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Return To Deliverance
🕑 Added 2019-08-01 09:28:00 +0000 UTCHere's the second part of my trek through Kingdom Come: Deliverance, my new favorite baby history toy. Its like some kind of educational DOS game you'd play in elementary school in 1995, only it's 2019 and it's a first person Skyrim sort of thing. The key difference being that i had more fun playing this game for a combined total of 4 hours than i've had playing Nordy Shouty for the last 7 years.
You can do anything in this game, as long as it's within the bounds of historical realism. You can ride horses, sword fight, punch fight, drink beer, sleep, go for a walk, wear different hats and shirts, take a bath in a big barrel outside of a whorehouse on a dirt road surrounded by horse shit, everything you've ever imagined doing while also being able to actually do yourself in real life!
Well, except for that last thing, which i'm sure is illegal 10 different ways in our prudish, fascist modern society. But therein lies the true magic and wonder of this game. Oh sure there might not be dragons and magic spells like in other games, but the real genius isn't what the game has, but what it doesn't.
For example, in the centuries old historical setting of Kingdom Come, you DON'T have to be trapped in the increasingly dark and hopeless mental prison of being an internet personality, because there's no internet! You don't have to spend every waking moment of your life hunched over a computer screen being inundated with the constant flood of human retardation that makes it impossible to see any good in the species at all, while feeling utterly detached from the image of yourself gossiped into being by a voyeuristic culture of unspeakable degeneracy and malice.
You don't have to shudder with fear every time you hear your own name, or vomit in your mouth from anxiety every time anyone even vaguely associated with you is trending for doing or saying something incredibly unprofessional and/or stupid. You don't have to get molested by airport security and travel hundreds of miles by way of scary-metal-explosion-bird just to get somewhere you don't really want to be and only get through the weekend by drinking enough to pretend you're either not there or not yourself.
No attention or notoriety, no technology, no car payments, credit scores, or social media. No Gordian Knot of moral, professional, societal, and personal dilemmas without a sword to cut through them, or inescapable web of infinitely complex obligations, obstacles, and obtuse demands from a world you never made.
No to all of that modern malignancy. Just the simple life of Henry, the son of a blacksmith. Compared to the hell this planet has become, the simple Earth presented here seems as fantastical and uplifting a setting as any swords-and-sorcery high-fantasy epic.
Meanwhile in the real world of my actual life, I have to catch a plane in 2 hours to.... you know where.... which means I'm writing this post while also packing, panicking, showering, hating the world, trying to find my stupid Rarity hat, regretting every career decision i've ever made, wishing i was dead, and rehearsing about 50 million different "i quit all of this forever thanks bye" posts in my head. Christ almighty, somebody delivery me from this fucking life.
Take me back, Lord. Take me back to a simpler, smellier time. Let me take my barrel-baths outside the whorehouse and step in horse shit on my way back in. Let draining the pus from a gangrenous limb be the greatest of my trials and diseased rats my biggest threat. Let me wander through fields of flowers and fade into the beautiful anonymity of a society where you're still allowed to say racist jokes and beat people up.
Deliver me, O' lord. To Kingdom Come, Deliver me.
Comments
Chip Wiseman
I'm consistently impressed by the attention to detail in the NPCs' faces - they all LOOK English. I can't put my finger on why or how, but they look like people I'd see walking down the street in Bristol, distinctly different from the Central-Europeans that the Prague-based developers would be familiar with in real life. It's easy to think all white people look the same, but whoever modelled these characters obviously knows that's not the case and cares about the minute differences.
