Sundays are for sitting by a window in your pants eating cold pasta, as a game of football meanders through its grassy paces on a screen not too far away. Light curtains drawn in an attempt to eliminate any chance for people in the street below to catch a glimpse of your boxers, time slows to a crawl. You’re never not moving, but at least in this moment you’re being afforded that chance to move slowly. Life never stops, but it does at least occasionally allow the odd evening in cruise control. You’re snapped out of your trance by a flurry of activity on the screen. A decision has been made. One team flap around voicing their unhappiness. The referee ushers them away so the ball can be placed and the spot kick taken. The taker steps up. On the back of his shirt, instead of a name, you see a question.
“How do you mocap a cube?” Weird. Why would a footballer’s shirt be wondering that? Ah, the player must be Kotaku’s Rebekah Valentine. As she sizes up to belt the ball, you notice she’s aiming for a goal tended by Faye from God of War Laufey, a game that won’t be coming to PC anytime soon.
The general consensus among all the people I spoke to is that the developers are, in fact, capturing footage to animate the cube. That’s because even though it’s a faceless object, the cube still needs to express emotions through movement. Because it’s gelatinous, it can likely twist its respective halves in ways that might look similar to a human hanging its head, looking around, wiggling with excitement, and so forth.
Faye dives to poke the ball wide of the post. Corner kick. Another player steps up to whip a cross in. “Learning the Land,” his shirt reads. The commentators introduce him as Unwinnable’s Justin Reeve and gently laugh at the fact he’s wearing a stetson. He surveys the landscape of the pitch, how the lines converge to form the box, and the manicured flatness of the turf. For some reason it reminds him of riding the trails of the original Red Dead Redemption’s rolling western expanse.
I’d ask you to remember that first ride from Armadillo. Supposing of course that you’ve played the game, you’ll know exactly how the town itself is quite sparse and sun bleached, filled with wooden buildings arranged loosely around a central stretch of densely packed ground. There’s nothing dominating the skyline. The structures feel temporary, as if they could be dismantled and carried away at a moment’s notice.
New Austin opens immediately in front of you, offering no gradual exit, escape or buffer. The ground shifts from brown dirt to a looser, dustier surface full of scattered shrubs and stubborn cactus. The light is harsh during the daytime, flattening the relatively rich detail and reducing the landscape to little more than tone and silhouette.
The ball flies towards the mass of craning heads and studded boots. A player rises to meet it on its trajectory. “Thanks for the Soup is the most fun I’ve had in a horror game in a long time, and that’s owing to the broccoli,” their shirt reads. God, that’s a lot of text to fit in such a space, you think. PC Gamer’s Elie Gould doesn’t seem bothered as their bonce thumps the orb towards the goal and they shout the following:
Yes, the town in which I find myself delivering soup is more than slightly unnerving. The occupants are kind of weird, the neighbourhood gets super dark, flashes of light and thick white fog descends on the town at random, and occasionally you experience a heavenly vision. But a job’s a job, and I find cycling around on my bike surprisingly peaceful. All I have to do is think of my broccoli, oh, and eat a mushroom or two – did I mention there’s a wide variety of mushrooms found across town?
As the orb loops towards the goal, it’s a thing of a thousand possibilities. Time, realising this, politely slows to allow the bubbling cacopony of what ifs their day in the sun. It might be more sensible to sit back and watch, but there’s some fun to be had in speculating as long as you make clear you’re not taking it – or yourself – too seriously while engaging in it. From a setup inside the ball itself, IGN’s Jim Trinca engages in a similar genre of tongue-in-cheek detective work about the cover art of some obscure thing called We To Play 6.
The chain around her neck says (gets out his phone for pronunciation help) Siempre, which is Spanish for always. This probably doesn’t tell us anything except that this person likes to adorn herself with the Latino equivalent of live, laugh, love, but we’re committed to giving you the facts.
Jim’s still yacking about alligators as the ball hits the back of the net. The crowd – which you now realise to be made up entirely of New Yorkers – go bananas. “There’s No Place Like New York City”, Defector’s Israel Daramola declares as he stands among the celebrating masses. For some reason, these masses are very passionate about 17th century Dutch trousers.
Walking through this parade of debauchery and wild excitement, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of love for New York City. I’ve wanted to live in New York since I was 7 years old. It was the city to be in if you were an artist. My favorite rappers, filmmakers, fashion designers, writers, and painters were there, the coolest skateboarders were there, the center of media was there. It seemed like the coolest place in the world.
People hate when you go on and on about what New York City means, and I can empathize. It is indeed a city full of people who think they are at the center of the universe just because they rent a tiny, expensive apartment here. But the thing is, it’s basically true. There are few places in the world where every type of person, ethnicity, religion, non-religion, derangement, age, and language all gather together, all living on top of one another. It makes the culture, the feel of the place, genuinely unique.
You take some joy in seeing the trouser enthusiasts so happy, given the plentiful helpings of misery and failure they’ve endured over the decades.
Everything’s fine until you realise the game’s bald referee has walked out of the screen and is now standing right next to you. “RED CARD,” Adrian Edmondson screams as he pushes you, a surprised trouserless husk, out of the window.