Anodyne 2: Return to Dust is human-made magic
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I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to create something. Fundamentally, materially, the aftermath of the process I suppose. I engage in a lot of what philosopher Maurizo Lazzarato calls “immaterial labor,” basically turning ideas into something valuable, like this essay for example, and without a physical object to show for my efforts it can be easy to collapse the value of the time and energy.
The thing about immaterial labor is that it is often invisible, and this is only amplified when the creation is digital. It is easy to mask the creative process, to believe that somehow these 1s and 0s corralled themselves into a new being through some form of digital evolution. I think about this a lot with games, particularly, for how actively they attempt to hide the human labor that goes into creating them.
I played Gears 5 (The Coalition, 2019) recently and even though it does better than most at shouting out its development team with a film-esq opening credits sequence, that scene is only a fraction of the people actually involved. I couldn’t tell you who modeled Kait’s retina refractions or wrote the flavor text on the in-universe posters. It’s difficult to even tell where one asset ends and the other begins - the edges have been entirely sanded away leaving a game that is technically impressive but creatively vacuous and opaque.
This is the curse of AAA games, objects of massive financial, technical, and laborious girth that all but necessitate an appeal to mass market familiarity and an obfuscation of human labor. AAA games aren’t inherently less artistically significant than other games, but they are restrained by their scope and this leaks down to every aspect of development.
Eric Wayne describes something similarly in how wealthy, popular artists frequently employ other artists to fill the gaps in their ability (a painter hiring a sculpture, for instance). Frequently, the assistant is a ghost creator working to synthesize their client’s vision, but because that client is not intimately involved in the art’s creation, Wayne describes the result as striving for “a manufactured, mass-produced aesthetic.”
It has to be this way because the result needs to reflect the client, not the artist who actually created the work. This is not unlike games which become products of studio heads and publishers as much if not more so than the individual people who work on them.
“In the case of today’s artists who have assistants make their art in its entirety, the meaning that can manifest in the making of the art itself is zero. It has to be zero, otherwise they’d have to credit those who made the art with having provided some sort of meaningful contribution, and it is the fashion to not acknowledge their contribution whatsoever.”
It is a known fact that those involved in a given game’s development and those listed in its credits is frequently uncomprehensive. Rockstar admitted as much during a string of reports about its labor practices, and even smaller studios like Chucklefish have been accused of using unpaid labor and misleading young developers. Immaterial labor becomes invisible labor, and in an industry where a game’s credits are your resume that has implications far beyond immediate abuse.
This is all to talk about Anodyne 2: Return to Dust (Analgesic Productions, 2019), a game entirely involved and about its existence as the creation of two people. Analgesic Productions is made up of Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka, who together have made several games which in many ways seem to have been building to Anodyne 2.
Opening on the birth/creation of Nova, Anodyne 2 is a spiritual sequel to the original and an evolution on that game’s themes. Nova is a nano-cleaner, someone capable of shrinking down and going inside people to remove nano-dust which is causing them harm. They do this for The Center, an organization seeking to push back the dust storms surrounding their city and bring about the Anodyne, something they say will bring peace to the restless world.
Anodyne 2 is narratively rich, but its how the game is constructed which feels so remarkable. In the normal-sized New Theeland, Nova navigates in 3D across chunky, angular environments. When she shrinks, the world becomes 2D and pixelated. Shorthand would say Anodyne 2 is PS1/Sega Saturn inspired in 3D and SNES inspired in 2D, and that’s true to a point. But as they are not constrained technologically Analgesic is able to subvert that aesthetic as part of the work’s themes.
In one area, a beach gives way to an ocean that stretches as far as the player can see. They can’t swim so the horizon is forever in the distance, the illusion functionally sustained even if the sea actually ends fairly close. But if Nova follows the shoreline and hops along the edge of a hillside, suddenly they are beyond the façade of an endless sea and can see where water textures meet the hard geometry of the level’s edge. The world is collapsed into flat planes and non-Euclidian anomalies, the player both outside and within the game. And this is by design.
Where most games attempt to hide the patchwork by which they are constructed, Anodyne 2 invites the player to poke at the world and see how it’s put together. At the halfway mark a new collectible unlocks called metacoins. These are optional pickups that often draw the player to areas that shouldn’t be accessible: ridgelines that appear as invisible walls, atop characters who don’t deserve to be jumped on, floating at meaningless points in the air. There are hundreds of these coins, far more than is necessary to unlock everything in the metastore, but they draw our attention enough that it is impossible not to engage with the environment as a constructed place.
Anodyne 2 is not a meta-joke like DLC Quest (Going Loud Studios, 2013) but it also isn’t the perfectly masked sequence of processes that most games attempt to be. It exists somewhere in-between, a work meant to be appreciated artistically as a game but also metatextually as something created.
Once I collected enough meta-coins I was able to purchase “unspaces,” diegetic prototypes of environments that would eventually make it into the game. Inside these spaces are info points that talk about how the environment evolved, what the goals were for it, and often why it was eventually cut. In one unspace I learned that Analgesic had a lot of trouble figuring out how to have an elevator carry the player from one scene to another, so they just decided to cut the elevator and have the screen fade to black. It’s a delightful moment where the realities of game development collide with thematic intent, and rather than overwork themselves trying to solve the problem Analgesic decided it was ok to let this one go.
It’s not unusual for games to adopt unconventional solutions for seemingly simple problems, but it is unusual for them to openly admit to it. Anodyne 2 is so refreshing because it is plainly honest that it is a video game that people made and those people are only that: people. It strikes me as a sort of digital brutalism, a work which shows the fingerprints of its creators, the materials of its construction. It’s an imperfect metaphor - likely an actual brutalist game would be a command line text adventure or something similarly stripped down - but I think the spirit is the same.
Anodyne 2 constantly seeks to remind us of its own artifice, not to dismantle the game but to remind players that real people did this, and that’s pretty incredible. It is rough, at times rushed, frequently astounding, and quietly profound without ever seeming to try. It is the type of game which highlights why art must be smaller - why AAA games are widely known to be unsustainable - and shows how much can be accomplished when and because we recognize those who made it possible.
There didn’t need to be a proper credits sequence in Anodyne 2, it’s only two people after all and their names are on the title screen. But Analgesic did one anyway, crediting every collaborator, patron, and tool used in the game. It is silly to see Google Docs in the credits, but it is also wonderful.
Games can often feel like some kind of sorcery, impossibly complex and created by people with inhuman ability. But they’re just people. Highly talented people, but still. Anodyne 2 is not sorcery, but it is a kind of magic, an ordinary magic that is all the more exceptional because of it.
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