The GwG Halloween Monster Mash, Part 1
Nate Schmidt, Contributing Editor
We’ve developed a little bit of a tradition around here at GwG where we run a few articles about some meaningful monsters around Halloween time. This year, I’d like to offer you a short list of my “monsters of the year”: the creatures and characters that have stood out most dramatically to me in the games that I’ve played over 2023, no matter when the game originally released. Even though not all of the following figures fit the definition of “beasts,” I invite you to think of the following as a type of medieval-style bestiary–a catalog of what is lurking out there and what it has to teach us.
Lilith, Diablo IV
What does evil even mean in the Diablo games? Diablo IV reminds me, more than anything, of Black Sabbath’s song “After Forever”; the band and the music are ostensibly evil, but the lyrics are all literally just about how you need to give your life to God before it’s too late. The Diablo games are full of twisted biblical references, demons, hellspawn, and what have you, but your position in this dark and gory world is mostly that of a self-assuredly righteous crusader. It’s like Diablo builds you this roaring hellish bonfire of satanic ritual and then tells you to burn your Mercyful Fate tapes in it. In some ways, it’s actually a little humorous how tautological “evil” is in this game, where the primary indicator of a character’s badness is the degree of disgust with which the PC intones their name. (My male-voiced druid voice actor did a particularly memorable job growling out the name “Lilith” with palpable malice.)
I am sure there will be more to say about Lilith once I have actually finished the main quest of this game, but at a little over halfway through, my overwhelming impression is that I’m only fighting Lilith because otherwise I wouldn’t have anything to do but side quests. Why is Lilith bad? Because she’s evil! Inarius, the angel, is also kind of bad, though. Why aren’t we killing him? I actually think there is something endearingly silly about Diablo’s every-day-is-Halloween depiction of evil, but I also think it’s worth mentioning that the game basically treats Lilith, the game character, the same way that writers and artists have historically portrayed Lilith, the mythological figure: she’s bad because she exists, end of story. I wasn’t necessarily expecting the smash-n’-plunder dungeon game to portray Lilith with serious nuance and tact, but I also didn’t expect to feel quite so stuck in the Middle Ages. What exactly makes my character the good guy in this story?
Chris Walker, Outlast
Outlast is a really scary game, and it is also a scary mess when it comes to the representation of institutionalized people. You play the game from the perspective of a journalist who is investigating an asylum, and while the game certainly takes the position that the acts of violence perpetrated against the inmates are evil, it also goes out of its way to represent those same victims as utterly dehumanized husks at every opportunity. Sure, the main villain in the game is the Nazi scientist who was repatriated to the US as part of Operation Paperclip, but his victims who still inhabit the asylum arguably approach the player character with no less malice and violence. In Outlast, mental illness is grotesque, shocking, and brutal, and the game fails to interrogate the long history (and present) of the criminalization of mental illness in the United States.
Chris Walker, the giant self-mutilating monster who chases you through the asylum, is not so much an exception to this rule as he is a tiny glimpse of what might have been accomplished with a little more thoughtfulness and tact: a combat veteran forced to relive his worst nightmares under horrible duress, he is actually the only person in the game with both the knowledge and the ability to stop the true terror that lives in the basement lab. It is wild to me that this game portrays mentally ill people as irredeemable monsters for no other reason than the fact that they are mentally ill and horribly abused, and maybe my desire to complain about that is the main thing that puts Chris on this list. But a better version of this game also lives in my head, in which Chris’s herculean strength and sense of duty—along with the obvious connection between his grotesque form and the real-life MKUltra program—are given the narrative sympathy they deserve.
The Kaernk, Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Image credit: Fandom, https://amnesia.fandom.com/wiki/Kaernk.
This fucking thing. Look, if you haven’t played Amnesia: The Dark Descent, there really is no perfect way for me to explain to you how scary the kaernk is. Imagine a flooded hallway full of boxes that you can just barely jump between. Now, imagine that water is murky and gross, and the sight of a few splashes is all you have to alert you to the fact that there is a thing in there. Something murderous. Something hungry. Something you can’t see. It might not get you right away; it might not actually get you for quite a while. But any time your feet touch the water in this very wet, very dank basement, you can bet you’ll hear it coming: splash…splash. Splash. Splashsplashsplash—and game over. Keep out of the water.
I would say that the kaernk has to be seen to be believed, but the whole point of the monster is that you’ll never get eyes on this thing. It’s a master class in demonstrating Stephen King’s assertion that there’s nothing scarier than what you can’t see. Somewhere in the depths of time, my paleolithic ancestors heard noises in the night that needed no further clarification, and that ancient part of my brain lights up like fireworks when I hear the kaernk. This kind of ingenious minimalism is also what makes the first Amnesia such a scary game, even though the graphics leave so much to be desired compared with, say, the Dead Space remake. There’s nothing the lizard brain fears so much as it fears a void.
Kamek/Magikoopa, Super Mario World, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island…so many other Marios
The Mushroom Kingdom may not always be the most orderly place, but it is guided by rules. The strength of the Mario franchise has always been that these rules are magically both improbable and intuitive. There is absolutely no reason why bonking your head on a brick should make stuff pop out of the top, but after the first time you do it, you know exactly what to expect all the rest of the time. Why does eating a blue koopa shell make Yoshi fly? There is no good answer to this question. It just works. As the recent (and incredible) Super Mario Bros. Wonder reminds us, the world of Mario is a world of practical surrealism and dynamic nonsense. And then there’s Kamek. (I’m conflating him with all the rest of the magikoopas for the purpose of this argument, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.)
Kamek is the intervention of chaos in a world that is preposterous but regulated; he is the division point between the chaotic and the absurd. When that guy in his little blue hoodie shows up, the world as you thought it had been formed suddenly reveals itself as mutable: blocks become turtles, static environments jiggle and waver like a fever dream—regular-sized enemies with whom you knew the rules of engagement become colossal bosses, the stuff of nightmares. The screen has all the visual information you need to do away with Bowser and the rest of his minions, but let me ask: when you jump on the magikoopa in Super Mario World, does he die? Does he stay dead? What dark arts give him the power of resurrection; to what Faustian sacrifice has Kamek committed himself? Truly he is the sign of all that is untamed in the Mushroom Kingdom, the avatar of havoc and the lord of lawlessness, a “tough customer” not only in name, but in deed.
