Game Review: Crypt Underworld (made by LilithZone, Zoë Sparks & neotenomie)
If videos are tourism, this is Mecca.
Crypt Underworld is a sprawling, boisterous, noisy reappropriation and recontextualization of virtual space from earthly space, becoming what feels like the expected potential of polygons, colours and imagerys liberated from order. It's intentional and tangible in a way that never baffles, but still ceaselessly invokes awe throughout it's entire "runtime". There are streets and sensible locales in tandem with divine, ethereal spaces that feel too precise, too structured, to be meant to be observed. There's an almost holy eminence within the chaos of it's areas. There are the absolutely massive, the boldly garish, the impossibly complex and realized. Calling it a gallery undermines it's vitriol towards curation and accessibility. It demands and rewards you for shattering it's boundaries with further development and sprawl, it gives you tools to damn yourself with through overloaded framerates and easily destructable interactibles. It is too easy to break Crypt Underworld because breaking Crypt Underworld leads you to it's biggest surprises. Violence is an option, interaction is an option, optimization is an option, boundaries are an option, mechanics are an option. We are here to hang out and see some cool shit from someone intent on making some cool shit, and I won't be told by anyone that anything has more class than that. Soul is exuded through mere aesthetic, passion exuded from want to create and experience the unexperiencable, love exuded through candy locales and dreams constructed through it's distinctness and materiality.
Crypt Underworld is both a disruptive and meditative experience. It defeats thought through incomprehensible spectacle, through that which feels unexaminable beyond pattern and adjacency to the world we know. At the same time, it's mellow. There is little to be frustrated at unless you opt into valuing mechanics or optimizing your time spent. In some ludonarrative sense, it punishes you for treating it like a game, punishes you for trying to find and collect everything. If you aren't here for the space, the charm, the aesthetic experience, you aren't welcome here. As I mentioned, the game breaks when you turn all your abilities on, both aiding you in leaving the map boundaries, but also breaks when you try to outsmart it. The observer is entitled to experience the space, but they ought to respect it. That's just cool as fuck, intentional or not. Regardless of this respect, the game let's you piss on it, blow it up and kill everyone, always rewarding you for doing so. It's DNA is anarchical, the kind of shit where 'the only rule is there are no rules'. As one character memorably says: "Our relationship is based on a mutual love of snacks and murder". Vibe-wise, it's an awesome sentence, while also speaking to a philosophy idealizing the option to be lazy and the reclamation of taboo. "I just want to live!" screamed Faye Wong in Chungking Express, for we aren't alive without every avenue uninhibited, regardless of if we'll go down them. It's ultra-violent not by the masculine standard of big-dick gunnery, but through a want to live freely, fucking around and making beautiful things. You piss on religious idols, piss on mall displays and piss on monarchs until they explode to chunks of meat all so you can just stand around the carcasses of 'their' opulent, spiritual castles smoking a bunt with your homies and eating snacks.
I spent my first hour inside the apartment building, finding various places and methods to accumulate keys for all the locked doors. I simply didn't know there was more, underestimated it as a low-budget niche passion project with enough wonder in one area to drive a whole experience. I tried collecting everything inside the building so I could witness the worlds clearly signposted behind their doors. I assumed this was the whole game, and each door would have a smidgeon of progression, a la Crypt Worlds. I opened all the doors, found out how the game worked and already felt like I had broken it. I was disappointed that most of the doors just led to a cool little room with a guy in it. I was expecting the scope, charm and linearity of Crypt Worlds, some semblance of a narrative to tie myself to that lied beyond those doors. A little defeated, I tried pissing on some standout furniture before asking myself "I wonder if I can leave the building?" 99% of the "content", the spaces, the coolest areas and boldest ideas were outside of that door, and I very well could have closed the game unaware of what Crypt Underworld is. Nothing signposts the possibility, nothing makes you leave your house, no invisible force guides you to see it all. Even now, though I have reached an "ending", it is impossible to know if I have seen it all because, as is the space of reality, there is a lack of linearity, only a will that can be compelled, perhaps towards consumerism, perhaps towards adventure, perhaps towards deviance. It's fractal in this sense. It takes that notion of "sprawl" I noted of LilithZone's Map trilogy and takes it to an extreme through maximalism and expanded scope. Where most games have borders, an intro and credits, a map or a level count, you can keep zooming in and the complexity only sprawls further. I would fly into skyboxes and discover temples, I'd fall in the void and land somewhere different each time, I would run to the edge of the geometry and still find life and intent. The Underworld feels utterly infinite. There is no singular identity to a space besides the will you impose on it and the objects you frame it with. Space is, by my definition, a formless, contextless existence that we fill in with our own aesthetic reaction and fixation on intent. Electric spaces, such as those of Crypt Underworld, are able to be the purest distillations of the will uninhibited by the cost of objects, the notion of property, practicality and the laws of physics. Crypt Underworld can be read as the unravelling of a mind into geometry, or it can be read as an indication of the utter absurdity that lies in trying to claim and format experiencable space. There's a simmering anger inherent in it's representation and rewarded destruction of our idols, yet there is a love of aura, imagery and soul, a love of those who come in with open hearts ready perhaps to listen, perhaps to play around, but definitely to see.
I would also hate to call this a "weird" or "quirky" game, as such terms tend only to other outsider art as distinctly separate from a canon status. It's not an acid trip made for the sake of reactionary video essayists who want claim over having discovered it (though that is what will inevitably happen in the next couple years if it hasn't already). It's 'for the fans', for the people by the people, for those who adore games as space or want to hang out and be safe in their virtual worlds. It's for those who want to enliven the experience of perception within their stint as a living being. Art is not accumulating culture, it's not a drink to suck down and piss out, it's a cool thing, hopefully a thing that makes you feel beautiful feels and think beautiful thoughts, but not necessarily. It's the seasoning of a day, a sprinkling on top that can overpower and determine the flavour of a mind. Nonetheless, it's so easy to call the mind the seasoning, to bemoan this as a pointless, chaotic drug trip, but like... fuck you? One does not carelessly jam-pack all of this into a free game maybe a couple thousand have played. One does not carelessly invoke imagery, carelessly create, carelessly reject traditionalism because "oops, my budget is tiny and I can't afford tact and structure so I'm just gonna make something pointless that'll get people talking"...
Fuck that strawman I just created, I hate that evil bastard! Grah, I hate the phantom of "gamer" I have in my head! I just want to eat snacks and murder, and whatever Divine said in that Pink Flamingoes rant! I just want to use my time to spelunk these flavourful fractals without any notions of structure or the necessary components of gaminess! I hate being trapped by my own fixations on completion and I want my art to do whatever the hell it wants because it feels like it, because in doing so, it only comes closer and closer to my divine idealization for what art can be and how it can move me! The most despairing art, the most unbridled, is the only place we can expect to see ourselves in the reflection. I don't care if Crypt Underworld is "perfect", if any game is "perfect" or "good" or "bad" or "flawed" because those terms are utterly devoid of meaning outside of a context we create! Words are space! We define our intent, regardless of the fact it's read by others! I write for myself, for my own entertainment, to force myself into expression and conversation into something I can will myself to be passionate about. I feel like a shithead when I write a review critiquing or evaluating something mechanically because that's not what I care about or why I write. I don't really care, my opinions and words hold no weight rather than reinforcing some side in a greater debate about assessing properties. I write to lay out my mental space, to unmat my neurons on a canvas so I can make sense of them. I write to be in conversation or to be the conversation in something I hold sincere respect and love for. I cannot evaluate the flaws of Crypt Underworld because they are not compatible with my takeaways. It is not my place to claim anything in it as unintentional with how it subverts everything. It is a thing in a microcosm of life, which is itself a thing in a microcosm of all of existence. It acknowledges its status as such through it's ending, through it's acknowledgement of it's smallness within culture and digital space.
[SPOILER START]
One of the dozens of jawdropping points is the games ending. You enter a lush garden with birds chirping and overgrown walls. You wander the space as you typically do but experience a familiarity, a lifeless nostalgic husk.You can find the world of the first game within a random mushroom in the skybox of one of the game's side areas. An entire experience and digital life reduced to nothing, now dead and trumped by this new understanding of scope. One experience is made utterly irrelevant by our own expanding array of experiences until the smallness loses meaning and significance
[SPOILER END].
Nevertheless, Crypt Worlds is, Crypt Underworld is. Their boldness to be in spite of the social pressure to be otherwise is inspiring. Their boldness to go further and bar nothing, to speak only for itself and thus become a spectacle through that rawness is purely inspiring. It's the canvas on which a mind has been laid out, a bleeding heart aflame with passion. It's only as "abstract" as the mind is, as "weird" as it's vision is different, as "perfect" as it is what it was able to be and do what it wanted. I'm sure the barriers of finance and time and some residual notions of what ought to be present slightly interfered, but I will experience it no other way, know no other LilithZone than the one I saw, different from the one you saw. Infinite is it in interpretation, infinite is it in it's gall and infinite is it in it's space. A subjectively divine traversal.
Would visit again!