Nina and I are Fighting Monsters
- Louie
- 6 days ago
- 9 min read
Paulie: Hey hotties, we’re back with more heat from resident rat writer Louie, this time a really lovely piece on growing up playing games with your friend, and the emotions it can create, or conceal. This piece was edited by Jimmy, I'm just here because since then he got lost in a dungeon area and died. He might be back, if he kept a map.
Remember you can follow Louie on a variety of platforms besides ours, attached here:
Without further ado, push START to begin.
I am a dungeon-trawler and my body is perfect: polygonal, planed, code-efficient. I follow no map. I obey only the forces that propel me breathlessly forward and compel me to hit, jump, parry, dodge. When I die — and I will die — I return to the last place I can remember. I have no memory of my death as I hurtle back towards it. I have died a thousand times in this way. There is no God in the dungeon but there is an afterlife and an afterlife and an afterlife.
2004
“Hannahhhh, you’re deaaaaad,” Nina sings, and the screen goes dark. She holds out her hand, I place the controller into it and she smirks, pushes back a lick of heavy hair. “Let me show you how it’s done.”
I sit back and watch her play.
2025
After the last round of layoffs the studio downsized to just one floor of our trendy Södermalm headquarters. People previously scattered across five floors are now piled into one and so although whole departments have been slashed to teams of two or three, the place feels busier than ever. I know for a fact we’ve frozen taking anyone else on, and yet it feels like a sea of new hires.
I am greyboxing a new arena — some vapid collab with some brand or other — when one of these strangers taps me on the shoulder, and I lower my headphones. She is small, with dark hair and lively eyes. She introduces herself as Jiwon, and she’s sorry to bother me. She points to the paper on the wall above my desk and asks me: “Is that the map from Kage no ōkoku?”
“How did you know?” I reply. I’d never met anyone who knew Kage before. The game hardly got any attention outside of Japan — partly because it was clearly riding on the coattails of Castlevania and Final Fantasy, but also because it was unwieldy in its design and confusingly pitched. A tale of princesses and knights done out in pastel pinks and purples but with a Souls-like difficulty curve and monster design to rival Silent Hill. And even then, the paper is creased from folding and refolding, smudged with the ghostly marks of things long-erased. The drawing itself is an obsessive warren of overlapping and interconnected squares pencilled out in lines of varying confidence. If I hadn’t drawn it myself I would assume it was for the bin, some loose doodles one of my juniors had sketched restlessly through one of our tedious Friday townhalls. Back when I had juniors.
