Good things about Phoenix Point – the world-building

OK so I’ve been kinda down on Phoenix Point here, but I have kept playing it, and although that’s mostly because I have a serious addiction problem with XCOM, it’s also because PP has some good qualities and particularly some good world-building, and I think that’s something you people would dig.

First, let’s get the yawn/eyeroll-inducing parts out of the way – yes it’s a
– postapocalyptic survival game
– with Mad Max collapsed-world petty kings
– and a “Lovecraftian” story
– and big machine guns
– and a pandemic that turns out to be aliens (always aliens), some of which look like they’re wearing your grandma’s underwear on their heads:

and more guns than people, just like America.

BUT its writers have actually read some Lovecraft, so it has a whole thing about deep time, hominid and human evolution (including a lurking shame in humanity’s DNA), long cometary periods, Yuggoth, and mind-control technologies. It even quietly raises some questions (without resolving them) about why aliens can control human minds. Is there some… basic compatibility between them?
AND YET in spite of this high level of literacy compared with most “Lovecraftian” video games, it’s still really the same level of seriousness as Stranger Things. It expresses that through occasional moments of satirical humour –

or

and it’s not even above Rickrolling you – each Haven of survivors has a motto; one of them is “Never gonna give you up.”

The soul of the game, though, is its three NPC factions, which have very distinct characters. In many ways, playing PP is about choosing between these factions – you are told quite explicitly that your own organization’s idea for winning is Pyrrhic – it’ll lead to the death of most of mankind, and anybody else’s idea is likely to be better. And each faction has its own technologies, so the wise player charts a course between them, gathering tools and strategy ideas from each. But the factions are designed as rivals with incompatible philosophies and they periodically throw questions at you, to find out whether you share their world view, and the designers have some fun framing those questions to make it uncomfortable for the player to just tell the faction what they want to hear.

They’re also…. strangely familiar. OK look, you could interpret them as takes on any number of historical prototypes – say, Romans, Persians, and Greeks; or the 3 dominant tendencies of late Weimar Germany – Nationalists, Christian Democrats, and Socialists; but to my eye, they look unmistakably like 3 (unflattering) faces of contemporary America: Authoritarian Conservatives, Religious Cultists, and Techbro Utopians. And the art does a phenomenal job of painting those three ideas, through their architecture and equipment, and their statements and approaches to problems.

The authoritarians call themselves New Jericho and their leader, Tobias West, is initially described to you as a billionaire with an uncompromising vision, but he is slowly revealed to be somewhere around Hitler on the dictator scale. Their buildings all look like mixtures of factories and barracks – the Military-Industrial Complex laid bare:

nice underground train or truck tunnel there.

and there’s a pervasive grottiness to life in their Havens – messy mess tables for mass meals, military barrack showers and unmade beds, because who has time for niceties when there’s a war on? They’re also the only faction with propaganda billboards everywhere:

and toilet rolls; toilet rolls feature prominently.

Their APC and aircraft look distinctly like part of a Vietnam war timeline and their guns are resolutely bullet-based. You just know they get off on “rolling coal” and go hunting aliens for sport in their spare time,

and their color palette is murky cold grey and camo green.

Which could be a look for the whole game, right? Mad Max havens, the militarized future – but then you meet the cultists – the Disciples of Anu, and they seem to be living in a completely different world:

one that’s learning to live with the virus, and embracing mutation and the strange new skills they’re developing. Their ruling class are mind-controlling priests, they fly zeppelins, which are partly alive and partly blinged out,

and all their biggest buildings are temples, full of statues. In fact, they’re suspiciously well-funded – almost as if their cult leaders had been preparing for an end-of-the-world event for years before it actually happened.

And, refreshingly, they’re not necessarily the enemy. Sure, they have bad days where they start shouting at you to cleanse the world of unbelievers, but then you calmly say no and then another leader comes in and apologizes and says that’s really not their teachings. They’re sort of Neo-Sumerian or cod-Mayan, but I suspect they’re most of all Tekumel-inspired. And they just might have the best solution to the whole alien-virus-invasion problem.

They also might be onto something with their Sumerian schtick, because it turns out human (or hominid) civilization has been around a lot longer than people think and you can go dig up some Antediluvian Tech from secret Indiana Jones sites and it’s got this kinda gold floaty thing going on that’s more similar to the Disciples than anyone else:

some kind of stone age particle accelerator? Funny how humanity never noticed it before…

even the Antediluvians were not immune to the lure of Steampunk.

Finally, Synedrion are the Techbro Utopians and they have two big obsessions – on one hand, Ancient Greek gods and Athenian democracy, and on the other, Silicon Valley corporate parks and Apple/Dyson product design.

Their buildings are full of cantilevered overhangs (which are kind of a nightmare in a game that shows you slices through the terrain, floor-by-floor) and giant textured glass walls (which you can’t hide behind but also can’t accurately shoot through), and their half-green-spaced parking lots are full of charging stations and fountains and trees that play havoc with your jump jets. They’ve long since abandoned petrol and bullets for cold fusion and lasers, and you just know their uniform fibers are ethically-sourced – even if they’re also long-term toxic and a landfill menace for future generations. Their planes and ground vehicles were clearly designed by the same hairdryer guru:

and with similar goals in mind – they have the fastest speeds, highest costs, and smallest passenger capacities of any vehicles in the game, because that’s who their users are, right? High-flying executives, mostly working alone. If you need to carry more people, buy two of them. Duh.

And looking at the game’s arc through the eyes of these three factions, I find myself asking (as I did with XCOM2), “what will life be like in this world, after you solve the immediate crisis?” And I’m genuinely not sure which of the factions I would choose to go live with… the game does a pretty good job of setting you up for “maybe something can be saved out of each of them, but maybe none of them is right as it stands.”

Oh, right, but that Stranger Things limit on seriousness? So each faction has a color palette – militaristic grey for New Jericho, Apple white for Synedrion, and lush purple and gold for the Disciples of Anu (though they wear it with a certain restraint that makes it look cohesive at least, if not logical).

But you the player can customize your color palettes for each soldier, or you can check the “randomize” button, and I am so glad I did the latter. Because the palette they randomize from is fabulous.

I asked my engineers to build a copy of the Synedrion super-hoover, pictured above, and this is what they gave me.

It’s always like this. Here’s what the randomizer gave me for a stealth unit, comprising a Sniper, a Priest, and an Anu Berzerker.

And you know what? I love it. I would Berzerk too. And I can always find my soldiers against a feature-rich background.

ETA: I have now finished the game and have spoilery denouement thoughts about the outros (which someone has handily collected in a video). Ending spoilers follow:

…so remember the Hitler guy? Turns out he’s more of a Hitler/Stalin figure, obsessed with purity:

and uncompromising unity. His ending gets the strongest mismatch between image and text:

although I wonder if all US players would get that it’s mismatched – after all, it’s a mainstay of American militarist propaganda that “freedom isn’t free” – you have to have a bunch of people signing away their freedom in military contracts in order to “protect the rights of every individual.” Bush’s mantra was that Iraqis must die in war so Americans may live in peace.

The Utopian ending has you freeing the aliens from being mind-controlled by their evil overlord, which is a highly interesting deviation from the Lovecraftian norm and raises Chimera Squad questions about how humans are going to live in peace with independent, intelligent species that have totally different ecological requirements. But its imagery ducks all these questions and just shows you some Syd Mead/Dymaxion architectural renders that you’ve already seen:

The one that cracks me up is the lovin’ the alien Anu Cult ending,

because of the dude with a cowboy hat and tentacles. Like “yep partner, that’s how we be naow.” Considering changing the name of this blog to “bound by the chains of an imperfect biology.”

Architectural history for gamers 2b: mountains and misdirection

So last post we’d finally got to the throne room at Kandy and discovered that maybe the god-king actually isn’t who we need to talk to. He sits there, absolutely immobile, a mysterious silhouette on a throne at the end of the ritual garden, while various courtiers tell you what he wants and how you should be bowing and scraping. What gives?

1796, the highest point in Kandy palace, the king enthroned – a god incarnate on Earth, and 6 Dutch East India Company officials, who are used to giving orders, not kneeling in front of distant monarchs they can barely see.

It turns out the god-king is supposed to make everything work (everything – the sun rising, the tides going in and out) just by being. Or by his Divine Will, if you want a kinda-Christian gloss on it. And so it’s vitally important for him to never lift a finger, because that would look like taking action, which is not what he’s supposed to do.

Typical PCs in this situation look around the room to see who’s really in charge – some back door or chink in the armor that can let them break into the system and make off with the loot. And Dutch East India Company officials are absolutely typical PCs. This whole throne room setup is not useful to them – you came on a pilgrimage to see a god on Earth and you got this close to the mystery, but the final veil cannot be pierced? Try telling that to the Company directors. Therefore it must be false.

And it turns out the throne room landscape is kind of a misdirection – the people who really have power are the various groups of Buddhist and Hindu priests who speak for the king and maintain the religious traditions on which the king’s power depends. The king might actually be powerless, or might be a player among players, or might be secretly running the show in spite of his immobility, but the priests can do things. A very similar situation existed in Bali during the same period, BTW – there, the real holders of power were the Buddhist priests who (can you guess?) …controlled the flow of water down the mountain.

A Balinese mountaintop temple, with attendant water channels

The Balinese lived on wet rice cultivation in the 19th century – these rice paddies run all the way down the mountainside.
And they need an enormous amount of water to operate – you have to flood them to germinate the rice, and then dry them out for the growing/ripening season

…and it’s all controlled by the Buddhist clergy, who direct water to one rice farm or another, according to a calendar that only the priests understand, in order to ensure cosmic balance around the island and especially among the farmers who give generously to the monasteries.

So how can the king of Kandy balance the power of the different priestly sects? This is where James Duncan’s book on the subject really comes alive – he gets into the court politics and the competing discourses on which court power depends, and the arena in which the power struggles play out, and in the end it’s all about landscape design.

See, everyone has a stake in the king being accepted as divine – all the different priestly groups want a stable kingdom (with themselves at the top, naturally), and that means a king that agrees with the story they’re telling in their temples. Water is life and it is right and proper that the lake (or reservoir, actually) should be next to the palace – that wave-swell wall is a reminder that “the crown adorns the kingdom, as waves adorn the sea.” But past that, everyone wants different things. The Buddhists want Kandy tobe more like the ancient Empire of Ashoka, when the water was kept for the welfare of all, and everyone came to the Buddhist temples for education. So their ideal king would open up the lake and the temples for public access and would teach the kids Buddhist scripture, and incidentally keeps the Hindus down as second-class citizens. The Hindus, on the other hand, want the kingdom to be like other Hindu kingdoms on mainland India, with access to water and temples reserved for the privileged classes, the water being nicely channeled into walled parks and gardens, the better to echo the park-like top of Mt. Meru. In their view, the lake, temples and king should all be a bit distant from the common people, tucked behind the palace walls.

Now, a canny king would play these interests off against each other, alternately favoring one faction or another, or managing to please everyone a little bit with signs that could be read favorably by any group. So he walls off part of the lake beside the palace, and makes a garden for the Hindus to enjoy, but the other shore of the lake is open access to the Buddhist commoners. Or he sequesters a shrine behind a palace canal but puts a big Buddha statue on the hill above it, or he makes rich garden apartments for the Hindu aristocrats but puts them some miles outside the center of the city, so that the aristocrats feel guilty about not staying there. And the result is an ambiguous landscape full of contradictory signs, where making a change anywhere could lead to a shift in the balance and re-reading of the signs everywhere.

The South Indian Mayamatam Shastra (a sort of architectural manual that tells you how to construct everything from a garden to a kingdom) says “if the measurements of the temple are in every way perfect, there will be perfection in the universe as well.” Which is a great way to keep all your religious advisors haggling about temple measurements, while you get on with ruling and raising taxes and waging war and peace. On the other hand, “if the king swerve ever so little from righteousness, the planets themselves will desert their orbits… rainfall will diminish, all life on Earth will cease,” which is a great way to keep your king in line.

The last king of Kandy was not particularly canny. He came up with a sneaky plan to imprison the Hindu aristocrats in a new, highly desirable set of mansions, but in selling them the idea, he also wound up walling off the most important Buddhist shrine – so his scheme of trapping the Hindus in a gilded prison just looked to the Buddhists like giving their rivals a load of gold, stolen from themselves. He demanded that Buddhist peasants do the building work and took Buddhist temple lands away to expand the lake… with the intention of rebuilding things to restore the balance later. The whole plan might possibly have worked out in the Buddhists’ favor if it had been completed, but… the Buddhists understandably saw the raw ditches being dug and the disorder in the city and a wall of earth going up around their Shrine of the Buddha’s Tooth, and… they complained to the English (who had replaced the Dutch on the coast), that this bad Tamil king was cutting down their sacred trees and creating “great mountains of earth… a place where dogs and foxes defecate at night.” Worst of all, he had built a giant monstrosity of an octagonal tower for viewing elephant races or some other such Hindu-inflected nonsense:

The very order of the world was under threat. Perhaps the English could step in and mediate, restore order, and put the king in his place?

The English, of course, didn’t care about any of that. They wanted cheap and reliable cinnamon delivered to the docks down in the coastal city of Colombo, and to spend as little time in Kandy, where the cinnamon grows, as possible. So they brought in troops and put down the king, and then put down the Buddhist elites, and set up a cinnamon extraction factory, and then chopped down the bodhi trees to make room for a tea plantation, and nobody got their lake or their mansions. They could have their Temple of the Tooth, though… once its keepers had lost their right to landscape the kingdom.

That controversial octagonal tower even became an emblem for Ceylon tea at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition. Note also the bit of wave-swell wall, in the corner of the image.

So how do you use all this in games? The first thing is, if landscape communicates, then it can also lie – or at least have multiple interpretations. Potemkin villages, carefully-framed views that have wanton destruction just outside the picture, presentations that conceal the true nature of things – Lewis Mumford said the weakest regimes tend to have the most solid-looking buildings. The second thing is, landscape is no more static than anything else – it may be expensive to dig lakes or flatten hills but landscapes also change by having different people living in them, or by being imagined differently. Whom does it serve (and whom does it flatter), when you put up or take down a wall, bridge, or dam? Access to water and farmland and streets and markets can raise some communities up and push others down. Power over the people generally involves some power for those people – and nothing makes people feel ignored and aggrieved like an imposition thrown up on their land. Forts and churches want to be able to see each other, to send signals and know that all’s well between them – what happens when you put an obstruction in the way?

To take an example from fiction, one of my favourite moments in the recent Westworld TV series is where we discover the Great Designer has been designing a whole new corner of the kingdom, with a giant bucket scoop excavator hidden over the ridge of his ersatz Western wilderness park. It’s a literal case of politics via landscape – he’s taking back control of his creation from his creations.

Bagger 293, ready for its close-up

It’s an old joke that killing the dragon and looting its hoard will tank the local economy by flooding it with gold – but what about the land developers that were being held at bay by the prospect of being barbecued? Or the cult that can now “reclaim” their holy mountain? Or the cult that has lost their nightly firework display, that proved God was still on their side? The pilgrim routes that are disrupted, the royal roads that can now cut across the goblins’ swamp? Which provinces and ethnic groups will profit, which will be pushed up into those suddenly-open mountain pastures, forced to dig bits of dragon-glass out of them so they don’t lacerate or mutate their sheep, while the Emperor’s retired Elite Guards swipe all the fertile, long-fallow farmland? If you knock down the black monolith on Druid Mesa, how will the aliens know where to park on the next planetary alignment?

Of course, the state of politics can be expressed in a hundred ways. But the power of landscape is, it’s always there. And if it changes, you immediately know about it – when something is rotten in the state, it leaves marks on the countryside. And vice versa.

…I guess I’m just repeating what Lorenzetti said in the 14th century with his murals, the Allegory of Good and Bad Government, for the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.

Good government has blue hills, neat farms, and naked women flying in the sky.

Bad government leads to ghostly soldier figures, burning towns, and frescoes in a poor state of conservation.

Architectural history for gamers 2a: the holy mountain

Not Jodorowski’s hallucinatory epic (sorry) but the whole concept of holy mountains as narrative landscapes.
…recapping the end of the last post,
Before the British conquered Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), it had an independent kingdom tucked into its central highlands, called Kandy (or “Candea” in 16th century Portuguese):

…ringed by forbidding mountains:

this is from before everyone agreed to do maps with North pointing up, so I’ve rotated it to match the map above

The Kings of Kandy ruled over a mixture of Hindu and Buddhist subjects and they presented themselves as ideal priest- or philosopher-kings in both traditions, ruling an ideal spiritual kingdom that was effectively heaven on Earth. This has been a pretty common ploy throughout… most places. China, India, SE Asia, central America, Greece…. So many places, in fact, that some early historians of religions tried to come up with ur-myths about the universality of the ideal kingdom as a mirror of the kingdom of the gods, and of the ruler being a pin or axis point that locks our dirty world together with the ideal god-world, which is usually located in a city in the sky or on a bit of land that touches the sky, i.e. a mountain top.

So a lot of temples are built in the form of holy mountains, like they’re the local version or access point to The Holy Mountain. Shown here, one of the Jain temples at Khajurato, India.

here’s a Buddhist one, from Borobudur, Java, Indonesia, complete with shlepping ascent trek and meditative wheezing.

In many Hindu traditions, that god-home mountain is Mount Meru, which is a very unusual shape:

…wider at the top than the bottom (that’s not actually perspective). It’s also square, but it’s shown trapezoidally on the picture above to show off the colors of 3 of the sides. Mt. Meru sits at the middle of the world (like Kandy in the middle of Sri Lanka), anchoring it firmly to the sky. From Mt. Meru, the world expands in all its glory until it reaches the 4 or 7 concentric seas that surround it, and beyond that is chaos and/or The Buddha. The whole thing is called a Mandala system, and it was as important to Chinese and Majapahiti political theory as to Kandyan.

Phew, that’s better: a nice, clear plan view, more like the maps we’re familiar with, no ambiguous perspective.

The god-home has 4 rivers that spring from a single source/lake and flow down the sides of the mountain, dividing the world into 4 continents – that same scheme finds its way into various Persian and Islamic cosmographies, which explains the 4-garden paradise or chahar bagh, centered on a water cross, that you’re probably familiar with from Mughal funerary parks or late Almohad palaces.

The popularity of the mountain-as-center probably has something to do with mountains being so damn visible from everywhere (and, just occasionally, powerfully explosive). There’s also a common feature that they tend to have people living on them who are regarded as original – either culturally older than valley-dwellers or at least less tractable – it’s an old saw that “civilizations can’t climb hills,” and the Portuguese and Dutch took a lot longer to colonize the hilly center of Sri Lanka than the accessible coast, just like the Romans had had a harder time Imperializing the mountain-dwelling Basques and Caucasus-folks than the valley-dwelling Goths and Franks (although James Scott says we’ve got it backwards – valley people get driven up into the hills in attempts to escape oppressive valley governments, which would support the general principle that ideologies are usually created to cover up the truth, not to represent it). And it’s remarkable how many stories there are around the world about mountains being the origin points for civilizations or the holders of ancient truth and wisdom – the Bugis have a creation myth in which they climbed down out of the sky, from the mountains of Sulawesi. In the Bible, Noah’s family repopulates the world after the flood from the peak of Mt. Ararat (an origin story asserted by, among others, Turkmenbashi).

So mountains come with inbuilt concepts of power and purity – whether that stems from their proximity to heaven or the strange vibrations in the air above the mountaintop, or their harshness, which is imagined to make people stronger. Concepts that stand in direct contradiction to the facts – that mountains suck for supporting polities (they generally have terrible topsoil and worse communications) and have historically hardly ever been origin points for empires (yes yes I know, the Inca. But they’re a special case – no beasts of burden or competition from lowlanders to speak of – they can be seen as more of a community of desperate solidarity than an ambitious and expansive imperial project).

OK so back to Kandy and its political ideology of being a mountain god-kingdom. In the 16th-18th centuries, if you applied to send an embassy to the kingdom from one of the cities down on the coast, they would send you a guide and the whole thing was presented as a pilgrimage. You’d have to bring gifts and pack elephants and it would take weeks.

And the path up the mountains was strictly laid out by the guide: setting out from a courtyard with a bodhi tree (like the one the Buddha died under) you pass through 7 “thorn gates” to have your initiation checked before reaching another bodhi tree just outside the hidden valley

and beyond that, you’d wait at the border of the great lake – source of the life-giving rivers of Sri Lanka.

If the chamberlain invited you across, then you’d ascend another 7 layers at the palace.

from the Wave Swell Wall (symbolizing the waters of the lake) to the Meru Gate, to the Cloud Drift Wall (entering heaven), to the Terrace (with a floor like the sea), Upper Terrace, Lower Audience Hall and, finally, the Throne Room, where the king was displayed, remotely, at the end of another indoor stage-set-like garden, attended by courtiers who would interpret your requests.

Dutch East India Company delegation to Kandy, 1796

So, how to use all this in games?

…published adventures often make some use of landscape in setting the scene – the entrance to the dungeon is in the ruins of a long-lost civilization, multiple layers of history inform the presence of different factions of enemies – but they seldom make the landscape set the scene in a way that makes it relevant to the current action, that frames what the game will really be about. Two notable exceptions are Patrick and Scrap’s Deep Carbon Observatory and Zedeck Siew’s Lorn Song of the Bachelor – the latter, in particular, has the landscape reconfiguring as the adventure runs, to show the current state of play. (Go read those books. I don’t want to spoiler them)

A great example from video game is Tim Schafer’s Grim Fandango, which not only uses a Holy Mountain pilgrimage as its overall frame, it also uses that frame to make it natural that the interaction possibilities and interconnection of spaces reduce steadily as you progress along the game’s journey. It’s a Noir detective story set in the Mexican Land of the Dead, and you start out in a mythologized, Americanized-Modern Mexico City:

which is a whole lot like Raymond Chandler’s LA, plus some of that kinda-Mayan styling that was so popular in the American West in the 1930s. The soundtrack is Mariachi bands and 40s jazz. The plot propels you out of this, into a sort of Tom Waits fool’s journey of thorny forests and doomed dockside casinos and a damnation/redemption narrative that’s more Spanish and Catholic in mood and Casablanca/Third Man in style, with art reminiscent of Diego Rivera murals, all set to tangos and 20s speakeasy jazz.

Along the way, your Jacquayed dungeons get steadily smaller and the puzzles get more elemental, until finally you reach the spiritual showdown, and it’s… a pre-Columbian mountaintop (perhaps Monte Alban) with nothing but the wind, heaven, hell, and pan pipes.

The story these shifting landscapes tell is one of choices narrowing down into destiny – you start in an expansive city, trying to do your job and accidentally discovering something’s wrong. Along your journey you get into claustrophobic environments of the trapped dead – souls who have lost their way and have nothing left to do but gamble and make each other miserable, clustered in a little town in a canyon, dominated by symbols of how they can’t escape – a gigantic ship and zeppelin that are unreachable because they’re too expensive, because you don’t have the right ticket. And finally the place of judgment is all sheer faces of stone with no refuges or toeholds.

“No ticket? I can’t do nothin’ for ya. Go back where ya came from.” You know I never noticed before how much that eagle looks like the US border control logo…

It’s also, by the way, the kind of narrative of Mexican nationalism you get if you go on a tour to see the ancient ruins – you start in the (relative) lowlands, taking in the big city sights to see how modern Mexico can be, then go up into the Spanish heritage staging towns below Monte Alban or Teotihuacan, and finally… stones, grass and sky. What we have left of the Aztecs, Zapotecs and Mayans.

Another way to go with this is to pick up on the fact that this little paradise is just a mirror of the greater one that you can’t visit. If mountain-shaped temples get their power from mimesis of the Original Mountain, like franchise outlets of a Master Brand, then having something go wrong with the power network is a great way to launch a campaign – what if the life-waters stop flowing from the Paradise spring? Or communications stop between the franchise and Head Office? What if the orcs next door have their own alternative mountain cult and the townsfolk are converting for access to cheap candy? Then the landscape the players know from their own local temple can inform their investigation – first as a standard to hold the rest of the world to (“hey, these pyramids don’t look anything like the ones we have back home!”), later maybe as a sign of how badly things have gone wrong (“you mean we’re the only ones that kill the goblins?”)

part 3 – Mountains of Lies – coming soon…

Architectural History for Gamers 2: telling stories with spaces

We’ve talked about communicating via city walls and we’ve talked about buildings that want to tell you about their character, but we haven’t really talked about ways that ordering things in space can itself communicate messages. How landscape and architecture tell stories – about what happens in them, and about their visitors’ station.

So…

…a giant mountain smokes in the distance, looming through all 400 pages of book 2. It’s your certain doom, but maybe your salvation;

or: you stand on a cliff overlooking a rich land of golden fields. Only the black rock fingers in the east spoil this view of an orderly, heavenly kingdom;

or: the thick moss curtaining the river banks suddenly opens to reveal a vine-covered temple, nearly reclaimed by the jungle. The dungeon lies under the central pyramid;

or: north of The Wall, all is snow and meandering tracks up craggy mountainsides that spiral on and on into the bleak white. Nothing could live here, which is why the dead have annexed it;

or: this place is not a place of honor. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.

early design for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, New Mexico.

These are all communicative landscapes – they tell you what to expect will happen where the landscape gets special – and they transform you as you approach the special bit.

First, though, a few bits of theoretical orientation to bear in mind:

1. there’s no meaningful distinction between landscape and architecture. (a) Landscape is often designed and sculpted – golf courses and American cemeteries get that picturesque quality by judicious use of earth-moving equipment and planting trees in just the right places. (b) You can’t possibly build a whole holy mountain (yes you can) but you can tell people which way to go up it by putting a path there, and then you can put, like, stages of the cross or something along that path to turn your little river-grotto into Jesus’s cave or whatever. Or you can just tell stories about it, that reconfigure its parts into a memory palace for your story elements, or you can tell people they must be this holy to go there.
2. architecture communicates social order – it situates its users and assigns them a status, it expresses social hierarchy and specific roles – who is in charge of or responsible for whom. This is generally the most important thing architecture does – more than keeping the rain off or the grain dry. Social order is king: dry followers and dry grain, if they’re involved at all, are generally part of the project of social ordering.* And usually architecture does this as part of a complicated textual program that involves writing and rituals and everyday practice and rites of passage and so on. Very often, the actual built architecture refers to another place that’s so special you can’t go there, you just have to imagine it, so the architecture you can see is just a pale imitation of that greater, deeper reality, which means the users have to fill in the missing details (or scrub out the non-ideal intrusions) themselves.
3. architecture is in the first place the assembling of ideas, and a lot of architecture is composed of nothing else. Societies “produce spaces” to keep their functions separate or to usefully intertwine certain concepts (like, say, indoctrination of children, by having them be born only inside a controlled institution, which is also where they’ll get their moral education). So landscape design is as much about steering the visitor’s thoughts and opinions as it is about moving their body.

It’s at around this point that someone (usually Vitruvius) inevitably complains that architecture is most of all practical. It has to be fit for purpose. But what purpose? Things aren’t “just practical,” they’re practical because they support a practice, which is to say, a ritual of putting society in its place.

So to really understand what a bit of architecture/landscape is doing – the full program of ideas it’s serving – you’ll probably have to read (and, yes, maybe even dance) about it. But also, there is a bit of this big program that is (maybe must be) communicated through spatial arrangement. Probably because it communicates below the level of discourse – that is, it doesn’t tell you in words (that you could disagree with, if you heard them) what it means, it just is and continues to be all the time you’re moving through it. You understand maybe without being able to put into words what you’ve understood. Holy mountains are solid and tall and difficult to climb – they have a sort of morality of perseverance built right into them, just like alcohol and hangovers contain a morality of brief euphoria and lingering painful consequences.

Landscape, even more that buildings, is a thing you generally can’t experience all at once, so its communications tend to happen over time, in series.

The pilgrim trail prepares the visitors by having them follow a specific path where you can frame their views and by revealing things one after another – so they can work like story beats, but also so the visitor can be put into a particular mood before they get shown the next thing.

After walking a few hundred miles of pilgrim track from Paris to get to Rocamadour in the south of France, you are first of all greeted with a sort of player map of the site, that shows the Ordinary People (like you) at the bottom, and then a set of gatehouses guarding the Holy People at the top:

Once you’ve checked into your lowly guesthouse at the bottom of the cliff,

you climb up a twisty path to get to the holy places

and along the way, when you’re out of breath and you’ve been turned around half a dozen times and everything gets a mystical soft-focus glow, you get shown the (local) Cave of Christ’s Sepulchre…

…hidden behind a gate, and… it’s oddly convincing that this is a sort of extension of Jerusalem.

So when you get to the paved abbey/church at the top and you finally get to go into another dark… cave-like structure:

you’re ready for revelations that you feel you’ve earned – special realizations reserved just for you, from the blue-shrouded figure above the altar.

The point here is, it doesn’t work if you can stroll in straight from the market. With apologies to Charles Reade, “make ’em shlep, make ’em wheeze, make ’em wait.”

If this sort of thing is good for spiritual awakening, it’s also good for inspiring awe in a king’s subjects.

Before the British conquered Ceylon, it had an independent kingdom tucked into its central highlands, called Kandy

or “Candea” in 16th century Portuguese, ringed by forbidding mountains.

Part 2 to follow……

* for a really cool and complicated, totalizing vision of architecture ordering society, check out Pierre Bourdieu’s classic study of the Berber (or Kabyle) House, in which all the episodes of social life, birth, marriage and death, are set out in the ideal ordering of a family home. One of Bourdieu’s observations is that the whole world of traditional Berber men is made up of stuff that’s offered properly to the right or the left hand – a sort of manly ordering of the habits of the body, and that inside the house that whole order is reversed… because the house is orientated for the woman, who sits at her loom facing the door, waiting for her man to come home with his hunting trophies.

How to have fun playing Phoenix Point

I persisted with Phoenix Point, the alt-universe version of XCOM by the original designer, and it’s almost, mostly a good game! But most players are never able to access that goodness because, as I’ve noted before, it has some serious problems with information design. And its interface and gameplay are different from XCOM in some important ways, which it fails to tell you about… which is weird when you consider that the majority of Phoenix Point players are apparently XCOM players who are looking for similar games.

So here’s a quick guide to getting past the problems and finding the fun in PP, to keep you from having to go through 3 restarts and waste dozens of hours like I did. I’m not really offering a strategy guide – this video does a good job of that – I’m doing something more basic: letting you know about pitfalls in the basic presentation of the game. If you think it might be fun after reading this, you’ll probably have fun with it. My next post on the topic will be about the game’s world-building, which is actually quite good.

1. Disable the Festering Skies DLC. It might be because I’m running it on a Mac, or it might be a bug or a weird RNG artifact, or maybe I’m just not appreciating the fun of being stopped cold after 20 hours of play, but my experience is, it doesn’t work. And from watching videos it seems like it wouldn’t be much fun even if it did. On the downside, you’ll miss out on fighting with aircraft!!! On the upside, even when they work, the aircraft fights seem to be like a bad phone minigame. So, avoid.
2. “Cheat” in every way you can think of. The game expects it – seems, in fact, to actively encourage it. This is a design philosophy I’m familiar with from reports of how Gygax ran his D&D games – Gary expected you to listen closely to what he was saying, look for exploits (like oil flask grenades), and try to outwit him. That’s what this game is about, too. A very basic case in point: some players think it’s bad form to exploit the inventory system, which operates in a kind of no-space dimension, teleporting gear to wherever you want it, so you can strip the armor off one person in Mexico and put it on another one in India. I’m here to tell you, it’s supposed to be like that. The game is full of weird, non-naturalistic boundaries about when things are in a definite place or no-place: trust it when it offers you a crock. Moreover, its resource economy, in which you can’t build a research lab because you’re using all your materials making bullets, is balanced (to the extent it’s balanced at all) with teleporting bullets in mind. So if there’s a misprint, exploit it. And be ready to savescum around some balance issues. In particular….
3. Check if your starting position is unwinnable. You cannot trust the RNG on this, either at the individual mission level or the whole game level. Regarding individual missions, nobody gave any serious thought to ranking the enemies and balancing encounters, so when you load a level, sometimes it will have 3 boss monsters that all attack you at once, and sometimes they’ll be 3 entry-level mooks. I am giving you permission to reload (the game autosaves just before every mission, probably for exactly this reason). Regarding the whole game, if it starts you in South America, you should probably restart. In any event, before you get invested in playing the game, you should spend an hour just scouting around with your aircraft to make sure that there are representatives of all 3 NPC factions somewhere near you – and then reload so you don’t lose all that valuable early-game time. If one faction is missing, then many of the winning strategies are simply unavailable to you. You could treat that as hard mode, but the game is already hard mode.
4. Watch the interface closely, it often contains more information than it really tells you up front. If you mouse over an enemy, for instance, it shows you how far than enemy can run, or the area of effect of its attack, which is information it otherwise withholds. And double-check your troops’ loadouts – PP is just fine with sending your people out to missions without any weapons or armor.
5. Try not to rely on metaphors or what the game interface implies – the fact is, PP operates in its own universe, which only sometimes looks like ours. For instance, the ring around your airplane that contracts as you fly seems like it could be an indicator of the remaining range before you refuel. It isn’t. It does represent a sort of range, but it resets every time you pass over any Point of Interest, no matter what it is – an unknown thing, the base of an enemy you’re at war with, a thing that used to be unknown but you spent time examining it and now you know there’s nothing there. Doesn’t matter, a dot on the map resets your airplane range. Another example: after you build a Containment Facility, you can capture disease-aliens but only, only if you paralyze them – mind control doesn’t count. Or the manufacture/scrap screen – you can guns to get resources back from them, but you can’t scrap vehicles. That’s just the physics of PP, same as teleporting inventory.
6. Pay attention to what is spatially located and what isn’t. Some buildings inside your bases only serve the particular base they’re in (power gen, aircraft hangars, satellite uplinks, medical bays). Others can be anywhere and just contribute to a global counter (research labs, manufacturing facilities, archaeology labs, stores). New gear, vehicles, and recruits get auto-delivered to whichever base you state… and you have to watch the interface like a hawk because you will definitely accidentally send them to Base #1, the default, unless you’re hyper-vigilant.
7. Only build what you really need. Activating bases is expensive – broadly speaking, you should only activate them where their satellite scanning range will reach red mist zones. And every base needs power generation and a satellite uplink, but apart from that, you should limit what else you build. As a rule of thumb, a total of 4 research labs, 4 manufacturing sites, and 2 stores is enough for your worldwide empire. I also assign 2 bases to be stables for training and healing recruits – those act as squad headquarters and I put one in the Americas and another in Eurasia, to be able to respond to haven defense missions before they expire. Each stable gets 2 living quarters (repairs troop fatigue), 2 medical bays (repairs troop damage), and 2 training facilities (which give xp to recruits for whom you don’t currently have an aircraft) (those figures might not be optimal, but they’re working for me). Aircraft hangars and access lifts are irrelevant – in theory they could repair aircraft, in practice that’s never needed unless you foolishly activated Festering Skies. One more thing: you will have to go to Antarctica (which is just like any other continent – has people and farmland and so on). Some people think that means you need a base at the south end of South America, but my experience says this is not true – if you’re flying Helios aircraft, which you should be, you can get to Antarctica without building a special base for it.
8. Beware of accidental clicking. Sometimes you get a second chance (like when you’re assigning gear to troops most of the time before you go on a mission but not always) but in general, once you’ve clicked there’s no undo. I use TAB to go through any list – personnel, bases, whatever, because it’s unambiguous that I’m selecting from a menu, not choosing to do something with the current item.

9. (super important) The soldier advancement screen doesn’t work the way you’d expect from XCOM. It looks superficially similar, but it’s NOT QUITE.

On the left there’s your dude’s own inventory of stuff they’re carrying, and under that the no-space complete inventory window. Familiar enough. But on the right, there’s skill advancement and above that – the interface to increase your character’s Strength, Willpower, and Speed. I didn’t spot that for 40 hours, and it’s the thing you should do first.

Speed is the single most important stat for any character. Spend points on it first. Then Willpower, which is both your morale (your ability to keep fighting) and a resource you spend during fights to power your special abilities/skills. Only bother with skills once you’ve improved both Speed and Will to at least 12, and then balance stat and skill increases to maximize them all. Strength is the least important – it determines your damage with melee weapons (only important for Heavies, Berserkers, and people who have the randomly-assigned “use melee weapons” talent) and how much loot you can carry from scavenging missions. Only increase it when there’s nothing else left to spend points on.

At 4th level, every character unlocks the ability to multi-class. And every character should multi-class – but probably only after they’re 5th level in the first class, with good high stats. There are only 3 classes to start with – Sniper, Assault (runner), and Heavy (melee/jumper/heavy gunner), and the only multi-class really worth pursuing out of those is Sniper/Heavy, because you can use the Heavy’s jumpjets to reach a high sniping platform. But as you befriend the 3 NPC factions, you can unlock their classes… and then things get wild. This page explains the exploits that open up by combining different classes’ abilities, and they’re in general not obvious.

I draw your attention to the typical PP logic behind the Berserker (pictured in the example above). You first encounter berserkers as fast-running melee specialists, cracking heads for the Disciples of Anu – their heavy pistols make them annoying at close range and they will cut you to ribbons if you let them get into melee range, and they are all born with a giant hammer in one hand, so… melee troops, right? No.
“Berserkers are essentially a meta-class. There is no reason at all to use Berserker as melee fighters. It’s probably the one thing they are actually bad at, and this is neatly reflected by their skill set.”
Their first skill is Armor Break (shredding, in XCOM parlance), but “using this with a melee weapon is a very poor choice indeed.” It turns out one killer app is to multi-class berserker and sniper – the berserker can learn a skill of very limited utility – turning their 2AP melee attack into 1AP, allowing them to melee twice as often in one round at the cost of being useless the next round… but if they’re also a sniper, that turns a 3AP sniping shot into 1AP, and if they get the armored head mutation you can overcome the next-round hangover and…
…..it’s a big collection of Gygaxian crocks: exploits that lurk just below the surface that a new player sees, that completely change the balance of the system for “system masters.” And the whole game is built like that. A further crock: pay attention to your characters’ randomly-assigned talents, because if a character can buy e.g. sniper rifle talent, then you don’t necessarily need them to have the sniper class, so then you could use the skill crocks from 2 other classes with your sniper rifle. Multi-crocking, if you will.

On missions:

1. Forget XCOM and its move-then-shoot structure. In PP you can not only shoot-then-move, you can also split up your move action square by square, and unspent squares remain available after you’ve done anything else. So never move like you would in XCOM, where you advance to a good shooting position and stay there to shoot. No. Instead, advance just far enough that you can possibly hit an enemy (the interface shows you a line of sight if one exists), then shoot, then use your remaining movement squares after shooting to sneak back into cover before ending your turn.
2. Always, always click “free aim.” This lets you look down the gun sights and reveals several important things…
   (a) that your gun can’t see the enemy (heavy weapons are fired from knee height), therefore you won’t hit them;
   (b) that a friend is in the way, so you’ll hit them instead;
   (c) that the enemy’s waiting animation periodically exposes their head – wait for that moment, then hit “free aim,” which freezes them;
   (d) that if you moved sideways one square, you’d quadruple your chance of hitting the target.
3. Sniper rifles are like other guns but better. PP is very proud of its “realistic” shooting mechanic, which is “your bullet hits some pixel inside the gun sight.” In recompense, it doesn’t care at all about other weapon features, like e.g. having a minimum range for sniper rifles or rocket launchers. So use your sniper rifle from melee range and shoot them in the nostril. But be warned, there is one exception: Hera paralysis pistols. If you stand right next to an enemy and try to shoot them with that, the game doesn’t understand and pretends there’s no target. So leave 1 square of empty space between yourself and your Hera target.
4. Shoot them in the leg. Heads in PP control specific functions… but not life. Aliens’ heads are often purely decorative. And heads are small, therefore harder to hit. But legs are always important. Also, the best place to shoot an enemy in order to do the most damage is the place you’ve already destroyed – you’ve probably shredded the armor or other special factors off it, so all your damage goes through.
5. Everyone has 3 kinds of HP – health (shown on the health bar over their head), will (morale – never explicitly stated but you can guess a lot of the time, and it’s affected by lots of factors during a fight), and resistance to paralysis (explicitly stated after you’ve hit them with some paralyzing ray). The shortest path to victory is identifying which one of these is lowest and attacking that.

OK, so now you’re actually playing the game. How should you treat the NPCs? Where should you concentrate your efforts?

1. One of the questions I often ask of a game is, “what sort of philosophy does this game have? What’s the rewarded approach? Should I be a good, co-operative, pro-social pan-humanist or a selfish, nationalistic psychopath?” PP’s answer is, you must start as a psychopath but later switch to co-operative. This is because you cannot begin useful social relations with the NPC factions until you’ve done some crimes for them – specifically, sabotaging (not merely raiding!) the specific facility they ask for. Each wants you to sabotage another faction, so you must do the sabotage round robin and attack all 3 factions to please the others as quickly as possible. Because for some reason in the first week of game time, people get less upset with you. After that, you must be nice to them all and try to climb the ladder of their trust, which never again demands that you hurt relations with the others. It makes no sense but it’s true. You are frequently encouraged to screw the factions in various ways (steal their research, raid their bases, opine against their philosophies) but you should resist because the costs always outweigh the benefits after that first learning sabotage moment.
2. Winning is all about exploring quickly, and that takes aircraft. You start with 1 Manticore – the aircraft your own faction can make. The sooner you can get a second, the quicker you can double your exploration rate. AND your success on missions depends strongly on fielding a full squad of 8 soldiers, which (essentially) means deploying 2 aircraft to each mission. AND as your awareness of the world increases, so does your responsibility for defending faction havens, so eventually you’ll need at least 2 full squads, which is to say 4 aircraft. So build more aircraft as quickly as you can. You could steal them (it’s actually trivially easy to do so by exploiting a land vehicle) but see the costs of annoying the NPC factions in the preceding point. Players who make videos say “heist 2 Helios aircraft from Synedrion immediately, you’ll progress much faster” but (a) I’ve never had the opportunity to do so and (b) their advice might be out of date or just irrelevant, depending on where the Synedrion havens are and just how quickly the faction-annoyance costs change and… you really, really want Synedrion as a friend, so my advice is, it’s probably better to build your own aircraft and befriend Synedrion and eventually they’ll teach you to build your own Helioses. I did that, it was fine.
3. You do want Helioses, though. Aircraft speed is a very important factor in (a) how fast you can explore, (b) your ability to defend havens that are attacked by aliens. Faster aircraft = fewer squads needed, so even though Helioses are expensive, they work out cheaper because you can get away with fewer squads. Anu’s Tiamats are just bad and dumb except if you use them for the Legacy of the Ancients content, below, and New Jericho’s Thunderbirds are never better for anything. Oh, also, you might think that the greater range of the Tiamat would be important in, say, crossing the oceans. It isn’t. The only way from Eurasia to the Americas (and the only way from Antarctica to South Africa or Australia) is over the north pole. Effectively, PP is played on a Dymaxion Projection minus the sea areas, so think of that when you’re deciding where to put your stables.
4. Make friends with all the factions, like the video strategy guide linked at the top of this post says. I think the priority order is Synedrion, then Anu, then New Jericho, but really you want to be besties with all of them, because that’s how you unlock their character classes, skills, tools, research and (in the end) win conditions, all of which are better than just relying on your own organization’s inventions.
5. Exploit vehicles and the weird mechanics of how your dudes ride in vehicles. Missions to get vehicles are 100x easier with a vehicle. But mostly leave the vehicles in your bases, because they can’t level up and that means robbing your dudes of xp.
6. Don’t worry about which of your dudes kills which enemies – xp are handed out to the whole squad for mission success far more than for individual kills.
7. Trade with faction havens. You (almost) can’t avoid making a profit, and trading is built into the game’s expectations. And each faction trades one of the three resources, so keep all the factions happy and trade with them.
8. Build replacement equipment. You start with a generous package of guns and armor, but they will all get destroyed. The game doesn’t tell you this, nor does it say “oh no your equipment got destroyed,” it’s just missing one day when you go to equip it on a character. Don’t build lots of it in advance, just a couple of spares so you don’t run short. Oh, and keep your wonderful Hel II cannons to use on only the toughest enemies. You won’t get any more until you research them, which you can’t do until you’ve performed an autopsy on a late-game alien enemy, so guard those Hel II rounds.
9. Pursue the Legacy of the Ancients content, which starts with a mission called Rise by sin, by virtue fall, because it unlocks superior weapons, including the most important single weapon in the game – a sniper rifle with the damage of a heavy cannon. On paper, this weapon doesn’t look like a game changer, but (a) most alien effects have shorter ranges than the sniper rifle, (b) lots of enemies’ toughness is designed to be just outside the damage effectiveness of ordinary sniper rifles, and (c) there are various crocks that make it easier to shoot more than once a round with a sniper rifle, so… it adds up. OK, but… this content has its own interface stuff, which is the worst-explained part of a badly-explained game. So here is a walkthrough, which I hope will make things clearer:

– after you’ve done several story missions, you get the chance to build archaeology labs and archaeology probes, to look for Antediluvian Sites. And you get a string of missions to steal info about a series of weapons to research. So do the missions and research. But you can’t build any of these weapons without a bunch of new weird materials, so you also…

1. Build exactly 4 archaeology labs, anywhere in the world – it’s the cheapest and fastest way to do everything else. 5 is a waste.
2. Then build 3+ archaeology probes. You can deploy these over half the Earth’s surface, centered on whichever aircraft you have selected at the time. They show you their scan circle, so… try to optimize those circles to cover the land area efficiently. Don’t worry about the sea or isolated islands. They will do a cute pink scan-sweep for a while, then when their scans are finished they… disappear. You may or may not get a message that you’ve found something. You will not be told what you’ve found or where.
3. Despair because the interface hates you and there is no help file to tell you what’s going on. OK, fine, here’s a help file:
   
   If you’ve found something, then a new Point of Interest has been added to the Geoscape. It looks like a green eye:

i.e. almost exactly like a Synedrion haven:

so you have to scour the areas you just scanned to look for that eye. But where did you scan? The interface just hid that information! OK, go to launch another probe…. and the area you’ve already scanned will light up pink! So that’s where you look for the eye(s).

Fly out to the eye icon, click “excavate” (which starts an 8 hour counter, during which you can fly elsewhere/do other stuff) and after excavation you’ll learn it’s either:
– an orichalcum mine or forge
– a mutane gas field or refinery
– a living crystal quarry or refinery.

THEN you send a squad to do a horrifically tough mission to kill all the ancient guardian robots at the site (no, there is no option other than killing them). After THAT:
– if it’s a mine, gas field, or quarry, station an aircraft over it to slowly extract its new weird resource. The most efficient option for this is a Disciples of Anu Tiamat aircraft with one basic Muton on board (by the time you get to this content, you’ll know what all that means). This is, AFAICT, completely safe. Nothing in the game can attack that aircraft/muton (provided you’re not running Festering Skies)
– but you can’t use that resource until you have its forge/refinery. Each resource has multiple extraction sites but only one refinery.

There is no advantage to owning more than one extraction site. You can speed up extraction by stationing multiple manned aircraft over it. And you must have extraction and refinery sites for all 3 resources to make the sniper rifle. So send out probes and excavate sites exactly until you have the 6 sites you need. And only attack the sites you need – if you’ve already got an orichalcum mine and you find a second one, leave it alone.

You can use some of the resources you get to rebuild a Guardian, to help you defend the site in the future. I have been doing this and my defense missions have been comically easy… but I don’t know if that’s because I got the Guardian or not. YMMV.

So, now you should be equipped to enjoy Phoenix Point. That’s all I’ve got for now. Feel free to ask me questions – I often miss comments to this blog, so the best way to talk to me about this is to hit me up on discord, where I am richardgrenville#1863