I had only played about an hour of Virtue and a Sledgehammer prior to sitting down to speak with a few of the game’s devs. The third-person, narrative-driven exploration game is essentially a walking simulator, in that you methodically explore a space and slowly uncover a story. You learn about what’s happening by swinging a sledgehammer, which can shatter buildings, break open painful memories, crush generators, and destroy the androids that each house the digitized ghost of a person who was once one of your neighbors. The story gets pretty freaky, pretty fast–it opens with the reveal that the body of the protagonist’s mom is in their car’s trunk–and is clearly more concerned with telling an affecting story than delivering a traditionally fun experience.
Or at least that’s what I thought before I spoke with the devs. And one small moment changed everything: I asked all those who were present if they found themselves playing the game the same way or if they tackled Virtue and a Sledgehammer’s loop of tearing down both physical and figurative walls differently.
“You know, actually–this is just funny and stupid–but there’s actually aiming in the game,” Deconstructeam composer and level designer Paula Fingerspit told me. “So if you aim the stick looking up at the sky, you can actually smash [the androids] into the sky.”
This, of course, changed everything.
I made it through the rest of the interview as best I could but the entire time we were talking, I just kept thinking to myself, “I’ve got to try that.” So as soon as the interview wrapped up, that’s what I did. I hopped back into the game, found a father android who informed me that he had locked his wife android and children androids into the house on top of the hill and needed me to kill them for him, walked up to the house, broke down the front door, and as the android mother ran toward me and shouted for me to not harm her android kids, I aimed up at the ceiling, and swung the sledgehammer.
She went flying through the ceiling. It broke a huge chunk of plaster off, which then fell down onto a table and sent the android kids running. I mercilessly tracked down each one through the house to corner them in their various hiding spots so that I could use every one of them as a wrecking ball to dismantle their entire home. I then went down the hill to the father android, and used what I had learned to send him flying up the hill to join his destroyed family.
In this scenario, I’m clearly the monster–again, the androids are all clearly people who have been digitized (possibly against their will?)–but I was also having a delightful time. And from that moment onward, I always tried to position myself in such a way that I could launch the androids up and away at something I wanted to destroy.
This amusing distraction aside, however, Virtue and a Sledgehammer is an interesting title. Its narrative of a pretty ordinary (albeit, extremely strong) person who returns home to unleash their rage at those who harmed them growing up feels like something I’d normally prescribe to a short indie film or an episode of a TV show, but the game’s developers have opted for the interactivity of a video game to give the viewer ownership of how and when that rage is directed.
“It’s funny that you mention TV shows because we always think a lot about why this is a video game,” Deconstructeam creative director and writer Jordi de Paco told me. “And it’s always the power of video games. Like any medium can pose questions but only video games can make you answer them.”
Virtue and a Sledgehammer is a first for developer Deconstructeam, as the team’s past games have been extremely minimalistic in terms of how much you’re actually playing. While the sledgehammer-swinging mechanic in Virtue and a Sledgehammer is quite simplistic, it’s a level of violence and gameplay that goes beyond the studio’s past work on point-and-click games or narrative experiences.
“With this game, like we said at the beginning, it’s always more [about] designing combat or stuff like that,” de Paco said. “We are always designing situations [and] every level or every bit of the game is a situation. And in the same way you get to respond [in Virtue and a Sledgehammer] throughout the flashbacks with what you want to say, you get to respond [in the present gameplay] with a sledgehammer.”
In terms of being a game, Virtue and a Sledgehammer is okay (unless you’re launching the androids into the sky with murderous glee–then it’s quite a bit more fun). It’s clearly meant to be appreciated more as a piece of art than something that’s just to be enjoyed for fun.
“You cannot destroy a Spanish townhouse with a sledgehammer,” de Paco said. “It’s not possible, but in this game you can. And [the game] is about this method of being methodical, engaging with this destruction. It was a deliberate decision for us to not allow the player to run, and video game players immediately miss that–you are not able to run [in Virtue and a Sledgehammer]. In fact, with the demo on Steam, we have many requests from people to add a sprint button.”
According to the team, Virtue and a Sledgehammer did have a sprint button once upon a time, and was much more of a game than a narrative experience. “We removed it because it felt disrespectful with what was going on to just run around in town when you’re going through something really heavy, really stressful, [and] emotionally demanding,” de Paco said. “Suddenly, if you run, you lose all that vibe. You need to walk, you need to stare at things, and you need to decide how to deal with them with a sledgehammer.”
“We would rather have some people get bored about having to walk slower than appeal to the people that are fine with the walking speed but will run if they have the choice,” Fingerspit said.
“We are protecting them from themselves,” Selkie Harbour technical director & co-founder Guillermo Ferrando added. “There are these things that if you [implement], add up. Like, a lot more arcade-y moveset. If you can run and you can attack more, there is this room for thinking about what you’re gonna do before every android just slips away. We wanted to make the game more powerful regarding what you do, not how. It’s fun to break things, but it’s not fun violence [in Virtue and a Sledgehammer] per se.”
And I think that’s totally fine! But it’s good to know that going into the story–you’ll need to bring out your thinking cap and be ready for more abstract concepts to appreciate this one. And, if you’re like me, you won’t walk away from the game thinking, “That was so much fun!” Instead, you’ll go, “Oh that was interesting.”
“And after seeing people play through it, I start thinking that this is like an elaborate personality test,” de Paco said. “Like you throw someone into the game and you just watch them [in how they] behave and you get to learn a lot about them.”
I also get the feeling that Virtue and a Sledgehammer is a game that’s meant to be played multiple times. Not because there are different endings, but because your interpretation of the characters can change depending on what choices you make.
“There’s no reward for a pacifist run, but you can do a pacifist run and you can go through the whole game without killing anyone,” de Paco said. “I think that there’s only like this bit of dialogue that acknowledges that [you did so] if you do it, but it’s mostly just [asking,] ‘Why? How?'”
According to the developers, the demo I played only included the first 75% or so of the full game, so I still haven’t seen what kind of concluding statement Virtue and a Sledgehammer ultimately makes, or how the game’s ending will react to the choices I’ve made. I won’t have to wait all that long though–Virtue and a Sledgehammer is scheduled to launch on PC on October 27.
