Readers remember their favorite pointless places in video games

There’s an item I’ve grown fond of in World Of Warcraft called the Last Relic Of Argus. It’s a Draenei relic you can build through Archaeology that serves only one purpose: It will randomly teleport you to one of several places on the world map. Sometimes it’ll plop you in the middle of an old quest zone full of enemies, which is just kind of annoying, but what’s more fun is when it sends you to some out-of-the-way place you never would have thought to go otherwise that gives you a new perspective on zones you’ve left behind. You might end up in a hole in the statue in Booty Bay—and it’s full of treasure! Or perhaps you’ll be standing on a tree branch overlooking a whirlpool, or, my personal favorite, on top of a huge mesa that holds nothing but four skeletons sitting in front of some sort of arcane device. What were they trying to do? Did they succeed or fail? You’ll never know, and you’d never see it unless you had this one mostly useless item. I always like those bits in games, the idiosyncratic details that don’t really need to be there, but hey, something’s got to fill up this world, so why not something whimsical?

The Misanthrope was reminded of a gag from The Stanley Parable:

I loved the way The Stanley Parable plays with the idea of empty rooms. Granted, the whole game satirizes the notion of player choice and “meaningful” play, but the maintenance closet bit devotes a lot of dialogue to really driving home the point. Spoilers ahead, I guess?

Initially, you will enter the maintenance closet and the adaptive narrator will pretend as if this was just a momentary diversion in the story. If you continue to stay in the closet, he will disparage you for wasting your time on a room with nothing of interest in it. The narrator becomes more aggravated and desperate the longer you stay there stalling the story (such as it is). At some point, he just assumes that the player fell dead at their computer and asks that whoever discovers the body does the right thing and moves the story forward. Eventually, the game reaches the end of the dialogue for that room. The funny thing is that all the effort they put into the dialogue for that room makes this empty room one of the most interesting and funny bits in the game.

Smilner got to thinking about The Last Of Us, which has this concept covered in spades:

When I saw “rooms,” I was thinking about it in a more literal sense rather than “screens” or “squares.” That’s largely because I’ve been playing a lot of games that are very much defined by their emptiness. Primarily, I’ve been spending time with The Last Of Us: Remastered, which is one of the most physically empty action games you’ll find. Especially on Grounded Mode—where supplies are less prevalent and the HUD is disabled—every inch of the game screams about a world that has been lived in and everything has moved past. Every wall and table and object has a history there for the reading, and it’s all so tragic that you have to teach yourself to ignore the endemic horror. Also, the very nature of the game (the secret MVP of which is the sound mixing) makes the player question whether or not the room is empty at all. Some say that these rooms are needed to create a space in between the action set-pieces, and that’s true, but TLOU has an almost relentless march to it, and the stealth portions and gunfights are the cathartic release from the rising tension created by that very emptiness.

Addressing one of Anthony’s primary examples, the confessional room in Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night, SofS laid out a neat little explanation for the strange make up of Dracula’s castle:

I have a semi-theory that Dracula’s castle in SOTN is a sort of mocking microcosm of humanity. The themed areas represent many different forms of human endeavor (scholarship, spirituality, sport) twisted into surreal violence. It’s installation art, in a sense; it’s humanity’s underbelly with a frame around it. The library, a place of learning, is revealed as being motivated by quests for power; the arena is a paean to humanity’s boundless thirst for blood (be careful about judging vampires for their appetites); the chapel is an intriguing mirror of religion, where contemplation and salvation are cast aside in favor of holy terrors and strictures. I don’t know if any of that’s intended, but it’s how I tend to read it.

That’ll do it for this week, folks. As always, thank you for reading and commenting. We’ll see you again next week!