Lately I've been having a lot of fun playing shorter games. While the longer game format has come to dominate the gaming sphere, stories have come to encapsulate entire towns, cities or continents and their citizens, and gameplay has become about developing new mechanics as they are unlocked, either behind story milestones or a leveling system. They are multi-day or even multi-week investments, and when they are good they are great, but the magic of smaller games has usually been in sharply focusing on one thing that would become tired if lingered on too long. Stories Untold, despite my criticism of that game's plot, was sharply focused on a handful of mechanical ideas and the ways in which they can be stretched narratively. Little Inferno, likewise, emulated a long form time sink game in a relatively short amount of time, encapsulating its mechanics and making fun of them. It's in shorter games where passion projects can come out, where you can experiment a little and not worry too much at scaling it to a whole game, because things will be over in only a couple of hours. Low time investment means an easier time playing into the payer's patience. One such genre that has come out of this short game renaissance in the indie gaming world is the much maligned walking simulator, a genre I've defended staunchly before, but must admit feeling my enthusiasm waning with each subsequent game I play. There is only so much you can do in a game where walking and inspecting are the mechanics. As much as I love storytelling through exploration, it certainly has its limits as the focal point of a game. Sagebrush takes a similar sense of exploration and the "figuring out what happened" approach that Gone Home had, but wraps it in a sense of haunting tension and retro style that the original Silent Hill had, and it is in this tension, this immense pressure from the sense of place that the game does something interesting with the genre.
Sagebrush is named after Black Sagebrush, a compound somewhere in a Texas-like setting where a cult lived and operated. In the game, we are years (a decade? it's hard to tell exactly when this game takes place) after the mass suicide on the compound. Things start with us breaking into the compound at dusk of all times, and venturing around the abandoned buildings that made up this cult's home. The gameplay loop is really just a key quest, where finding one key leads you to another location on the compound, where you can then find another key. There are some ways to sequence break the game, but it isn't valuable to do so. Some of these keys are somewhat out of the way, and if you were to miss one, my biggest criticism is in that trying to find out where in this vague path the game has laid out for you you must have taken a misstep could be patience testing. This game screeches to a halt when you have to spend too much time figuring out where it wants you to go next. Luckily, the game does a relatively good job at pointing out when you should be looking for a key. While looking around the various buildings, you'll read notes, letters, and journals left behind by the inhabitants, and piece together the experience of living here as a member. The cult itself isn't particularly interesting, being a hodgepodge of different real-life cults and thus throwing nothing particularly original your way in its internal machinations. It's the people's lives, the way they react and are reinforce by the cult's cultural movement underneath their spirited leader James Israel, a.k.a. Father, even when he starts to rapidly change the rules, that takes center stage. Minor stories start to make themselves known, stories of a perceived 'rat' in the cult giving information to the outside that is breathing down the Father's neck and making him act less and less consistently, of people with doubts, and others that believe his doctrine to violent ends. It feels like an excavation, and the sense of place is thick.
Exploring empty buildings is always creepy, but rarely has it been done with so much tension. I couldn't explain it, but there was something much more unnerving about Sagebrush than most any other horror game I've ever played, and I wouldn't strictly categorize Sagebrush as a horror game. I found it hard to sleep afterwards. Exploring a place where people lived and, essentially, tortured themselves for a fanatical leader is unnerving in and of itself, but knowing from the outset that the chapel, looming over the compound from its hilltop perch to the east, despite looking so docile, was also their grave, creates a thick layer of foreboding. You know already where this game is going to end, and as you go on through the 2 hours that it takes to beat this game, you begin to wonder if you're quite ready to confront that horror. This displacement of time that the compound's emptiness permeates is only compounded by the graphical style. Stylistically, the game uses a PSX approach to anti aliasing and polygonal count, which is to say "none" and "low". The only thing that feels particularly modern is the lighting, which is rather modern standard technically, but perhaps a bit annoying in execution. As eerie as the sun setting is as the course of the game plays out, walking around a compound at night with a measly flashlight with PSX graphics can be frustrating. It was dark when I finally got around to the trailer park in the lower left corner of the compound, and trying to find my way around looking for the trailers that belonged to the significant members of the cult was more difficult than it probably ever needed to be. The sun doesn't set in a gradient over time, but in steps. These steps are tied to the tapes strewn about the compound.
The tapes are where the narrative starts to take shape. Throughout the game, you will stumble across tapes that have a woman explaining to someone - by the sounds of it, FBI - about why she joined the cult, and what life was like there, and this is where the varying story threads of the different people start to swim into view. If this game sounds interesting to you so far, the game is a measly $7 when not on sale, so do yourself a favor and check it out. Consider this your spoiler warning.
Spoilers from here on out.
From the get go, you know someone escaped the mass suicide that ended the cult, and you know that someone is a woman, but you aren't sure exactly who it is. Was it Viola, the school teacher? Lillian, the quiet girl? Juliet, 11 years old, the young daughter of Viola who was considered a "troublemaker" at the school and required more aggressive indoctrination? Or could it be Anne, the Father's wife, who slept on a cot in the cupboard of their house, cuckolded by her husband? As you sift through the notes and journals left behind by the inhabitants, and as the tapes give a sense of framing, you start to learn about what has been happening here. The Father started this cult under the presumption he was a modern prophet for Christ, that an angel named Sarial came down from on high and told him the new gospel, and that the end times where upon them. The congregation is made up of people with varying reasons for joining. Viola wished to escape her abusive husband, and Leonard, an ex-military man with violent tendencies, saw the other Christian sects as full of charlatans, hypocrites, and idol worshipers. People like Lillian simply wanted a place to belong. Others like Peyton, Andrew, and Henry are given little background going in, but get some significance in the plot a little later.
In the upper right corner of the compound, between the farm and the old abandoned mines, is a locked barn, flies buzzing around it, and a pool of blood that has escaped from underneath the door. The barn is called the Cleansing Room, and you are led to believe it was a relatively late addition to the Father's doctrine. The Father talks about pain in this life buying forgiveness in the next life, and eventually takes this quite literally. The barn becomes a veritable torture room where you were cut, whipped, or maimed depending on your sins of that week. When you finally get the keys to the Cleansing Room, you find a rack of knives, saws, and whips in the back. There are plastic tarps laid out with blood covered alters, like impromptu surgery tables. Apparently the congregation was very accepting of these new practices. More controversially, the Father chose a few days out of the week to re-purpose the barn for his newly conceived "Alternate Cleansing". This is where some people begin to take some notice. It is a secret cleansing that only the women are allowed to know about, and which amounts to the women having sex with the Father. A tape is left in his love den where he tells the women "I am the Lord's flag bearer. Do you not love the Lord more than your husbands?" What really creeps me out about this is in how the Father has multiple spots for this "Alternate Cleansing" - his locked bedroom on the second floor of his house, a room bathed in red light with a camera and large bed next to his wife's "bedroom" cupboard on the first floor - yet the cleansing room is implied to have been used, with the blood and torture devices. In the Father's bedroom safe you can find a note written by him with plans for a bunker type building filled with food and ammunition and a king sized bed. Upping the ante, or simply reading the winds and taking precaution? Sometime close to when the Father realized there may be a mole in their flock, he prays for what to do with little 11 year old Juliet, who has been causing a problem. He says he was going to wait until she came of age to put her to Alternate Cleansing, but has read of people engaging in religious sex with girls as young as 3. So he prays, and he gets the answer he sickeningly wants.
When the mole problem comes to the Father's attention, he sends Viola to user her "femininity" to figure out who it is. He suspects either Leonard, Andrew, or Peyton. Viola starts sending them flirty messages, and it is implied at the very least she has slept with Leonard. But trying to oust the deceiver becomes a balancing act as Viola starts to worry about Lillian and her increasingly anti-social behavior, and with the fact she is sure she is pregnant and doesn't know who the father is. It is telling that her terror here is unclear as being heavier with the idea it is one of the three possible deceivers, or the Father himself. She questions what the Father will do when he finds out, and whether what she has done is a sin that is punishable. The lack of clarity the Father's doctrine seems to have finally reared its head. A lot of this information about the individual people comes from their trailers, where they keep their journals and letters, and when you finally find your way into Peyton's trailer, you learn that he is a Fed. He's been keeping tabs on everyone in the compound and wiring them out, learning of their past indiscretions or crimes - especially the Father - and believes the Father has an amphetamine problem (a box with white powder and a glass tube in the Father's bedroom validates his suspicions). Of all the people in the compound, he finds one person he seems a viable dissenter: Lillian. So he reaches out to her. Lillian is alarmed at first, but as she reads the "Are you in a cult?" pamphlet Peyton gave her, she begins to have second thoughts. She tests the waters with Peyton, but before any action can be taken, Leonard and Henry find out about Peyton. They break into his house and bash his head in with a shovel, killing him. Leonard, despite his violent tendencies, is shaken by what he is done, confused whether or not it was a great sin or necessary, and thus forgiven.
After Peyton's murder, Lillian forgets about it. She continues with the cult and thinks of it as an unsettling diversion from her faith. But the Father is acting strange, jumpy, scared. He tells them the time is nigh. He gathers everyone up in the church and gives them quaaludes. The father starts a fire in the church, and the congregation helps it spread. They each lie in their own patch of fire and die as the fire engulfs all. Except two. Lillian has a fight or flight response, and realizes she doesn't want to die. She bolts into the back of the church, where the Father has his secret bunker full of guns, and locks him out. The Father, unable to get into his secret bunker, runs to the mines, and the game does something clever here. I've been telling this story mostly in order, up until this paragraph. You don't go to the church after the trailer park, but the mines. Throughout the game, there has been this lingering fear that, by the end of this game, you are going to see a pile of corpses, but this fear doesn't make much sense. The FBI most certainly has taken all of the corpses from the compound after the mass suicide. Then you enter the mines, and you realize the inside is boarded up. There is just enough space underneath the boards to believe a person could squeeze through. You have to chop it down to get in. You descend the mines, and the power goes out due to the generator running out of gas. Stuck underground in the dark, you have to find a way to get the generator back on. The mines are terrifying, because you aren't exactly sure what you are going to find. There is a blood trail leading to the back of the mine, but you know the FBI hasn't been down here because the mine was boarded up. There is a shooting range down here, and a hole in the very back, deep in the mine, with a cart in front of it. You move the cart and are confronted by the corpse of the Father, lying in the fetal position with a gas can. He looks to have been shot. He is holding a letter, from Peyton to Lillian, showing he knew the raid was coming soon before the mass suicide. Despite its plainly low poly appearance, the weight of that corpse's image is palpable because of the build up, and the nonchalance in which it is presented. It's just a dead corpse, no fan fair, nothing. Just a dead man. A dead man who killed a dozen or so people. It hits like a sledgehammer here in the dark, beneath the compound. You take the gas can, turn the generator on, and leave for the church.
In the bunker at the back of the church, you get to the room with the bed, guns, and a TV. Examining the bed gives you an important piece of information: "The sheets are still ruffled from the few nights you slept here." You learn Lillian came down here and passed out from the quaaludes, and it becomes obvious that you are Lillian. This reveal, despite being somewhat obvious, was incredibly executed. Throughout the game, if you are anything like me, you are wondering who this nut is that wants to break in to the cult compound nearly at night. Who is this person, so obsessed with this awful event, that they would break in and look around with so much effort as you do while you play the game, and in a final reveal that treats the reveal as matter of fact, as though you should have realized this by now, it is effective specifically because it is so seamless. I had some assumptions, but the game respected me enough to treat it with the proper weight and affect. It didn't tell me, it showed me, allowed me to realize it naturally, giving me that "a ha!" moment despite the fact it wasn't so shocking.
As you venture deeper into the bunker, things take a hallucinatory turn. You take a series of stairs down darker and darker hallways, your flashlight flickering out to give way to the near void. You stop at the first room, where a table, chair, and camera are illuminated, and you hear the voice of Lillian being interrogated by the FBI. They ask her who started the fire, and she is confused. Father started it, but everyone helped it spread. They are try again: okay, but you are here. The implication is clear: they want someone to blame. You go down another hallway, darker than the last, and into another room. Apparently the feds couldn't blame you, because now you see an illuminated dinner table with several chairs, and you hear the voice of Lillian arguing with her father. He asks if maybe it was something he did. Was he a bad parent? She tells him not to worry about it. He gets angry: he just doesn't understand how he could raise someone who would go off and join a cult. She tells him she has to go. Another hallway, this one completely black. You enter a room with what looks like a therapists' set up, and here Lillian tries to defend herself as the therapist asks if her guilt is because she feels she should have died with them, that she had let down her (cult) family. She tells him she can't do this today, nearly breaking down. Another hallway, this time the dim lights have turned a hot red, like those in Father's sex room. The room at the end of the hallway illuminates a bar, and you hear a man talking to Lillian, apparently on a date, asking her how she spent her 20s. She lies about having traveled abroad. He mentions something about falling for some scam or another, and she lies saying "I can imagine" when he complains about how silly he was. Another hallway, red lights brighter, and a door giving way to a room with the car from the beginning of the game, and the sound of the engine revving, drowning out a voicemail from Lillian's boyfriend asking where she is, and saying that he is scared. The next hallway is vibrantly lit in red, crosses hanging from the walls, down deep until another door, and inside the bunker again, the bedroom, the TV, the guns. There is nothing left to do now. You turn around, and make your way out of the bunker and back into the church. Now you see the church for what it really is: a burnt husk, opened up to the sky where a rising sun hangs low, only just now marking the start of a day. Lillian calls her boyfriend as she looks out at the sun bathed compound, and tells him she has some things she needs to tell him.
One of my major criticisms of Stories Untold was in its lack of narrative depth, and in its reliance on shocking revelations that felt cliche and tryhard. In a lot of ways, Sagebrush does something similar. The cult isn't that interesting itself, so exploring how it works isn't nearly as illuminating as the game's mechanics would imply, and the story largely ties off as a reflective work, of a person who is coming to terms with what it means for them to have been in a cult, but not really illuminating much about why they were there in the first place outside of the cliche. Likewise, the cult aspect isn't exactly unique narratively (although, I've rarely seen it done in such a way in a game), and can feel tryhard as a subject if improperly handled. What sets Sagebrush apart from the issues of Stories Untold is in how it is executed, and in what it wants you to feel. Stories Untold wants you to feel shock and surprise, and that feeling of eeriness that permeates all of the four stories, but it tells you its story, it doesn't show it or let you experience it yourself. It plays coy with what is obvious, and steals from you your agency to discover the truth yourself. Sagebrush wants you to seep into the earth here, the same earth Lillian called a home, despite the trauma, despite the zealotry, despite the horror and the violence and the abuse. We don't get to understand why outside of the superficial - the "family" element, the need to belong, the confusing time that is a person's early 20s when they are still at a loss as to how they should define themselves - but what we get an acute understanding for is in the reverence of that experience, the good and the bad, the inescapable. It doesn't just haunt her, it breathes through her, its corporal body dead yet in some spirit alive because she exists beyond it. It's human, it seethes, and she wants to escape from it, but that sense of community is intense, and it had felt so necessary, but it was wrong? It lead to the deaths of her friends. It lead to her shame in the grand cultural eye that never really sees but we always feel seen by it. She was a fool, but she felt like she was important. It's hard to let go, and in the end we don't really know how she takes it. Does she accept it? Is she folding it into who she is? Has she breathed her last breath of it, and is closing the book on it forever? We don't really need to know. What we needed was the confrontation of those questions, and the game executes them smartly, even if it can sometimes be coy with its character depth. Sagebrush leaves an oddly chilling air as you exit the game, one that hangs onto you like a heavy humidity. It haunts you.
8.5
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