Tales of Nivea: GRIP, by Arlo Inthaphone
One of my worst habits as a reviewer is that I’ll occasionally play a game that I really enjoy but which has a couple of flaws or makes a few choices different than I would make, and write a review that harps on that stuff in excessive detail while throwing in a shrugging “yes, this is actually quite good” in a sentence or two at the end. Queenlash, for example, is a 10/10 game for me, one that over five years on I still regularly think about and recommend, and yet my review is a 2,500 word harangue. What was I thinking? I gotta stop doing this!
I’m not going to stop doing this.
I can at least make sure there’s a couple full paragraphs (plus excerpt!) of unvarnished praise rather than just a single begrudging line, though. GRIP is pretty good! It’s identifiably working in the Papers Please genre, putting you in the shoes of a case officer processing anomalously-powered kids in a well-imagined alchemypunk setting – sometimes they manifest with the wrong elemental-alignment, or they’re too strong, or the child (it’s always children) uses them to hurt someone else, at which point they’re brought in and it’s up to you to review the file, question them, and then decide on their fate. In between these set-pieces, you get slice-of-life vignettes like commuting to and from work, or seeing how your low-income neighborhood changes over the years you work the job, which is an effective structure. There’s a pleasingly worked-out interface for all of this, with graphical elements that look like folders and forms, and a sidebar with a working glossary and relevant stats. Best of all, the writing is assured, focused on concrete details and psychologically precise. Here’s your thought process at the beginning of the game, when you see the job listing that sets you on your new path:
You do not know what a Godborn registry is. You know what hiring is, and what paid weekly is. While standing there in the stair traffic with people pushing past you on both sides, those two things are doing most of the reading for you.
You copy the annex address onto the back of a ration slip, fold it into your coat, and go home to sleep on it, which is a thing people say when the decision is already made and they would like one more night of pretending it isn’t.
It’s all compelling, and consistent over a fairly long playtime (there are ten cases to work through). The interviews are taut high-points, and your relationship with your immediate superior – a bureaucrat who perhaps doesn’t have a heart, but is very good at describing the place where one should go – creates a strong through-line through these more episodic sequences. And having the key decisions reduced to stamping a particular column on a form makes for a strong diegetic match for the choice-based format, with graphic effects making those clicks have more weight than the quotidian choices you use to navigate the rest of the story.
[Exhales heavily] OK, just a couple more things to get out of the way before I can talk about the thing I’m excited to talk about. There are definitely some places where GRIP makes some missteps, so I’ll just note in passing that some of the lore is overcomplicated (the whole business about kids being emitters vs. sorcerers vs. anointers is confusing and kind of precious); the way the children talk in the interviews doesn’t ring true to my experience of little kids, and you can’t really tell the five year old from the seven year old from the ten year old; once those interviews end your choices are to order the execution of a child (lol no), send them off to join the military (again, these are children), or put them under a form of house arrest, which is usually what your boss recommends, so it’s a bit too easy to pick; the writing, clinical as it is, can start to feel a bit one-note by the time you get towards the end of the game; and speaking of the ending, mine seemed to come out of nowhere, as I was ordered executed for confusing reasons that didn’t match anything I remembered doing. But most of these critiques are no big deal, especially the last one (“is this a bug, or is this just how fascism works?” is a totally fine question for a game to raise).
No, the thing that’s most interesting about GRIP is how it understands bureaucracy. This is a game about being a cog in a machine, but part of the reason the wonkiness of the key choice doesn’t ultimately matter that much is that it’s got no illusions about agency: the bureaucracy is there to do a job, and you are there to do it. It’s more interested in exploring what that’s like than pretending that you can make major changes to society by stamping A instead of B on your forms. It’s careful to depict the various depersonalization techniques that are used – “you don’t answer subjects”, i.e. respond to the questions asked by the children you’re judging, is a constant refrain – but is also careful to allow you seemingly low-consequences options to either go along with them, or try to retain some humanity by bearing witness. The depiction of authoritarianism is nicely calibrated, too; there are no illusions about what’s being done to these kids, but in the early stages the state’s interventions are more tentative, more tied to legitimate-seeming concerns, before the force of its oppression – oppression you’re unquestionably actively complicit in, no matter what you do on the side – grows darker and darker. And there’s a late-game moment of clarity that I think is quite sharp on the distinction between process creating legitimacy, and creating the spectacle of legitimacy:
You understand, holding the pen, that this is what the whole apparatus has been the entire time, under the interviews and the readings and the three columns. Not a machine for deciding fates. A machine for making fates look decided-correctly after the fact. The stamp was always this.
But, wait, why is the government concerned with creating the spectacle of legitimacy, actually? In the real world, it’s because people want to think of their society as just, want there to be rules applied to reach consistent results, even if they’re consistently in favor of in-groups and consistently biased against out-groups. But the lumpenproletariat of GRIP seem uniformly hostile to the government (a shadowy oligarchy only glimpsed via glossary entries) while entirely devoid of opportunities to express that hostility; there are no elections, no sense of how what’s clearly a lower-income but industrially important community is represented, no clarity about what is emboldening the regime to act more and more directly against the interests of residents.
This is a bureaucracy without politics, in other words, and as a result in its weaker moments GRIP can be a collection of dystopian tropes unmoored from material conditions. There’s a recurring subplot about a man who repeatedly abuses his partner and her children, but who never faces any consequences from the authorities, for example. There’s no explanation given for this inaction, nor is it even commented on. This is a familiar story in our world because of the politics of patriarchy, of course, but there’s no on-screen indication that that’s a factor in the world of GRIP; the wardens seem efficient at carrying out their orders without personal sympathies for abusers depicted as a factor in their performance, the highest-ranking official is a woman… but because police in a dystopian society need to be useless, they’re depicted as useless, though we never see their corruption. Similarly, fascist regimes have stakeholders and constituencies. The bureaucratic maneuvering depicted here would be a compelling way of dramatizing the ways authoritarians build consensus around smaller attacks on the weak, then escalating when sufficient popularity and familiarity allow it. But we don’t see the people cheering on each new step, just the victims, so the escalation feels like it’s there to make the plot more tense as it progresses, rather than proceeding from shifting social dynamics.
The obvious rejoinder here is that we’re meant to assume all that stuff is there, and fill in the blanks with our knowledge of how things work here. And that’s fair enough so far as it goes; just because a fictional world has fantastic elements doesn’t mean an author should have to take time to specify “by the way, gravity exists, and people breathe oxygen.” So sure, if you fill in the blanks it’s not too hard to figure out some justifications and explanations for the pieces that don’t currently add up. But the problem isn’t that their omission leads to plot holes – who cares about plot holes? – but that leaving these blanks weakens what should have been one of the strongest parts of the story: evil bureaucracies can be compelling to read about, but without depicting where they come from and how they metastasize, they can seem more like boogeymen than a real thing to fear.