The (likely) good ending of BEAT THE ART BREAKER—what I deem the QUEEN EYE ending—provides an interesting contrast to AXE’s violent transformation, achievable only by rejecting financially motivated violence. In BTAB, the player is given control of the ART BREAKER, a brawler resembling those from AXE and the later PALACE. The ART BREAKER arrives in a city where at least two factions, insect-like gangsters and diminutive, pacifist wizards, are engaged in conflict.
While achieving the QUEEN EYE ending on the first attempt is possible, the most obvious course of action in BTAB sends the player toward the harmful transformation of the CLOUD EYE ending. The presence of a merchant, seemingly named UZU, incentivizes the player to seek money to afford items and upgrades. By far, the most efficient method of attaining enough money for UZU’s goods is entering a house and killing the resident wizards, who do not fight back. This grants the player the UZU-aligned CLOUD EYE. Following the coldblooded elimination of wizards from a house, the building becomes an identical UZU MART.
This process leads to the CLOUD EYE ending, in which the ART BREAKER finally enters the art museum, FIASCO. There, using the player’s primary form of interaction, brawling, the ART BREAKER breaks the art like enemies and executes the wizards’ deity, whom I identify as the QUEEN referred to in the name of the QUEEN EYE. This magically transforms the city, darkening the atmosphere and emptying it of any other beings, of any diversity, except for the one remaining resident: UZU. Not only providing an unsatisfying ending, UZU also gives the player a bad deal: most items at UZU MART (possibly all of them) can be found free of charge. In the QUEEN EYE ending, the colonizing UZU appears with a flying saucer, a literal alien invader. UZU’s wizard staff trophies and knife not unlike the gangsters’ hint that the latter were hunting wizards on the invader’s behalf
The alternative transformations of world and self that lead to the QUEEN EYE ending involve the player taking a less intuitive route to align with the wizards against UZU’s colonizing economic drive. Rescuing a wizard from the gangsters will win the QUEEN cult’s trust, allowing the player to attain the QUEEN EYE from the ritual site GRAVE. The QUEEN EYE is the first transformation, changing the player’s view in an obviously useful way: the hostile and seemingly unbeatable shadow enemies revert to being harmless wizards. The ART BREAKER must then find their own image in the wizard ritual circle in HOUSING E and, as the title suggests, beat it.
If the player attempts the same with the CLOUD EYE, beating the ART BREAKER yields a game over instead of a transformation. Representing a rejection of the former anti-art, greedy, Iron Mind-like, UZU-aligned ART BREAKER, this personal transformation leads to a transformation of the game world, which becomes dark and frightening, road signs scrambled and enemies stronger and larger. Even the music gives way to ambient noise. But such transformation is a necessary step and may be nothing more than nighttime.
The QUEEN seems capable of emotional support, unlike the avaricious UZU. The player can ask UZU for direction: “I’m scared!” But UZU’s one response to all dialogue options, to all emotional and spiritual problems, is comically inadequate and selfish: “spend some money[.]” The QUEEN, in contrast, displays compassion and understanding. Told “I’m scared!” she answers, “i will protect you,” and gives a unique response to every dialogue option. Appearing in FIASCO, the WOODS, and the GRAVE, the QUEEN is associated with art, nature, and (pagan) spirituality, unlike the mechanistic, expansionist UZU.
This compassion may seem undercut when, immediately after the meeting with the QUEEN, a transformed wizard shatters the ART BREAKER. However, rather than a murder, this is simply another ritual transformation: the QUEEN EYE changes the game itself, breaking the preestablished rules by adding a save file, while this latest death adds a new checkpoint for the final boss. The player then battles UZU at the end of the deadly night—and given the difficulty, the checkpoint is an enormous help.
Furthermore, the ART BREAKER does not seem to genuinely die. The traitor ending depicts numerous ART BREAKER bodies being created inside FIASCO, and both it and the QUEEN EYE ending show that a pink bug is piloting the ART BREAKER (like the bug controlling Iron Mind). The body the wizard shatters is only a vessel of the living creature. The transformations of BTAB correspond, then, to another liberation: the rejection of UZU and art-breaking for the spirituality of the QUEEN.
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owch’s other games feature different types of changes, particularly sudden and surprising shifts into new forms of gameplay. To the extent these various transformations resemble each other, they are most consistent in their occult and disturbing transcendence and that within them is at least the possibility of a more positive future. Even in PALACE, the process of conjuring SWIM involves leaving a tranquil orchard for ominous, more challenging dreamscapes. The freeing transition is still, in its way, scary, and the tower that SWIM has to ascend guarantees a long journey ahead of her.
If some transformations first appear negative, this is because the period that follows the departure from the familiar is always disorienting and mystical brushes with the borders of the known are as easily nightmarish as beautiful. It is from this sense of dark liminality that owch’s videogames derive their power.
WD (he/him) is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. You can read more of his writing on his personal site, Medium, and Tumblr, and watch his videos on Youtube. You can follow him on Twitter @MackerelPhones, and support him on Ko-Fi.
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