The polite and objective thing to say about Embark Studios’ new extraction shooter—a genre of online game I was only vaguely familiar with before I got a code for the title and decided to give it a try—is that it’s “not for me.” It’s a useful phrase, one that would allow me to acknowledge that there’s care and craft in the game’s vision of a ruined world patrolled endlessly by hostile robots and ambiguously dangerous fellow humans, and some rigor to a shooting engine that makes every missed shot from your rickety, poorly maintained guns feel like a death sentence. “Not for me” acknowledges that there are people for whom the game’s social component—where you use proximity chat and emotes to communicate with fellow player-controlled “raiders,” scavenging the same stretch of apocalypse as you, in the hopes of not getting shot by them—is thrilling and engaging. “Not for me” covers a lot of ground.
The issue is that “not for me” also feels wholly inadequate when it comes to covering the depth of the antipathy ARC Raiders provoked in me. I was actively, jitteringly miserable while playing this game, to the point that I had to warn my wife I was probably going to be snippy around the house for at least an hour after my latest abortive efforts to find the fun in it. “It’s not for me” doesn’t really convey my philosophical and instinctual dislike of the well-crafted thing Embark has made here; it would be far more honest to state that I am actively opposed to it.
Let’s start with the early irritations, before getting to the big stuff: ARC Raiders is very much of a recent school of game design that feels almost perversely contrary to teaching players how to play it. A desultory tutorial runs you through some very basic controls and concepts, but is also weirdly deceptive: When I got shot by AI-controlled raider enemies during a scripted portion of the opening sequence, it (falsely) primed me to assume other humans I’d encounter in its world might also be computer-controlled. (I can imagine the eyerolls here from extraction shooter veterans, but the game itself does almost nothing to define what that term means; it was only by digging around online that I realized I was sharing gamespace with potentially hostile fellow players while trying to fend off the robot hordes.) The assumption, presumably, is that I should be trawling Reddit, or Discord, or, god help me, talking to other players, in order to understand strategies, basic systems, or the actual point of doing anything in these pretty, blasted landscapes. The idea that I might actually just want to read an in-game manual to learn how to play a video game seemed foreign to proceedings.
This “I dunno, you figure it out” mentality then slammed straight into the game’s inventory and crafting systems, which begin at “obtuse,” before blossoming out into a glorious web of trashcore incomprehensibility. A game literally about picking up garbage, ARC Raiders is weirdly disinclined to helping you figure out what to do with your various piles of refuse once you’ve brought them back to your rat horde; every crafting recipe seems to require about three more button presses to execute than would feel intuitive, and I often went into battle under-equipped, not because I didn’t have the resources to kit myself out properly, but because the sheer irritating complexity of loading up weapons, ammo, healing items, mods, and other useful gewgaws was simply too cumbersome to interface with. (It’s not for nothing that the part of the crafting system that involves coaxing a rooster into giving you building materials was by far the most intuitive part of the whole package.)
All of these would be irritations, not critical flaws, though, if not for the real hell of playing ARC Raiders: Other human beings. Admittedly, I had a few good sessions in the early going, grouped up with other random players, and making my way through the game’s starting zones. With my mic firmly shut off (and a few pings on the map to help navigate), I and my assigned allies efficiently scavenged ruined outposts, collected loot, and gunned down all the other human players we saw. Not all of these fights went our way, which is good and proper; the likelihood that you’re going to run into a team that’s simply better than you is part of the tension, and pleasure, of playing in an online space. Still, it usually went pretty well: Our quotas filled, I and my teammates legged it for the nearest elevator back down into one of humanity’s various boltholes, started the timer to open the gates home, and successfully decamped.
Where ARC Raiders made me miserable, though, was in those games where I opted to play solo. The solo experience in ARC Raiders is a truly odd duck: Whereas team matches almost always descend into firefights—courtesy of the comforting structure of “us vs. them”—moving through the wasteland alone, surrounded by fellow lone wolves, is far more ambiguous. The game gives players incentives to fight, mostly in the form of daily tasks for knocking down or looting a certain number of other human players, and the basic knowledge that pretty much everybody you see has the potential to be a loot piñata. But the reasons not to draw on other people are just as manifest, if less well-defined: Risk, ethics, social pressures, and more, all at play. Every time you see another player in the game, you have to run a series of evaluations to determine whether they’re an active threat, a secret threat, or, worst of all, someone who wants to be friends with you—and I didn’t spend my high school years eating lunch alone in a stairwell every single day to fuck with any of that.
I fully acknowledge that these systems, which have been celebrated in other corners, can generate genuine, human moments of shocking and poignant empathy. To which my only rejoinder can be: “Why the fuck would I want to have a genuine, human moment of shocking and poignant empathy with a stranger in an online video game?” I play online games for two reasons: To play with friends who I’ve already vetted, after years of rigorous testing, to not trigger my various neuroses and anxiety disorders too heavily, and to shoot at and be shot at by strangers. (Who tend to be a lot more interesting to fight than computer-controlled opponents.) The idea of having to run a layer of social deduction on top of all that, of having to both perceive and be perceived as a matter of course, makes my skin crawl. And, look: I know this makes me sound crazy, because playing ARC Raiders made me feel crazy, like I was playing a game on mental hardware that had been nerfed by God. I fully acknowledge that it’s fucked up that I’d much rather an online stranger shoot me in the head from a concealed position than talk to me. But that doesn’t change the way I reacted to these moments, to the fear that gripped me as I tried to reckon with a game that wants social fluidity to be as much a part of its players’ skillset as scavenging or shooting.
My final run through the game brought my own inadequacy to grapple with what Embark is building here into perfect focus: I’d scrabbled my way through an abandoned dam, full of nasty little robots that had burnt and grabbed me repeatedly, until I was a single hit away from death. I emerged into the sunlight, only to have another player suddenly appear before me. He looked at me, perceived me, saw my limping body and obvious weakness. I prepared for the killing blow, the proper ending to another trip through hell. Instead, over the proximity chat channel, I heard, “Whoa, do you need some help?”
I simply couldn’t. Scrabbling for the menu, fleeing the layers of intention I’d have to sift through to analyze that offer, I force-quit the game, then and there. (Sacrificing my entire inventory in the process, which felt absolutely worth it in the moment.) I can handle a lot of scary, anxiety-inducing things in video games. Bring on the zombies, the robots, the monsters; load me up on surprise screamers and cosmic horror. But a jump scare to my actual, human anxiety issues? That’s the very definition of a video game being “not for me.”
