Hammerfight
developed by Konstantin Koshutin (Vologda, Russia)
first published September 19, 2009 (in English: October 28, 2009) by KranX Productions, for Windows, $9.99
[website]
[trailer]
~120 MB

Played to the end of the story in 5 hours, then the other game modes for 1.5 hours, then declared I was done, 1/14/15–1/21/15.

A complete 2.5-hour “Let’s Play” video (i.e. with player commentary) in 5 parts.

(There is unfortunately no uncommented playthrough video of this game on YouTube. I deemed the woman linked above to be the most earnest and thus least distracting of the four available, though you can decide for yourself. She’s also the only one of them who takes the time to look at all the text and dialogue. She calls herself “AsperGamer” — take that as you will.)

(Hm, seems that she lost about half an hour of video in the middle, so I guess it’s not complete after all. But it’s still my pick.)

The fourth of the six games in “Humble Indie Bundle 3” at the time of purchase on August 3, 2011.

My initial dive into this game gave the impression of having been thrust into the mind of an unbalanced person. The insanity level felt high.

Okay, okay, it’s really just a very idiosyncratic private vision. Its bizarritude is built up in layers, none of which is itself absurd. But the combination is pretty damn weird.

The core of the game is the control scheme, wherein you swing a virtual flail with your real mouse. Centrifugal Thwack: The Game. In an industry constantly in search of the most satisfying possible thwack, that’s a pretty significant and inspired idea. (Here are some comments thereon from one of the organizers of the Humble Bundle, who may well have personally picked it for inclusion.)

Since the thwack is the game, here’s my review of the thwack: I occasionally found it somewhat satisfying, but it always paled in comparison to the much greater satisfaction of a real thwack, and the game kept that comparison alive in my mind the whole time. It was difficult to distinguish frustration that my foes were defeating me from frustration that the game wasn’t responding just the way I’d want, in that deep part of my brain that feels physics. The game’s selling point is that it offers compelling physical interaction with your input device — much more so than any of those “haptic feedback” games that buzz your controller — but your input device is just a mouse and this isn’t really what mice were meant to do. No matter how well you calibrate the sensitivity, you’re up against the fact that your hand, twirling a flail, wants to be dancing in sync with the centrifugal tug, but of course there is no such tug to respond to. Your hand feels like it’s floating free when it’s supposed to be laboring against a powerful weight.

“Feeling the heft” of things in a game is a strange illusion that is a very important part of the player experience. Especially in fighting games. I’ve never been much for fighting games and now I’m wondering if it’s because I have a harder time than most in experiencing the illusion of real physicality. A few years back when I played that Batman game because the reviews were so overwhelmingly good, it seemed clear to me that the heart of its appeal was in the thick plasticine oomph of its characters, who punch and are punched with a meaty fullness. I could recognize what the developers had achieved there. And yet, as always, my “sense of bulk” still found ways to be dissatisfied. It seems like the more it’s stimulated, the more it demands.

I think the “sense of bulk” really is a distinct perceptual sense. When I have a high fever or am in some other semiconscious state, it very often gets distorted independently of other spatial senses: my pinky or my eyeball will feel enormously bulky, or my leg will feel spindly thin. These impressions have nothing to do with shape or position, only with bulk. This is the same sense that is invoked by much of the art of sculpture. And other arts. Paintings like this feel very specifically aware of the sense of bulk as a perceptual mode unto itself.

I also feel like the sense of bulk is the actual source of the sexual responses that are customarily considered to be visual, and I think Picasso agreed with me on this, as did Modigliani. Certainly all those cheesecake pin-up painters did: the image is first and foremost a means to the perception of substantiality in its own right. Perhaps this is what I always mean by “pornographic” when I use it to describe how things look: that the sense of bulk, rather than the visual sense, is being addressed. (Or the sense of surface texture, which is sort of the city cousin to the sense of bulk.)

For me, the sense of bulk is more primal and irrational than other aspects of my spatial awareness (in the way that the sense of smell is more primal and irrational than the sense of sight), and thus yields more emotional rewards if it can be stimulated. Many 3D games want above all to stimulate the player’s impression of substantial matter, and offer as many cues as they can, visual, interactive, auditory, etc. If the player can accept those invitations and let his/her sense of bulk turn on, a whole world of deeper satisfactions opens up.

(I know, it kind of sounds like I’m saying that my personal resistance to the “pornographic” quality of something like the Batman game — or of any bulk-on-bulk fighting game — could be seen as a symptom of repression. For the present let’s say that’s too far off topic even for me.)

All this talk about “bulk” might seem sort of inappropriate for Hammerfight, because this is a purely 2-dimensional game. But I think more or less the same sense is in play; it’s just even harder for me to access completely.

The question of what stuff it’s made of, so basic to the functioning of video games (as it is to animation), is just as valid here as in a 3D game. Where Batman was made of wet plasticine, Hammerfight is made out of some kind of crumbly stuff that is simultaneously dry and squirmy, brittle and flexible. It is not quite welcoming. Though it can be impressive. The designer seems to have a thing for tininess — all the text in the game is miniscule, as are the human figures in the gameworld — that feels like a deep unconscious proclivity, dug up from as weird a level of consciousness as my bulky pinky.

As I was saying, the control scheme is the core of the game, and then from there, layer after layer of very weird choices have been onioned on. There is so much crap popping up on the screen at all times, some of it informational, some of it atmospheric, some of it inexplicable, much of which can easily obscure your view of your own character. Then there’s the crazy story and the world it takes place in. Then there’s the polished, aggressively-overdesigned style of the interface. Then there are the weird little insets of pre-rendered character faces. Choice after choice after choice feels boldly eccentric, and not all in the same direction. This is the only one-man indie game I’ve ever played that has the confused mishmash feel of a half-baked studio production, where the doofy little faces would be one guy’s pet project while the distracting smoke effects would be another’s. But here it’s just one guy’s multiple personalities clamoring for the spotlight, gradually accumulating and thickening the weirdness over the months and years of development.

On the other hand, maybe some of that visual clutter is just another one of those devices I personally can’t feel at the deep-down level where it’s supposed to work. In traditional 2D fighting games of the Street Fighter 2 mold, it seems like a big part of the way “heft” was conveyed was by splashes of overstimulation at the moments of impact — bolts of energy and shock waves and flicker effects radiating from every punch. That stuff never really did it for me, but I think the idea was to impart a sense of substantiality by a kind of metaphor, and apparently this works for enough people that it became standard. A variation on the same theme is the even older effect of having numbers and icons and coins and other doodads come exploding out of events in the action. Every moment of contact is its own piñata. You can just feel the bulk of a stick hitting the bulk of a piñata, when you see the point value come shooting out of an enemy, can’t you? Well, yes, I can sometimes, but it has to be done exactly right. My sensation in this game was more often that someone was tossing confetti in front of me while I was trying to play. Oddly enough, it was the very person whose game was being obscured.

A one-man game is an amazing thing. I feel like I’m supposed to be just impressed, not that astounded by the achievement, but I am that astounded. It’s inspiring (or intimidating, depending on your temperament) that all this is the work of one man. A game is a cathedral in itself, to a religion of the developer’s own invention. To enter it as a stranger is, as they say, going down a rabbit hole. And there are so many rabbit holes! I mean, Hammerfight isn’t even all that famous a game. Look at all these zillions of even more unknown cathedrals that keep coming out of people’s heads! They don’t stop!

When I was growing up, I understood the fullest extent of solo creative capacity to be that one man could, for example, build a whole house. Or paint a picture with many figures in it. Or write a whole novel with intersecting stories. Somehow making a whole computer game feels beyond that. The guy made the picture of the thing, and the sound of the thing, and what it does, and how it does it, for every thing? In this whole world that I spent 7 hours in and could easily have spent more? I remember the achievement of Tolkien, world-creator, language-inventor, being held up as a very special scale of wild ambition. In the world of video games it’s every man his own Tolkien, and we just shrug at it.

The craziness of the storyline — a certain amount of steampunk boilerplate is of course obligatory to make sense of the helicopters-with-flails premise, but then the game goes way, way beyond that — shares its character with all Tolkien-esque undertakings, which are not essentially shareable. Certain types of kids have always filled notebooks with stories and comics and sketches of “their characters.” The true meanings of those worlds cannot be conveyed. As with the girls in Heavenly Creatures, there can be something a little spooky about those private realities. But that’s just one angle on it; it doesn’t have to be scary. I associate that kind of fear-of-someone-else’s-fantasy with my fear of travel to exotic places, a fear I can probably stand to get over, at least somewhat.

By spending all this time in the world of Hammerfight, have I gotten closer to or further from feeling this stuff the way Konstantin Koshutin feels it? He really seemed to feel that people would care about the fall of the house of Gaiar and the house of Melka and the house of Kadish, when in fact most people online, like me, seem to have found all that stuff nearly incomprehensible.

Note that the title is actually The History of Hammerfight, which, besides being awesome, shows just how much the developer believed in his wackily earnest middle-school-notebook storyline, which it seems most players just clicked through as fast as possible. Somewhere behind all that overwrought dialogue, I feel certain, was real feeling. Maybe I got a sense of that feeling between the lines, but I can’t be sure. Probably those were just my own feelings.

This is one of those games where you name your character and then other characters call you by that name. I understand the idea — a very old idea — but is there anyone who doesn’t think this is silly? I ask sincerely. It’s supposed to bring you into the fantasy, but it does the opposite: hearing “your name” actually takes you out of the game because you know all too well how the program came by that one token bit of personalized information, and how little else about you it knows. Plus in almost every case, people use it as an opportunity to goof around. I named my character “Bradworst.” While I was competing in the Jarghanian Tournament at the port of Melka (or something), the eager onlookers shouted: “The one who overcame his foe is… The one whose name is Bradworst!” And: “Brought down his foe… A man famous as Bradworst!” I was amused, but at it rather than with it, I think. Why would a game set itself up that way?

When you’re done with the story, there are various other things left to do: go on monster hunts, play hammerball, fight tribal wars, or, above all, prove your gladiatorial mettle in the arena, over and over, earning new crap as you go. There are plenty of weapons and gems and banners and titles and whatnot to aspire to; hours upon hours of such stuff, I guess. Declaring that I was done goes against my desire to “do it all.”

But then I reflected. My old feeling for games, as a kid, was that they were as people: one grows bored or irritated with them, or simply doesn’t see them for a while, but one cannot exhaust them. Nowadays my feeling for games is more of a desire to complete. But one cannot complete one’s experience of a person. “Reaching an end” is another matter. For that matter, one cannot complete a movie, only watch it. We say “I finished the book” when we really mean “I finished what I set out to do with the book.” This has a customary definition but not a necessary one.

I like games better as people than as assignments. They retain so much more of their genuine depth and value that way. When I was a kid, even the simplest Commodore 64 game felt inexhaustible; to suggest that it could be “completed” would be a category error. This attitude lightens my mind. I can easily declare myself done with Hammerfight because obviously I’m not done, just at an end. For all I know, some day I’ll have another visit with Hammerfight, chez Hammerfight. Or not! Auf wiedersehen.

Is it really by one guy? He really did all the music, all the graphics? I don’t know. The only credits in the game are a splash screen at the very start that acknowledges resources, but not people.

Here’s what I can tell you: Vologda, Vologda Oblast, Russian Federation is very far away and very different from where I am. It’s a wonder this game didn’t seem more foreign. Let’s consider this experience to have been a few hours of stimulating cultural exchange.