Eight Last Signs in the Desert (Lichene (Laughingpineapple & McKid))
Played on: 18th + 19th September
How I played it: Via the IFComp ballot in Firefox
How long I spent: 55 minutes for 2 full playthroughs
There are many terrible opinions on the internet, but only a rare few enter the Canon of Bad Posts, so misguided and bewildering that they rattle around your brain forever, instead of that poetry or literature you should be reading. One such post is this tweet thread essaying a criticism of Disco Elysium, rolling its eyes at the idea of playing as a white man in a detective story and instead floating the possibility of it being about “a young witch trying to solve the disappearance of her neighbour’s cat in a small village in the Alps.” We can spend thousands of words unpicking the problems here, and we could dive into Disco Elysium and try to explain why the protagonist is a white male detective and how that might play into the game’s criticisms of power and fascism and capitalism, etc. etc… but fundamentally, it’s notable that the tweeter’s alternative suggestion doesn’t seem to go anywhere. It offers only a scenario, and gives no thought to what, exactly, the prose style of Disco Elysium is supposed to do with it. It’s practically meaningless.
When Eight Last Signs in the Desert’s random text generator spat out “Across the sky: actually this could be about a young witch in the Alps looking for her neighbour’s cat,” it was very much like being flashbanged. But it also neatly summarises the game’s message, and its fascination with the meaning of meaning.
To back up a bit, this is a choice-based game where we find seven monuments in a vast desert, each representing some unusual object – the commemorative t-shirt, the aardvark cucumber, etc. We perform rites on each, connecting them in pairs and reducing each to more sand in turn. These rites are described in abstract, poetic language which makes it quite hard to understand what’s going on, although we can cycle through text choices to influence the outcome. Most passages are also accompanied by a little square of white noise; mouse over it and it will give you a brief, usually randomised passage, often about how some imagery has been used in 100-or-so advertisements for dish soap this wish.
Those little barbs about marketing make it clear that Eight Last Signs is an allegory for consumerism, and how it distorts associations and meanings. (The subtitle of the game, “The consumerism of images,” is also a subtle hint. Like, literary analysis isn’t my forte, but I feel reasonably confident about this one.) Our protagonist explores each monument as an image, turns them around this way and that, and produces… what? Instinctively I want to say “garbage” – a little dangerous since I may have misread the authors’ intentions and I may be giving them either too much or too little credit, but in this case, I think they know what they’re doing. Each passage is a blizzard of free association and metaphor and personification, so densely packed that it becomes nearly impossible to pick out any individual thread. The monuments themselves prove unable to withstand this onslaught, and crumble throughout the game. It’s interesting to me that the exact disassembly of the monuments comes from this density. It’s not exactly that the monuments become meaningless; rather, they become so saturated with different meanings that it becomes impossible to derive one with clarity, and so the whole image buckles, as useless as if it meant nothing at all.
Where do these new meanings come from, and where do they go? Whenever a pair of monuments is reduced to sand, that white noise passage will be about a copywriter or publicist (or occasionally, a child) being struck by inspiration and writing their own connection between the two objects. In combination with the other random passages, although what we’re doing in the game is abstract, the suggestion is that we’re causing the dilution of images through advertising. (Mostly. I don’t think the children are involved in that.) Adverts associate brands with art and objects in an intrusive way. A favourite song becomes an advertising jingle; meerkats become the mascots of an insurance comparison site; even colours and colour combinations become “owned” by brands (e.g. purple being the exclusive colour of a chocolate manufacturer, or red and yellow becoming the signifier of fast food). In a brief interstitial, two woman find themselves unable to discuss whatever object you demolished first – it’s become sand to them, formless, something which could be anything and so is nothing instead. Eight Last Signs has obvious roots in Surrealism, shouted out in the credits and in the random text (which occasionally refers to paintings by Magritte and Dali), but the end result strikes me as more Dadaist, a deconstruction of meaning as a satire of the logic of capitalism. (Please don’t press me on this point; I’ve plumbed the depths of my art history knowledge in this paragraph.)
There is, at the core, a nostalgia for the original image here and there (for example, when the random text talks about video game genres wandering away from the original vision). This perhaps overlooks how an image or genre or object naturally evolves in meaning over time and how any image can pick up meanings on an individual level (I’m sure everyone has a song that they associate with a beautiful or traumatic moment in their life, quite outside of their, the artist’s or anyone’s control). Having said that, I think Eight Last Signs is less concerned with the natural accumulation of meaning, and more with the forcible association of images and the intentional overwriting of meaning in favour of one more marketable and cosier. This, I think, is what that “witch in the Alps” tweet is doing in the pool of text; the tweeter is, knowingly or not, arguing for taking the brilliant writing of Disco Elysium and removing all the meaning and anger and passion that drives the writing, thus creating a shell of the original.
Oh, the actual game underneath all the allegory is pretty damn good, by the way. From two playthroughs, it’s clear that Eight Last Signs has a lot of conditional logic under the hood; your choices, as meaningless as they may seem, are reflected in the order of events and the text that accompanies each connection. That must have taken an awful lot of planning and testing. The writing is beautiful, even when unparseable; there’s a rhythm to the language that compels you onwards and washes over you. The illustrations are gorgeous, arid and bleak, and the text styling is very tasteful and features some thoughtful accessibility options. If I’m taking potshots for the sake of criticism, I’ll say that the default text settings occasionally produce text which is slightly too long for the boxes, depending on what text choices the player cycles through. But it didn’t happen very often, and since boxes stretch to fit the text as necessary, it was possibly just my browser settings.
I used the word “garbage” earlier to describe the nonsense borne of desperate attempts to commercialise meaning, but another word that comes to mind is “slop”. We talk about AI slop and the word-association chains produced by LLMs and passed off as meaningful as if this is a recent development, but maybe we’ve been living in an age of slop for a lot longer than that. Before LLMs there were social media bot farms pumping fake news; before bots there was Photoshop; before Photoshop there was propaganda; all perversions of meaning destined to sell you something, whether a product or an idea. If we engage with Eight Last Signs’ rather bleak outlook, it’s all been sand for a long time now. I hold on to a bit more optimism and I think that art and clarity of meaning is still possible, but it takes a lot of energy to make sand become glass.
