MMOs are a strange facilitation of games because they are, ostensibly, dead on arrival. Not dead in the sense of “lol dead game,” that exact comment you see littered in the comments of articles, videos etc. about literally any online game, no matter how popular it is. Dead in the sense that it will die, as all things do, because one day the servers will go down and there will be no (legal) way to play it anymore. I put the legal in brackets there because there are many a fan effort that allow you to play a range of “officially” dead MMOs, but what would a game about a Frankensteinian revival of such a thing look like? Probably, Gorgon’s Garden.
For Gorgon’s Garden, we go back to the year 2008, weirdly, personally, probably the last year I spent regular amounts of my time playing an MMO. It’s a random summer day, and you are trawling through Hypogeum.net, a resuscitated version of it anyway, a fictitious forum all about an MMO called Gorgon’s Garden, now defunct due to a majority of the game being sealed away by a digital currency that no longer exists.
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In practicality, the game is not the game, “Gorgon’s Garden,” but the game, Gorgon’s Garden. It is you, hanging out on your computer, in what looks to be the family computer room – you can see the edges of the computer screen, hints at a room beyond the bevels fully revealed in a reflection when the screen goes dark. You can browse that fake forum, read cringey posts from people of all ages, learning tidbits about their lives, and importantly, find a tool from a notorious hacker that bypasses that dead digital currency. The world of Gorgon’s Garden opens up to you once more.
It’s mostly quite simple, you can only look left or right, though you can move in any direction. Attacks are limited to the swing of a sword and one spell, and as you kill enemies you level up, which doesn’t do much but increase your health.
As you delve further and further into the game, or perhaps dive is the right word, it starts to fall apart, the forum acting as a hub of secrets pushing you further down the rabbit hole. What starts as something silly moves towards something genuinely a bit unsettling, and I’ll stop there because the whole thing is short, and free, and given the season, you’ve not got much reason to not try it out yourself.
If you need further convincing, Gordon’s Garden comes in part from Feverdream Johnny, developer of one of my favourite weirdo platformers Orbo’s Odyssey. Go on, give it a go, remind yourself of the horrors of niche forums and your favourite dead MMO, there’s no better time for it. You can pick it up on Itch.io.
