cre: Double Fine’s Rad is a game about disrespecting your elders to save the planet
The world has suffered an ecological collapse. The smug adults who thought they had all the answers, the master plan that would save everyone – they’ve gone silent now.
The solution never lies in the bureaucratic world of adults, but rather in the determination and lucidity of adolescents.
Beyond the pastel pink skies and wing mutations, there’s little wacky in the world of Double Fine’s Rad. Our own world, after all, is one where Elon Musk can present a renewable energy transition plan at the Paris climate summit and then donate money to a Republican party that is largely dismissive of climate change. The one where a 15-year-old girl’s environmental protest led to global school strikes that rocked the fossil fuel industry. Rad just drenches our current world situation in neon.
In its post-post-apocalyptic universe, a second society has already risen and declined since the end of the world. You walked through this twice devastated landscape as a teenager with a baseball bat, to right the wrongs of generations before you.
All the echoes of Steve from Stranger Things defending the Earth with a batter’s swing isn’t too far off the mark. For game director Lee Petty, the planet’s impending doom took him back to the nuclear panic of the ’80s, when artists and designers filled movie scripts, comic books and paper RPGs with gooey mutants and forgotten technologies.
These visions of future fringe civilizations were a way to deal with the peril facing the world, and Rad does the same – siphoning off the weirder, more satirical pop culture of the late ’80s. It’s less of a nostalgia project , however, only a warning against looking back in admiration.
“At the end of the day, the young people of Rad are not here to restore the societies of the past,” says Petty, “but to forge something new.”
In fact, Rad doesn’t care much about those who deify the people who came before them. Throughout the game, you are accompanied by the voice of a narrator, a wizard-like elder who provides commentary on your actions and shares information with you. But his knowledge of the past is comically flawed, and he sometimes uses 80s slang to conjure up a sense of old power that comes off as rather, well, silly.
Petty says Rad also introduces a second narrator, a young girl’s voice, unexplained until you’ve completed several parts – which should give you an idea of what to expect from the game’s structure. It’s a roguelike, designed to be replayed multiple times as you gradually piece together the secrets of its world. The enemies, loot, weather, stories, and communities you encounter change with each run, just like you.
While your bat offers multiple melee combos, it’s secondary to your Exo-Mutations, Random Growths, and Appendages that can fundamentally change how the game is played – ranged, crowd control, or indirect damage. Combat is fast-paced and rewards those who quickly adapt to their new skills, experimenting and improvising with limbs springing from their bodies.
Petty has a past form with unstable protagonists. As director of Double Fine’s Stacking, he created a world populated by Russian dolls and introduced us as the smallest of them. This little chimney sweep was able to solve puzzles by commandeering other characters in the world and using their special abilities like verbs in adventure games.
Then, in Headlander, Petty’s retro sci-fi adventure, your protagonist was housed entirely in a rocket-powered helmet. By shooting your enemies’ heads, you can take their robotic bodies and steer them until they’re too damaged to be of any use.
Rad’s Mutations are a continuation of this theme, but leave you at the mercy of random generation – instead of dictating the changes to your body, you acclimate to them. “I find the impermanence of the player character speaks to the kind of existential angst we all have,” says Petty. “What makes us who we are? »
There’s a secondary angst here for Double Fine fans stirred up by the studio’s recent acquisition of Microsoft. Since splitting up its teams in the aftermath of Brutal Legend, the studio has been celebrated for its funny, weird, and bold ideas – games that allowed characters like Petty to take creative control alongside Tim Schafer. Could Rad be the last of his little experimental projects?
“I like to think that what makes Rad a Double Fine game is its focus on personality, unexpected choices, and a strong aesthetic presence,” says Petty. “Microsoft has indicated [it wants] keep working on the kinds of games that inspire us creatively, and that’s definitely what I’m most interested in working on.
Yes, there is angst at the root of Rad – but channeled into a teenage neon energy that ultimately feels positive. “Thinking back to some of that ’80s media, I remembered that despite their dystopian worlds, there was often an underlying sense of hope,” Petty says. “That somehow things could be fixed.”
source: gameplaytrick.com -
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