The Remake of The End of The Greatest RPG of All Time isn’t really a remake, nor an RPG. It’s a puzzle game with a metafictional narrative.

Source: Steam

You get plopped down into the final dungeon of an RPG. You can’t make any progress because the combat relies entirely on creating combos from specific sequences of moves. The characters allude to events that already happened, but it’s difficult to tell what’s going on. The game contains many unpolished elements, such as missing textures or collision boxes and awkward block-pushing mechanics. The way to progress through the game is by finding pages from the instruction booklet.  Essentially it’s a game of finding the passcode, skinned as if it were an RPG.

The puzzles are decent enough, but I’m more interested in discussing the game’s narrative. Through audio logs, FMV sequences, and secrets, you learn about who made this remake and why? And what exactly is a remake of? The narrative touched on many of my interests, about the motivations for art, its commercialization, and misinterpretation. (This analysis will include a few spoilers, but not many, only as needed.)

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Helldivers 2 is a game that takes a significant amount of inspiration from Starship Troopers, being basically a satire of fascist propaganda. Players take the role of Helldivers, who fight on the side of Super Earth in a galactic war. Super Earth’s goal is to spread liberty Managed Democracy. Managed Democracy is basically a totalitarian government where an algorithm votes on people’s behalf, allegedly based on a prediction of how they would vote.

But where Starship Troopers is a short self-contained movie, Helldivers 2 is a game that people pour hundreds of hours into. It can’t just be a satire of fascist propaganda. It can’t be any single thing. There are many narratives that emerge from it, some of which are at tension with each other. For example, in the interpretation of Starship Troopers it is possible to argue that the bug aliens did nothing wrong, and the humans are the aggressors. On the other hand, Helldivers doesn’t lend itself to such a straightforward interpretation, because there are many clear examples where the aliens are the aggressors.

So I’d like to explain a grander emergent narrative that took me months to understand. It’s a narrative about how players are kept in the dark, and how this leads to a mismanaged war that wastes billions of lives.

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