CW: Depictions of extreme acts of violence towards children, suicide, mentions of sexual assault, gore.
Estimated read time: 10~ minutes.
We (Laika) hear from our daughter (Puppy) over the radio that cousin Poochie, her best friend, has been crucified with his own guts by The Birds. No more than a minute later or so, we see cousin Poochie, as described.
Fuck.
...Now our friend Jakob is going after The Birds for revenge, what a fucking idiot. A total suicide mission. Fuck. Gotta catch up to him.
Fuck.
That's the very start, the intro. Yes, the content warning precedes this too in-game (I merely added the gore warning, though that should be obvious if you saw the trailer); I thought about expanding it even more, honestly, but I feel that would be spoilery. Anything more than explicitly labeled in the CW is never on-screen anyways, but at a few key moments it made me choke up.
Laika: Aged Through Blood really doesn't hold any punches, save maybe one, but it's the difference between dealing with extremely heavy themes and piling on so many that nobody's going to touch your game. I still think for many the game is too much to deal with, when the barometer for "heavy" content to most consumers of media is "saying goodbye to a friend" or "maybe we question why we shoot people sometimes".
Mechanically it similarly doesn't really hold many punches, sort of, it's a rather demanding game while also being extremely unique to actually play. It's ultimately a fusion of sidescrolling driving with twin-stick shooting, emphasis on momentum and careful angling; weirdly precise aiming, though with a somewhat generous aim assist, which feels weird at first but after a bit I stopped thinking about how it works. I'd say after my second real boss the game's general movement also truly clicked with me, and in that regard it's one of the most satisfying games I've ever played to perform well at, it just looks so sick when you pull off weapon swapping to deal with a whole group of enemies in the span of one jump, calculating your target priority and executing on it... It's the balance game designers toil with endlessly and it's something I feel Laika: ATB more or less nails immediately, with only occasional hiccups in some awkward encounter design. The bosses themselves are frankly kind of whatever, but thematically they all kinda nail it. It has what I could only compare to "bloodstains" in the form of "viscera sacks", whereupon dying to an enemy or falling off your bike (falling into a death pit or similar doesn't drop one.
It's worth mentioning that I think a certain boss in particular is easily the worst part of the game, about halfway through, lol; got stuck there for an hour+ but when I beat it I felt like I could take on the rest of the game without any real troubles.
And that soundtrack... God, the soundtrack... I know for many they'll find the lyrics insufferable; a lot of people don't even like having em for credits sequences, and normally I'd say "SAME!"; but you know what? I love the OST. It makes it feel so much more grounded, the mixing is wonderful too, can hear the actual slaps on drums, or the breathing; just very organic ya know? The way you acquire tapes as you progress through the game also seems fitting relative to the location they're found in for the most part, not all of them hit but most are bangers.
Major spoilers from this point on, until closing thoughts.
"Fuck me if I care."
Getting to this point in the game struck my heart with a twinge of pain, if you know you know. I gush about the game mechanically but for me it's the symbolism and pure vent energy behind everything. Laika's angry, I'm angry. Laika's sad, I'm sad. Some friends you know you'll be seeing for the last time. Other things are more systemic. Sometimes you're given a choice, one that likely would do nothing for the long run, yet immediately after I felt genuinely awful for acting in anger during Closure; I felt as though I'd failed my own moral compass, because I was immersed in Laika's suffering, her anger, her tug of war between apathy and empathy. I let apathy win once and felt like shit. I need to clarify the game never forced me to. More on this later.
There is a revelatory moment late into the game that explains a very specific enemy behavior that confused me and other people: The birds who don't attack, that's not a bug. It's deliberate. They are effectively committing suicide in protest of the war, feigning their positions as much as possible and willingly being mowed down to fulfill their own moral and philosophical code, even after we desecrate their religious and cultural center in revenge of Poochie; because they leave their long history behind as it's been repurposed as the heart of a new eugenics advocacy and research program. Sounds familiar...
Also, at the religious center, the person who's the only reason we're able to get in isn't a bird, but someone who willingly became a slave to them so she could get closer to their most treasured history; as an archeologist and historian, to her it was worth it. After helping us demolish all of it, we find her having hung herself in guilt of destroying her passion. She did it for what in her eyes was a righteous mission, but the weight of destroying culture was too much to bear.
At one point, Puppy asks her mother if she'll be like her one day, Laika responds by recounting her experience inheriting the curse. She explains that it is hereditary, that her body felt like death, eating itself from the inside out and like being on fire, until she bled out; her memories played back instantaneously as she revived, taking the curse away from her mother and into her. Puppy doesn't seem too phased by all of this, but also says little.
Later it is revealed Laika has lost two daughters who bled to the curse but failed to actually survive the process, thus permanently dying; all this Laika omitted telling Puppy, whom she didn't try to become too attached to for fear of experiencing the same pain all over again. In a subquest, we follow Laika go through PTSD of one of these deaths. It is revealed later the curse is not exclusive to Laika's family; the foreigner at the bar, upon finally figuring out what she's saying, talks of her own home, how there existed a woman with the same curse of immortality. She bled too, but rather than become a pawn for her village, she threw herself off a cliff, and the body was never found.
The big thing here is that the curse, reviled by the carrier, is sought after by those looking to turn them into permanent soldiers. The birds who are adamant about eugenics want to abduct one with the curse to study it, in hopes of becoming immortal themselves. This culminates in Herman taking Puppy out to hand her off to someone, to get rid of what he considers a target to the village. We confront him at the bar, detailing excruciating torture that will be inflicted if he does not reveal where our daughter is. After he tells us he handed her off to someone at the bird city, we dome him, then head off after Puppy.
We track them down to a bar, where the "someone" is a singer who we confront with a shot to the liver; we explain they'll be dead in minutes if they don't explain where Puppy is. They explain they gave Puppy to a bird named Trook, who was going to use her as his Ticket to Heaven. We shoot the singer as well, before heading off to find Trook and Puppy. We find Trook in a dumpy little hideout with Puppy who's tied up on a bed, and we try to barter with him, explaining that Puppy does not actually have the curse, and that we will literally kill ourselves to give him some blood if he lets her go. He considers it for a moment, hesitating, then says he doesn't trust us, and begins pulling his gun out on Puppy; but we intercept this and dome him immediately, rescuing Puppy and taking her home.
(CW for paragraph: rape)
While out in the world I noticed some new NPCs about halfway or two-thirds through the game, one of which was this older man asking for us to return his young daughter home. By this point I was pretty set on doing all of the sidequests, so we tracked her down to Where the Waves Die. There we find her corpse, and her diary. The birds killed her on-sight, and the diary, quite unusually from most other items in the game, is not read back to us directly by Laika; she simply remarks. "Fuck... I wish I could un-read that."
When we return to the man to tell him the news, and confront him about what's in the diary, he plays dumb; we press him further, and he cracks, simply saying that "she was the only love in my life." It's heavily implied that the man was molesting and raping his own daughter. The sidequest is completed, and, much to my surprise, you can execute the man on the spot with no punishment. Fuck him.
"More on this later": Poochie's killer turned out to be a child soldier not much older than Poochie, who did so in rage after ceaseless mockery and abuse from his fellow soldiers; given the title "Kidgutter". In Closure, we find him wallowing in an abandoned warehouse, slowly starving himself to death in guilt and all but asking us to kill him. I hesitated, but only briefly, before pulling the trigger. I sat there for a while thinking about what I'd done, the quest was completed already before that; I never had to pull the trigger. Would Laika have pulled the trigger? I thought so in that moment, but when I became unsure, I felt genuine guilt and not the kind that's easier to answer past an "I don't know". I think the action were automated, Laika "could" have, but given the option not to, I have a feeling she'd find it in her somewhere to spare him. To have him starve to death instead? Maybe, or maybe she'd set him down a path of redemption as an ally to help bring an end to it all. I don't know. I'm sorry.
...
In the finale of the game, we learn that the Ticket to Heaven was to go to the new bird city that flies in the sky nearly perpetually, and work with an inside agent who opposes the bird regime. We board the flying city, and with their help, continue to shut down critical components that let the city thrive, and we confront their leader, a pure totalitarian dictator literally referred to as the Two-Beak God. After a straightforward battle, we defeat him, but the birds in a last ditch effort to commemorate their leader follow through with dropping "The Egg", the second nuke. We immediately dive after it, while getting calls from Puppy who is sick; her body about to be bled, the curse is taking its toll on her, all while we skydive chasing after this bomb in an attempt to save the world. More and more birds fall after us, diving to their own deaths for the sake of fulfilling their leader's vision in an attempt to stop us, but we keep going. Puppy radios back, informing Laika that she has bled, and lived, and has the curse now.
That's.. great, Puppy...
And with tears welling up, we take one last shot into the bomb, destroying it mid-air and being engulfed in flames, along with the destruction of the city-regime.
Fuck.
Closing thoughts.
Laika: Aged Through Blood, while I think rough structurally (gameplay-wise), is an unbelievably poignant allegory for womanhood, specifically the systemic mistreatment of it; the entire "curse" is the game's namesake, to be aged through blood, as that marks the end of being a girl and the beginning of being a woman, sought after to produce an ideal offspring, or more pawns for war, or simply glorified servitude in the house; completely disregarding the person of the woman and dehumanizing her as much as possible into her utilitarian and traditional role extremes. The entire game feels like a vent piece, soundtrack and all, and my lord it feels utterly cathartic to me; it rides a line that I appreciate a lot more compared to most "Art Games" that love beating you over the head very literally and directly with what their message is, though those have a place in my favorites as well. I cried.
In a word: Mother.
Favorite tracks:
Mother
The Last Tear
My Destiny
Lonely Mountain
Trust Them
(main menu)
(whole album's on Spotify btw)
Estimated read time: 10~ minutes.
We (Laika) hear from our daughter (Puppy) over the radio that cousin Poochie, her best friend, has been crucified with his own guts by The Birds. No more than a minute later or so, we see cousin Poochie, as described.
Fuck.
...Now our friend Jakob is going after The Birds for revenge, what a fucking idiot. A total suicide mission. Fuck. Gotta catch up to him.
Fuck.
That's the very start, the intro. Yes, the content warning precedes this too in-game (I merely added the gore warning, though that should be obvious if you saw the trailer); I thought about expanding it even more, honestly, but I feel that would be spoilery. Anything more than explicitly labeled in the CW is never on-screen anyways, but at a few key moments it made me choke up.
Laika: Aged Through Blood really doesn't hold any punches, save maybe one, but it's the difference between dealing with extremely heavy themes and piling on so many that nobody's going to touch your game. I still think for many the game is too much to deal with, when the barometer for "heavy" content to most consumers of media is "saying goodbye to a friend" or "maybe we question why we shoot people sometimes".
Mechanically it similarly doesn't really hold many punches, sort of, it's a rather demanding game while also being extremely unique to actually play. It's ultimately a fusion of sidescrolling driving with twin-stick shooting, emphasis on momentum and careful angling; weirdly precise aiming, though with a somewhat generous aim assist, which feels weird at first but after a bit I stopped thinking about how it works. I'd say after my second real boss the game's general movement also truly clicked with me, and in that regard it's one of the most satisfying games I've ever played to perform well at, it just looks so sick when you pull off weapon swapping to deal with a whole group of enemies in the span of one jump, calculating your target priority and executing on it... It's the balance game designers toil with endlessly and it's something I feel Laika: ATB more or less nails immediately, with only occasional hiccups in some awkward encounter design. The bosses themselves are frankly kind of whatever, but thematically they all kinda nail it. It has what I could only compare to "bloodstains" in the form of "viscera sacks", whereupon dying to an enemy or falling off your bike (falling into a death pit or similar doesn't drop one.
It's worth mentioning that I think a certain boss in particular is easily the worst part of the game, about halfway through, lol; got stuck there for an hour+ but when I beat it I felt like I could take on the rest of the game without any real troubles.
And that soundtrack... God, the soundtrack... I know for many they'll find the lyrics insufferable; a lot of people don't even like having em for credits sequences, and normally I'd say "SAME!"; but you know what? I love the OST. It makes it feel so much more grounded, the mixing is wonderful too, can hear the actual slaps on drums, or the breathing; just very organic ya know? The way you acquire tapes as you progress through the game also seems fitting relative to the location they're found in for the most part, not all of them hit but most are bangers.
Major spoilers from this point on, until closing thoughts.
"Fuck me if I care."
Getting to this point in the game struck my heart with a twinge of pain, if you know you know. I gush about the game mechanically but for me it's the symbolism and pure vent energy behind everything. Laika's angry, I'm angry. Laika's sad, I'm sad. Some friends you know you'll be seeing for the last time. Other things are more systemic. Sometimes you're given a choice, one that likely would do nothing for the long run, yet immediately after I felt genuinely awful for acting in anger during Closure; I felt as though I'd failed my own moral compass, because I was immersed in Laika's suffering, her anger, her tug of war between apathy and empathy. I let apathy win once and felt like shit. I need to clarify the game never forced me to. More on this later.
There is a revelatory moment late into the game that explains a very specific enemy behavior that confused me and other people: The birds who don't attack, that's not a bug. It's deliberate. They are effectively committing suicide in protest of the war, feigning their positions as much as possible and willingly being mowed down to fulfill their own moral and philosophical code, even after we desecrate their religious and cultural center in revenge of Poochie; because they leave their long history behind as it's been repurposed as the heart of a new eugenics advocacy and research program. Sounds familiar...
Also, at the religious center, the person who's the only reason we're able to get in isn't a bird, but someone who willingly became a slave to them so she could get closer to their most treasured history; as an archeologist and historian, to her it was worth it. After helping us demolish all of it, we find her having hung herself in guilt of destroying her passion. She did it for what in her eyes was a righteous mission, but the weight of destroying culture was too much to bear.
At one point, Puppy asks her mother if she'll be like her one day, Laika responds by recounting her experience inheriting the curse. She explains that it is hereditary, that her body felt like death, eating itself from the inside out and like being on fire, until she bled out; her memories played back instantaneously as she revived, taking the curse away from her mother and into her. Puppy doesn't seem too phased by all of this, but also says little.
Later it is revealed Laika has lost two daughters who bled to the curse but failed to actually survive the process, thus permanently dying; all this Laika omitted telling Puppy, whom she didn't try to become too attached to for fear of experiencing the same pain all over again. In a subquest, we follow Laika go through PTSD of one of these deaths. It is revealed later the curse is not exclusive to Laika's family; the foreigner at the bar, upon finally figuring out what she's saying, talks of her own home, how there existed a woman with the same curse of immortality. She bled too, but rather than become a pawn for her village, she threw herself off a cliff, and the body was never found.
The big thing here is that the curse, reviled by the carrier, is sought after by those looking to turn them into permanent soldiers. The birds who are adamant about eugenics want to abduct one with the curse to study it, in hopes of becoming immortal themselves. This culminates in Herman taking Puppy out to hand her off to someone, to get rid of what he considers a target to the village. We confront him at the bar, detailing excruciating torture that will be inflicted if he does not reveal where our daughter is. After he tells us he handed her off to someone at the bird city, we dome him, then head off after Puppy.
We track them down to a bar, where the "someone" is a singer who we confront with a shot to the liver; we explain they'll be dead in minutes if they don't explain where Puppy is. They explain they gave Puppy to a bird named Trook, who was going to use her as his Ticket to Heaven. We shoot the singer as well, before heading off to find Trook and Puppy. We find Trook in a dumpy little hideout with Puppy who's tied up on a bed, and we try to barter with him, explaining that Puppy does not actually have the curse, and that we will literally kill ourselves to give him some blood if he lets her go. He considers it for a moment, hesitating, then says he doesn't trust us, and begins pulling his gun out on Puppy; but we intercept this and dome him immediately, rescuing Puppy and taking her home.
(CW for paragraph: rape)
While out in the world I noticed some new NPCs about halfway or two-thirds through the game, one of which was this older man asking for us to return his young daughter home. By this point I was pretty set on doing all of the sidequests, so we tracked her down to Where the Waves Die. There we find her corpse, and her diary. The birds killed her on-sight, and the diary, quite unusually from most other items in the game, is not read back to us directly by Laika; she simply remarks. "Fuck... I wish I could un-read that."
When we return to the man to tell him the news, and confront him about what's in the diary, he plays dumb; we press him further, and he cracks, simply saying that "she was the only love in my life." It's heavily implied that the man was molesting and raping his own daughter. The sidequest is completed, and, much to my surprise, you can execute the man on the spot with no punishment. Fuck him.
"More on this later": Poochie's killer turned out to be a child soldier not much older than Poochie, who did so in rage after ceaseless mockery and abuse from his fellow soldiers; given the title "Kidgutter". In Closure, we find him wallowing in an abandoned warehouse, slowly starving himself to death in guilt and all but asking us to kill him. I hesitated, but only briefly, before pulling the trigger. I sat there for a while thinking about what I'd done, the quest was completed already before that; I never had to pull the trigger. Would Laika have pulled the trigger? I thought so in that moment, but when I became unsure, I felt genuine guilt and not the kind that's easier to answer past an "I don't know". I think the action were automated, Laika "could" have, but given the option not to, I have a feeling she'd find it in her somewhere to spare him. To have him starve to death instead? Maybe, or maybe she'd set him down a path of redemption as an ally to help bring an end to it all. I don't know. I'm sorry.
...
In the finale of the game, we learn that the Ticket to Heaven was to go to the new bird city that flies in the sky nearly perpetually, and work with an inside agent who opposes the bird regime. We board the flying city, and with their help, continue to shut down critical components that let the city thrive, and we confront their leader, a pure totalitarian dictator literally referred to as the Two-Beak God. After a straightforward battle, we defeat him, but the birds in a last ditch effort to commemorate their leader follow through with dropping "The Egg", the second nuke. We immediately dive after it, while getting calls from Puppy who is sick; her body about to be bled, the curse is taking its toll on her, all while we skydive chasing after this bomb in an attempt to save the world. More and more birds fall after us, diving to their own deaths for the sake of fulfilling their leader's vision in an attempt to stop us, but we keep going. Puppy radios back, informing Laika that she has bled, and lived, and has the curse now.
That's.. great, Puppy...
And with tears welling up, we take one last shot into the bomb, destroying it mid-air and being engulfed in flames, along with the destruction of the city-regime.
Fuck.
Closing thoughts.
Laika: Aged Through Blood, while I think rough structurally (gameplay-wise), is an unbelievably poignant allegory for womanhood, specifically the systemic mistreatment of it; the entire "curse" is the game's namesake, to be aged through blood, as that marks the end of being a girl and the beginning of being a woman, sought after to produce an ideal offspring, or more pawns for war, or simply glorified servitude in the house; completely disregarding the person of the woman and dehumanizing her as much as possible into her utilitarian and traditional role extremes. The entire game feels like a vent piece, soundtrack and all, and my lord it feels utterly cathartic to me; it rides a line that I appreciate a lot more compared to most "Art Games" that love beating you over the head very literally and directly with what their message is, though those have a place in my favorites as well. I cried.
In a word: Mother.
Favorite tracks:
Mother
The Last Tear
My Destiny
Lonely Mountain
Trust Them
(main menu)
(whole album's on Spotify btw)
Bojangles4th
4 months ago