KING OF XANADU, by MACHINES UNDERNEATH
(Another review with unmarked spoilers here, due to the brevity of the piece and the centrality of the way the plot develops to assessing the game).
Kubla Khan is a deceptive poem; for one thing, even though I should know better, I always need to catch myself to remember that the title isn’t Xanadu. But more importantly, the mythology Coleridge built up around it – that the idea came to him in a dream, and he had a flash all at once of hundreds of lines that he raced to scrawl down, until that famous person from Porlock knocked on his door, deranging his train of thought and dooming the poem to be a fragment forevermore – is self-evidently bollocks. I don’t have any special insight here, or done any deep examination of Coleridge scholarship, but come on, just read the poem: we get like a dozen lines on Xanadu and Kubla Khan, as advertised, then an overlong digression about a fountain, then a little more about Kubla, before a swerve to first-person section where suddenly we’re talking about an “Abyssinian maid” (Abyssinia being Ethiopia, quite far from China as a polymath like Coleridge would well know), and our narrator starts talking about how if he could conjure up the image of Xanadu in a song, everybody would think he was divinely inspired, if not mad. So yeah: there’s padding, a false swerve, and then a meta turn – this isn’t interrupted genius, it’s a guy desperately trying to spin out those first awesome ten or twelve lines and not quite succeeding.
So it’s appropriate that KING OF XANADU is likewise a deceptive little thing. The title is at least a bit more on point here: you do play the eponymous monarch of the eponymous utopia (though here an empire rather than a city-palace), making judicious choices of how to order your royal gardens, arrange the imperial armies, and perform your religious responsibilities so as to best please your refined sensibilities. The language too is worthy of its inspiration – it’s very easy for attempts at this poetic kind of prose to wind up as claggy high-fantasy treacle, but the writing remains fleet as it picks out one lovely detail after another to highlight:
The people perform the usual celebrations. Red cloth is hung from balconies. Young children paint bouys the colours of daydreams and set them out to sea. Elders with lit candles parade through the capital, singing the old songs, winding through the streets like ancient snakes. And, lastly, arithmaticians take out tablets and chalk, ready to count and divy the grain of the harvest.
The author’s not afraid to take big swings for pretty much every at-bat – here’s another early bit:
The fields surge with life. Rivers twirl through the tumbling hills like veins in a grand muscle, unwinding into your harbours, which throng with trading fleets and grow about them the holy lichen of your vast, marble cities.
“Holy lichen” is perhaps a bit too much of a reach for my taste, but the missteps are rare, and better by far to reach for something surprising than let caution keep things boring, in this kind of story.
But this is not a fantastic story about an enlightened, Orientalist despot. No, twist the first is that no matter how you try to play him, my man is an awful ruler, like “80% as bad as Donald Trump” awful. After being presented with a new elm grove for the palace grounds, I ventured the opinion that a water feature might improve things; His Eminence took this to mean the trees should be razed and replaced with an artificially-created salt-water (!) stream. Later on, when confronted with a famine, I attempted to heed the wise counsel of one of our scholars who suggested we “watch closely the simple animals of the world and preserve the ecological balance" before making any rash moves, and of course Kubla Mao issued edicts to kill all the wildlife that might be eating the crops.
Speaking of that famine, another feint is that the game takes as much inspiration from another poem in the Romantic canon, Shelley’s Ozymandias, as it does Kubla Khan. Despite how Xanadu is built up as a perfect, powerful state, it only takes a few years of failing crops – and the king’s increasingly unhinged ukases – to bring it to its knees. The exterior catastrophe mirrors the protagonist’s mental degradation; even as food riots are flaring up outside the palace, you wind up enacting purges, engaging in the kind of mad caprices that enliven the biographies of some of your more outré Roman emperors, and coming up with big ideas that would put the Simpsons’ Mr. Burns to shame ( “Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun” I scrawled down in my notes halfway through, and giggled) – look on my works ye mighty, indeed.
I don’t want to accuse the game of striking false notes, let me be clear – it’s very obvious that these subverted expectations are part of the design, and in fact each of these strands intersect cannily to deliver the desired effect. Having a protagonist who willfully misinterprets the player’s choices can be played for comedy once or twice, but quickly becomes frustrating, for example, but since the game telegraphs that doom is the only possible outcome, it’s possible to sit back and enjoy the ride. And if either the internal spiral of the king’s faculties or the external collapse of the state’s institutions were at all realistic, it’d risk the other half of the game feeling unrealistic; instead, they slide into extreme satire in tandem.
No, for all its deceptiveness, beyond the unfortunate accumulation of typos as the game wears on the only true bit of fakery I picked up on was the ending; after seeing everything come to ruin, you’re given a chance to tack a moral onto the proceedings, choosing to reflect either on the inevitability with which hubris is punished, or the fragility of social cohesion, or the importance of staying true to one’s dreams. But come on: there are no lessons to be learnt here (besides, maybe, “don’t put assholes in charge” – good advice to anyone who can vote in the US this November), and attempts to gesture at one feel unnecessary, like Coleridge grasping for his Abyssinian maid: just stick with Xanadu, no need to go any further.
