Breaking the Lustre | A Broken Reality
All Fax, No Printer.
Back in the 2010s, Vaporwave rode in on a wave of 80s-soaked green and pinks before surfing off to a neon sunset rising above an Arizona Tea sea. Where it once nested in the blind happiness of retro digitalware , it’s become an odd digital duck flapping its ugly wings in a post-pandemic, AI-questioning world.
The A E S T H E T I C has stopped being cool in this “hell is here” age, and its decommissioned processor has been left in the hands of a few loyal technicians to keep its electronic heart beating.
I grew up at the turn of the nineties and my siblings in the eighties. If you read my bio; we weren’t well off. When home computers reached their boom, the four of us shared our very first computer running Windows 95. It wasn’t until my precocious tweens that I borrowed my mum’s plastic Macbook to type up my school work… and play MapleStory.
The sweet siren screech of dial-up still rings occasionally in my memories, embodying the love I have for anything Vaporwave. As much as Vaporwave is a vessel for nostalgia for Millenials/Gen X like I, it too masterfully critiques consumerism with its nostalgic neon lens.
Moreso than the vaporware of its namesake, Vaporwave music and games bring the mirror up against its consumers’ reflections, asking them if and why they spend so much effort curating what they consume.
In this quest, I’ll explore three games: Broken Reality (DMT, 2018), Paradise Killer (Kaizen Game Works, 2020) and Holovista (Aconite, 2020). By entrenching entirely in the Vaporwave A E S T H E T I C, each game manages to skillfully critique it while maintaining their distinct identity.
Warning: Heavy spoilers ahead.
A robotic, alien figure with as many hands as all-seeing faces, Judge eagerly asks Lady Love Dies, the protagonist of Paradise Killer, if an island where its citizens imprisoned her is worth her expert investigative skills.
“Are you our saviour? Is paradise worth saving?”
We shall answer that later. For now, let us turn wide-eyed to Broken Reality.
You are thrown into the bright glitz of NATEM-owned Domo Paradisso. Onee-chan, the helpful AI assistant, tells you to enjoy your time in this dream-like world, and that she is always there to support you. Bold and nauseatingly neon, Broken Reality makes you, the player, use “tools” to like, spend and hack your way to obtain enough social capital to progress the game.
Scattered across Domo Paradisso and Axis Tower is an assortment of low-poly expressionless humans glued to their mobile devices, whose floating dialogues are a mix of cringe memes and realistic DMs. Few in number, the NPCs with unique models give you side quests or tell you memorable factoids to unlock more secrets of NATEM.
As you progress, spamming mouse clicks at kaleidoscopic pop-ups for likes, snapping photos of hallucinogenic beachscapes and samurai-slashing “virus.exe” windows to collect even more likes, the game slowly unveils a darker story behind the origins of the “Broken Reality.”
By mid-game, the fun social credit tools at your disposable become essential to unlocking the tragic, all-too-familiar tale of two creators. Look hard enough, and you’ll find tablets of the creators’ story told as a Greek myth in hidden parts of Paradisso.
Sigma and Architect simply wanted a safe space to hangout with their buddies. As word spreads about this new “Facebook”-esque space, this space is seized by the throes of corruptive capitalism, creating NATEM. Sigma and Architect fall out, and Sigma leaves the servers soon after.
Only… they don’t. Well, not quite.
Hiding in the dark undercurrents beyond Aquanet, Sigma creates their proxy, Zero-chan, who is so ‘corrupted’ that her name is an ERROR when the player meets her. Early game characters like the Shiba Inu shopkeeper in Domo Paradisso hint of this secret underbelly, but stop short, too afraid to get caught by administrators and booted out of NATEM. It isn’t until you meet and help the mysterious Phisherman that you learn of Innernet, the game’s final “social” level.
After puzzling and earning your way through the peak of Influencer-dom - Geocity and Love Cruise 64, you finally unlock Innernet. Left forgotten, Innernet is a desolate place where Sigma and Architect’s hangout has transformed into a broken codebase filled with “viruses.”
Using your tools, you help ERROR/Zero-chan save her ‘children’ in these depths. After completing a complex set of “collect triangle gems and solve puzzles”, you fall into a chasm – right into a white orb named as the symbol Phi. Phi leads you through another twisting labyrinth full of viruses and puzzles, confident you won’t “leave the path.”
You ‘bookmarker’/fly your way upwards the towering walls, higher and higher until you find a single door.
At the other end is a decrepit apartment accessible only through this door. A photo of a Shiba Inu, a lunar calendar frozen in the year of the rat (representing wisdom), a large poster of Zero-chan suspended on the opposite wall behind the bed. Discarded pizza boxes, soda cans, water bottles and cardboard boxes everywhere. An empty fridge. A cork board pinned with photos of a life you will never know.
A single, boarded up window where a woman sits at a desk. Dressed in a tank-top, skirt, with the same blue hair as Onee-chan, she stares at the boarded window at nothing. She must be Zero-chan.
Under her right hand is a tablet with a shattered screen.
Opposite her is another desk with a 90s computer, reminiscent of an IBM where the bulky monitor sits on top of the CPU. It turns on: the game’s introduction screen stares right back at you.
Broken Reality - Use your mouse to move around!
Then, a dialog:
“The program has stopped working, do you wish to interrupt the process?”
ERROR/Zero-chan’s face appears on the monitor screen, prodding you to “find a solution” to an error that can’t be fixed. Your only choice is to shut it down.
An action that can’t be undone.
So you do.
The game says goodbye the only way it knows how – by playing a mind-bending display of fractal patterns and colours joined by a symphony of loud bass and discordant synths.
And that’s that. Goodbye to Sigma, Architect, and their Broken Reality.
Without its pop-infused sheen, the game’s story would easily turn into a depressing dirge. Instead, Vaporwave becomes a perfect medium to warn of the potentially harmful effects of social media when left unchecked.
But wait, this sounds so familiar!
This too, is the world Carmen Razo resides in Holovista, one where social capital reigns supreme. Over the span of a week, she discovers her dream job with the elusive and acclaimed architects Mesmer & Braid is a lot more perilous than their shiny social media presence portrays.
The game plays out almost entirely on Carmen’s social media feed and DMs with her sister, Inez, friends and Mesmer & Braid (M&B). On the first day, you’re tasked to take photos of her apartment the day before she has her interview with M&B. Each photo unlocks her memories and thoughts, which are posted on her social feed, where her followers leave comments.
After acing the interview, Carmen is made to stay at a mansion owned by M&B for “a few days” and capture her experiences through photos. Every photo you take goes on her feed, which M&B monitors. After a while of taking photos, both you and Carmen notice that the photo’s subjects conjure up all-too-personal memories. From a broken plate that reminds Carmen of her childhood home, to the radio that plays a song her grandma used to sing, the photos intersperse these surreal reminders with countless pink and blue soaked animal bones, statues of the Lady of Guadalupe (The Virgin Mary) and pool decorations.
The game bathes in its dreamy dissonance with flair, pulling you into Carmen’s increasing confusion with what M&B is really asking of her.
As the week progresses, Carmen’s sense of reality and virtual reality blurs. Every new location and photo becomes ever more unsettling. She uploads photos that her followers can’t see. Her journal entries start to make less sense. Her grasp of Spanish and English mix in nonsensical ways when she replies to Inez, or her best friend and love interest, Vlad. Even I, at moments, hesitated before entering a new room; afraid to uncover more traumatic memories Carmen had buried.
Finally, you learn that she is burdened by immense guilt from a drowning incident as a child, costing her family everything for her medical bills. This prevented Inez from enrolling into university and the subsequent loss of their father. Trapped in spiralling self-hate, Carmen shapes herself around validation and forgiveness from others to prop up her self-worth.
Between days 6 and 7, Carmen then finds out that M&B’s locked her in a simulation after demanding an answer from them. Still trapped in her nightmarish trauma, her childhood guilt and hate manifests other versions of her friends and family, questioning her sense of self-worth through direct messages.
Thankfully, the very same people she seeks validation and forgiveness from don’t think the same way. Banding together, they storm M&B to be at Carmen’s bedside. At last, M&B’s exploitation takes the backseat.
With their power of happy memories and loving words, Carmen overcomes her trauma with love, slowly but surely leaving the simulation behind.
The game ends on a hopeful note. Free of her own trauma and guilt, Carmen goes on a social media hiatus to “touch grass” with Inez, Vlad, Jazz and her closest friends.
These two games resolve their unhealthy reliance on social media in different ways. Broken Reality forces us players to “game the system” and ultimately, destroy it for good. Holovista examines in minute detail the trauma living an “always online” life does to a person and their loved ones - then tells us that we have the ability to leave such exploitation. Those that matter don’t need your social media feed to love your authentic self.
Steering away from social media criticism, what if, in the very far future, the land you live on is constantly reborn into a state of retro-kitsch? Then, under a pink Vaporwave sky, an inconceivable massacre happens, stopping the island from being reborn?
Enter the Syndicate’s best detective, Lady Love Dies.
Freshly un-exiled after 3 million days on the Idle Lands, she meets Shinji, a demon who tells her she’s been freed to investigate a murder on the Syndicate. Yup, the irony of her ex-boss freeing her to force her to work with them again isn’t lost.
You soon learn that the birth and death of islands are managed by The Council in this world. So close to being rebirth as Perfect Island 25, 24th Island Sequence fell victim to The Crime To End All Crimes, and it’s up to Love Dies to get to the bottom of the highest treason.
The Council was murdered before the birth of a new island. Love Dies is sent back to Paradise, and her investigative skills are promptly put to work.
She soon learns from Judge of a red herring suspect – Henry, a Citizen possessed by a demon. Accompanied by Shinji’s nihilistic laugh and funky synths, she begins her investigation.
Representing the upper echelons of high society, Paradise’s citizens trade in blood crystals and barbed words. Besides Lydia and Sam Day Break, most of them are generally dismissive or suspicious of Love Dies. Crimson Acid trades secrets for blood crystals, and a lot of the running around is for collecting crystals to confirm certain truths with her.
Paradise Killer masterfully wields Vaporwave as a parody of social capitalism and its effects.
Paradise is obviously, not Paradise. The floors of the gold and marble Opulent Ziggurat are covered in blood. 24th Island is empty save for the suspects, LD, and Judge. Despite the poppy, bouncy music pushing your investigation along, the entire island feels isolated from the real world. Its residents are stuck-up and out-of-touch. You, a poor normie, have to run or walk everywhere - there’s no transport besides Lydia Day Break’s. Nor is there a clear passage of time besides night and day. You know the island will cease to exist once the investigation is over.
Somehow, the game makes it fun amidst all this dread. The suspects have a long history with Love Dies, and they’re both interested in hanging out with her and fearful of being implicated at the same time. This makes the conversations somewhat non sequitur. Everyone is ready to move on to the final island sequence and don’t seem to care about The Council’s deaths as much as LD herself.
By presenting the right evidence to incriminate the right characters, you get them to confess, rather angrily, that they’ve been working together to frame Henry all along. Carmelina, Yuri, Akiko, Witness and the rest of the Syndicate are all Paradise Killers.
Boosted by the banging synth music during the final trial, there is a lot of satisfaction gained from implicating that all were involved in this tainted house of cards.
The island sequence is destroyed to birth Perfect Island 25.
“When love dies, all that remains is the truth.”
Vaporwave sustains itself by remixing nostalgia. It gets away with ridiculous Anime-length names and using music samples taken from jazz and hip hop. Ask someone to succinctly describe it, and they’ll likely be hard-pressed to compress its meta mash of memes, music, visuals and aesthetic.
Such is the truth buried in something birthed from broken promises - Vaporware.
Anyhow, what is the truth these days? What value does it hold in a generation of fake news and TikToks?
Layered in these games is a keen sense of having to sell one’s personality and innermost thoughts just to live. You incrementally feed your most curated pieces of yourself to defeat the monster sucking your social presence dry. Your search for truth effectively destroys the world built from it.
Such games hold the mirror up, to us, the player, to bravely reach for the truth veiled behind its vacant, fabricated facade, even if it means confronting our deepest fears.
“Is paradise worth saving?” Judge asks, and I, the player, am forced to ask myself: Is this world I live in actually paradise?
Or is the nostalgia just too vapid underneath its neon coat of paint?
All Fax, No Printer.
The other day I came across the phrase “Fax, no printer.” Which, in Gen Z/Alpha speak, simply means “Truth.” (AKA, I agree.)
The Urban Dictionary tells me that this phrase has been around since the pre-pandemic days and that my ‘ancient’ 30+ self is slow on the uptake. PhD fellows discussing on Today assert that the fine print is Fax = Facts, and Printer follows the natural evolution of rhyming slang. Or African American Vernacular (AAVE).
What I think is that the fax machine and printer is not why Gen Z/Alpha are reviving these machines they likely have never used. I think, just like the revival of shaggy hair and floor-sweeping hemlines, the younger generations use it to sound cool. To sound anti-digital. To sound real.
Even if they, and the rest of us “wiserly” (wise elderly) spend more time interacting with a screen than nature most days. Maybe they are onto something by reviving things from a less digital time.
Word on the ‘stack
Thanks for reading this special essay! Besides the launch piece on Zelda, this one sat waiting in my mind’s queue for several weeks as I struggled to shape it into something worth discussing.
A few years before the pandemic, I spent hours listening to and playing Vaporwave adjacent games, an obsession that carried over during the pandemic when I had time to spare. I’ve outgrown the aesthetic since, but I wanted to give it one final goodbye by honouring the many hours I enjoyed with this essay.
For the foreseeable future, Sibylle Writes Games will focus on personal dev diaries. This will be the last full analysis. Look forward to more write-ups on what I’m working on!