PAX West 2024: Spiral

It may not be easy for people to really get a game like Spiral. This isn’t due to some deep and overwhelming combat system designed to challenge the player. Nor is it due to some obtuse and convoluted lore, requiring a history degree and dozens of hours of research to comprehend. Instead, Spiral is a game that tackles some extremely complicated subject matter, in a poised and patient way. It captures a moment in our lives that will be inevitable for many, yet is rarely discussed.

At PAX West 2024, I had the opportunity to meet with the wonderful people at Folklore Games to discuss and play their first project: Spiral. According to the Steam page, Spiral is a “third-person narrative exploration game that shares a poetic vision of cognitive degeneration.” You play as Bernard, a kind, elderly man suffering from the onset of dementia due to his advanced age. In the hands-on demo I played, you follow Bernard as he explores through a cabin that he lived in as a child. As you make your way around the cabin, you interact with dozens of objects, receiving snippets of Bernard’s past as you go. You learn of his mother’s favorite flowers, that he and his father built a chair together, that Bernard was a big fan of tabletop role-playing games, that he was a bit of a hyperactive student, that his sister was a world traveler, that he had a very good dog named Elfie, and that he had a few very good friends with whom he was close.

The colors of the cabin are vibrant and warm, expressing how welcoming the idea of our childhood houses can be. As the demo continues, however, you see the same objects multiple times. Each time you interact with them, the memories change slightly. Bernard struggles to remember who he built the chair with, whether one of his toys was his or his niece and nephews, who the flowers are for, and whether or not Elfie is still alive. The color pallet starts to become dark and sullen, with surrealist imagery taking up the screen. The walls of the house literally fall away into the void to symbolize where Bernard’s memories – his life – are going as he forgets. 

You play as Bernard, a kind, elderly man suffering from the onset of dementia due to his advanced age.

The demo ends with Bernard begging for more time to remember the things he’s forgotten and piece his life together. With that, the screen fades to black. 

I could talk about how the game controls, the frame rate, the voice acting, or the sound design. Instead, I’d rather talk about how Spiral’s short demo made me feel. In that crowded convention hall, surrounded by thousands of people, I was struggling to hold back tears during the second half of Spiral’s run time. I couldn’t stop myself from imagining the difficulties the people in my life who suffered through this had to endure; of people like my parents one day having to go through this experience, and how important a single life can be, how a life is full and laughter and love and joy and sadness and little moments that make us who we are. I got choked up and struggled to give my compliments to the devs who were able to give me this wonderful experience. I had to duck into a side room and collect myself before I headed to my next scheduled meeting. If a 15-minute demo can make a 30-year-old man feel that strongly, there is no real argument left to claim that video games are anything but art. 

That’s not to say that traditional gaming aspects of Spiral aren’t fantastic. Visually, the game is stunning. According to the devs, they wanted to strike a balance between a believable setting and that eerie, dreamlike state that our memories always tend to have. Memories are almost always an amalgamation of different points in time merged linearly within our subconscious minds, so they always appear to us as slightly skewed. Spiral nails this in every aspect of the game, down to the mundane details, feeling ethereal and otherworldly, yet extremely familiar. It creates a sense of being somewhere you’ve been before but can’t pin down where, and it works incredibly well. 

When talking to the excellent people at Folklore about why they chose such serious subject matter to build a game around, rather than something more conventional or light-hearted, their answer was simple: even if people don’t remember us, that doesn’t mean they can be forgotten. The idea of cognitive degradation is an uncomfortable topic for most of us, so instead we all worry in silence over whether or not we too will lose what makes us who we are.

I could talk about how the game controls, the frame rate, the voice acting, or the sound design. Instead, I’d rather talk about how Spiral’s short demo made me feel.

When it’s happening, we don’t have any real support system, so many of us tend to go on that journey alone. That being said, I was assured that the final game would be less intense than the demo itself. The point of Spiral isn’t to make us paranoid and frightened about the prospect of getting old – instead, it is a celebration of life and all of the little moments that build up to make us who we are. 

I’m happy for you if you’re one of the people who don’t exactly get Spiral, but I would venture to guess that the majority of us have some exposure to its subject matter. I came away from the demo feeling pleasantly conflicted. On the one hand, I was truly saddened by Bernard’s situation and felt nothing but empathy toward this seemingly sweet man who was handed something he never asked for. On the other hand, I felt elated that this individual lived a full life, with a good family and good friends. It made me want to take a breath and appreciate where I was at that moment and what I was doing. 

The team at Folklore Games is pretty small, but what they’ve accomplished with this demo is incredibly impressive. They were extremely welcoming and passionate about this game that’s taken them 6 years to get together. It's out on Steam now, and I beg you to go play it.