There are many squirrels in the neighborhood I grew up in and still live in. They are out and about, darting back and forth across streets, across yards, across trees. Even as a child, it would not be uncommon to see the corpse of a squirrel, its life cut short by a car, splattered across the road. As such, to teach my sister and me to be careful when crossing the street, my parents told us to “look both ways, or you’ll be squashed like a squirrel.” (every time I told my friends in college that, they looked at me like I was weird - they were correct). As such, I suspect I have a subconscious linkage between squirrels and death, which is probably why Squirrel Stapler was such an unnerving experience for me.
You start out in a cabin in the woods. You have a gun. There is a corpse near your bed, which appears to be your wife. There is a room with a refrigerator in it, as well as a dining room. On a wall, right next to the exit, is a countdown of the days until God arrives. The nature of God is never explained. You use the aforementioned gun to shoot squirrels, which you bring back to your wife. Some of the squirrels are not happy you are here and will try to kill you. There are signs that other people were in this forest at one point, but you never meet them.
So much of this game is the mood. The game explains to you how the game works - which is, by itself, a first person shooter which is not terribly complex - but not why literally anything is the way it is. You have been dropped on what may have been a desert island, if not for all the living things here, some of which want to kill you and some of which you kill with the aforementioned gun (not terribly detailed, but it could easily be a .22 like the one my father taught me to shoot with when I was about ten years old). The entire sensation is that of a deeply unpleasant isolation.
Squirrel Stapler does not merely cut you off from people, leaving you alone with animals and with what may be the divine. This game cuts you off from reality, from sense, from logic. Being a game that explains to you almost nothing, you are left to fill in the gaps with a litany of unpleasantries. The few things that are explained are done in such a way that leaves ever more questions open, gaping like a door into a haunted house. To borrow a concept from Mark Fisher’s book of criticism The Weird and the Eerie, this forest is Fisher’s ‘eerie-’ you get a feeling that something is missing among this familiar woodland, but you can’t quite say what that is. Eventually, by the end of the game, you are confronted with the fact that it is the basic condition of everyday life, or even most abnormal times in life, that is gone. In basically every second of living, you have some idea of what is going on. This game denies you that, and it gets under your skin.
Those looking for deep, complex gameplay here will be disappointed. The actual gameplay is to walk into the forest with your gun, shoot squirrels, bag the squirrels, collect items as needed, and occasionally run away from things. This is done with no music. The only sounds that accompany the proceedings are your footsteps, the skittering of squirrels, a rather quiet gun, and the occasional unexplained voice. The end result of all of this is a gaming experience that is stripped-down, minimalist, quiet, too quiet. That’s what makes this game so eerie, I think. It’s like meditating, but instead of focusing on what your mind is doing, you are focusing on all the ways your mind projects its fears, and on the whole rationality and irrationality of how you process the game, versus the sparing manner of the game’s exposition.
A similar affordance, I think, is there in the game’s graphics. They are graphics that could easily have been on the PlayStation 2, among the many games I played as a child in the 2000s on that console. I know there is a trend in indie gaming towards sparse graphics, but in this case they also emphasize the horrors. The squirrels are obviously fake, which increases the uncanny valley effect; ditto for the trees and the rest of this isolated forest. Your wife is fake. Your house is fake. God is fake. For all you know, you are fake (I am certainly fake). What remains is the fact that your fear, the meanings you concoct to rationalize what appears to be on some level noise, is very real, all too real. Your reaction is unnervingly, sometimes frustratingly real. I can vouch, as I felt almost dizzy by the end of this game.
The game is short, mercifully so, because I think a game this disturbing being longer than the ninety or so minutes I played it would border on the sadistic. It is a very good game for a single session, something short when you are in that mood. The end result is efficiency, conciseness, and an overall sensation of leanness.
Once I was talking with my sister and one of her friends about this very game, and we came to the conclusion that the horror genre of media, broadly construed, can be defined as ‘recreational bad vibes.’ That is a very good description of this game. I sometimes wonder why I let my sister talk me into playing this game, but I can’t say I regret the experience. There is something very expressionist about this game - it is about the vibe of fear, more than anything else, and it soaks you in that fear, and never lets you go until the very end, when you are called to answer for your crimes. There’s a sadism in the design that is quite compelling, in that it raises a bunch of questions and never at any point gives the player an answer for any of them, at least without raising several more questions of a similar nature. It is hands down one of the most unnerving experiences in my life. I don’t know if I can recommend it to anyone who isn’t into this sort of horror, but if you can handle it, go right ahead.
I’m still not convinced I’ll ever be able to look at a squirrel in the same way ever again.
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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
