Lisa: The Painful (

2014

) ½

For the last few weeks, the internet has been ablaze with news about The Last of Us: Part 2 [2020] with many holding it up as an unparalleled masterpiece of the medium, while others denounce it as a pretentious snooze fest so far up its own ass that it can see tonsils. Frankly, I don’t give a shit either way. I haven’t owned a Sony console since 2007. If Bloodborne [2015] can’t get me to shell out the couple hundred bucks for a PS4, nothing will. So, I can’t tell you whether The Last of Us: Part 2 [2020] is worth playing or not (though it’s safe to assume that it is neither as terrible as its detractors make it out to be nor as sublime as its defenders insist, in game criticism histrionics always prevail). But during all the controversy about the game, sometime between Sony issuing a DMCA takedown on their own twitter account and the rumors that the creative director did the mocap for the game’s awkward sex scene, a video of The Last of Us’ creative director Neil Druckman surfaced that piqued my interest. In it, he described the initial concept of The Last of Us, which was dubbed Mankind, where he had envisioned a world which had collapsed not because of the normal variety of zombie plague, but a zombie plague that only affects women. The result is a unique apocalyptic world utterly devoid of women. It’s in this strange landscape that the main character would find a girl with an immunity to the disease, who might be the last female human being on the planet. Druckman says that he abandoned this idea because it was misogynist, and started again eventually settling on the plot and setting that became The Last of Us [2013].

When I talk about political correctness tendency to limit human expression, giving us only boring, safe stories guaranteed not to step on the toes of any protected classes, this is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. Whatever virtues The Last of Us [2013] might have, a unique vision of the apocalypse is not among them. Seriously, how many zombie apocalypse games and movies can you name off the top of your head? Probably more than a dozen, with a few hundred more if you stopped what you were doing and began to put a list together. We have seen these hallmarks of apocalypse before: the oppressive governments keeping a diminishing population in line with fear, the vicious bandits who live outside the law, the morally suspect freedom fighters desperately searching for a cure to the plague. Making the zombies into fungal creatures whose disease is spread by spores was, at best, merely a cosmetic change, and did nothing to set the setting of The Last of Us [2013] apart from an already saturated market. Yet the vision of the apocalypse presented by Mankind was something altogether different. It promised to be something along the lines of Children of Men (2006), a world where even the possibility of hope and a next-generation rebuilding society was utterly impossible. Here, humanity was fucked even if the scant millions that survived Armageddon continued to evade the zombie hordes. Combine that with the unique notion of an all-male world and you have the potential for an artistic vision that has never before been realized. At the very least it would be something more unique and compelling than the bog-standard zombie wasteland we got instead.

Moreover, I find claims that such a game would been inherently misogynistic to be more than a little baffling. The Y: The Last Man comic series, a story where all men in the world have been killed off by a mysterious event, is many things but it is certainly not misandrist (or misogynist for that matter). There’s no inherent reason why making an apocalypse where one of the two sexes were killed off would necessarily be sexist. Indeed, a world where there are only men opens up many interesting ways for the game to examine masculinity in a vacuum. If Druckman was planning to make Mankind set in a world which is finally at peace because finally, men can relax, BBQ, and play video games without listening to the constant nagging of their girlfriends and wives, that would be one thing; but that is hardly the only direction that one could take the idea. It seems to me that an excess of caution and a desperate desire to be seen as virtuous prevented a truly compelling vision from being rendered. It shows that the cultural commissars at the big publications aren’t lying when they say “nobody is going to take your games away.” They just want to create an environment where developers will be too afraid to make them in the first place.

Fortunately for us, this unique vision of the apocalypse was realized, not by a big-budget AAA studio, but by a lone weirdo: Austin Jorgensen, AKA Dingaling, AKA Widdly 2 Diddly, AKA LOVEBRADgames; a martial artist turned music composer and game developer. In a way we were lucky. Certainly, there was no way a game made by Naughty Dog and Druckman could be as bizarre and as transgressive as Lisa: The Painful. This is a game, after all, that includes a joke about an enslaved man being used as a human toilet! Druckman and Naughty Dog would have doubtlessly insisted on a bit more decorum in their story and setting. Though, on the other hand, it might have been nice to see this artistic vision rendered in an engine a bit more sophisticated than RPG Maker. Ideally, we would have both, but hey at least we got Lisa: The Painful, one of the most strikingly original and disturbing amateur RPGs ever made.

The backstory is that some years ago there was a sudden White Flash that enveloped the world and when it passed all the women in the world had died. The exact nature of the event is kept mysterious, as Nern Guan, the greatest living historian who you meet early on in the game, is too preoccupied talking about his sub-par wife (God rest her soul) and the lemon tea he was drinking the day before the White Flash to actually tell you why or how the cataclysmic event took place. I’ve heard a few different theories while browsing about online: A sudden explosion of male hostility that caused every man to lash out at the women around him, a warp in the fabric of reality, a very specific nuclear bomb, and the biblical rapture among them. All that we can be sure of is that the event killed off every girl and woman in the world. Every girl and woman that is, except for one: A baby found in the wasteland by a miserable, broken loser.

The miserable, broken loser in question is our protagonist is Brad Armstrong. A martial arts master who is haunted by his inability, as a child, to stop his sister Lisa from committing suicide after being abused by their father Marty. He sees in this baby, who he dubs Buddy, a chance to make up for his past mistakes and find redemption at last. So, he opts to raise her as a daughter, keeping her safe from the outside world as the last girl in the world wouldn’t last fifteen minutes alone in a wasteland of desperate vicious men. Brad is also addicted to a drug called Joy, which he uses to cope with his guilt about Lisa’s death. Unconsciously he recreates the same environment for Buddy that his father created for Lisa, one where a drug-abusing father is keeping his daughter under lock and key. The difference is that Brad really does want to protect Buddy, and when he sees what’s happening he tries to make things better. He makes a disguise for Buddy so she can go about outside, and he kicks joy, throwing his tablets off a cliff. But Brad isn’t as strong as he wishes, and before long the nagging draw of addiction has him climbing down the cliff face looking for his discarded drugs. When he wakes up from his bender, an indeterminate amount of time later, he finds that his house has been attacked and Buddy is missing.

This opening takes about five minutes, and with relatively little dialogue gives us all we need to know about Brad to both root for him and despise him. He is a character that is defined by his failures and his inadequacies and desperately wants to overcome them. Yet, in a way that may be familiar to those players who have wrestled with addiction and mental illness (or know those who have), he finds himself falling short again and again. You can see why he’s so fucked up, and the pain that drives him constantly back to drugs, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to just grab him and tell him to knock it off. Brad is by no means a hero, which is to say a paragon of virtue, but he is not an outright villain either. Much of his actions can be seen as cruel and selfish but in plenty of flashbacks, he comes across as decent or even noble. The first flashback in the game is him taking a beating from a gang of bullies to protect his friends, in another, he agrees to teach a kid karate even though the kid’s parents can’t pay. Yet his main drive, his quest to get Buddy back, is a morally ambiguous one. Buddy is the last girl in the world, if mankind is going to survive then she will have to be a new Eve. It’s this destiny that Brad is preventing her from following because he needs to raise her right in order to make up for his earlier failures in life. Maybe Brad is protecting her, and maybe he’s just selfishly pursuing his own gratification. Now, if we knew Buddy’s exact age this would be far less ambiguous (if she’s thirteen then Brad is plainly justified; if she’s twenty he’s clearly not), but Buddy’s age is unknown so we’re left to parse Brad’s intentions from incomplete information.

Brad is not just a morally complex character with good and bad traits, he’s complex enough that the person on the other end of the controls will have to come to their own conclusions about him. Some no doubt, will see him as an ultimately selfish bastard whose endangering all of humanity for what amounts to his own vanity. Others will be more sympathetic and see him as a flawed man trying to make up for all the mistakes he’s made in the past. This is important because despite this being an RPG where you can recruit multiple party members (more than 30 in total), Lisa: The Painful is Brad’s story. He is the sole protagonist, rather than the most important member of a larger ensemble (which is the norm for leading characters in RPGs). Outside of combat and the occasional line of dialogue here and there, the characters that you take as your party members don’t contribute much to the game. Indeed, any of them can be perma-killed in a Russian Roulette minigame or by some especially infuriating bosses who have perma-death moves. The larger narrative lives and dies with Brad, and if he were a less compelling character then Lisa: The Painful would quickly fall apart.

Brad’s addiction to the drug Joy is worked into the gameplay mechanics. If Brad goes too long without a hit, he gets a status effect that makes him all but worthless in combat. Since he’s the party leader, you can’t just swap him out so you’re stuck with one out of your four characters being dead weight until the withdrawal symptoms wear off (which takes ages to happen). Or you could pop some Joy, and watch as Brad is transformed into a one-man wrecking ball that can plow through whatever enemies are unfortunate enough to stand in his way. This does make the dialogue sequences where Brad insists that he’s quit Joy all the more tragic as you see how easily he lies even to the people he loves the most.

As you begin to explore the wasteland in search of Buddy, the game gradually shows you what a hell hole the world has become in the intervening years since the white flash. For one thing, there seems to be a clothing shortage… I quickly lost count of how many characters you encounter that are wearing odd strips of clothing that cannot even cover their nipples. More seriously though, the world seems to be slowly succumbing to a sort of entropic decay. The characters are all dressing like they live in the desert wasteland of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) but they aren’t fighting for anything as sensible as scarce resources. Instead, they seem to be like the characters in Mad Max (1979), just people trapped in a world that is slowly going mad and taking their sanity along with it. Law and order seems to have been a construct that men maintained simply for the benefit of their wives and children, as the world since the flash has become a lawless anarchy populated by bandits and thugs. At the same time, all moral restrictions on behavior have evaporated and the populace has devolved to a state of antediluvian savagery. There really is no safe place left in the world, a fact the game emphasizes by having a chance of something bad happen to you whenever you rest outside an inn. The negative effects range from getting robbed, to having one of your party members kidnapped, to being farted on by some pervert. The shockwaves of the White Flash can be felt in the economy as well. With no women around, the men have become so sexually frustrated that pornographic magazines have become the most commonly accepted currency.

The game takes its time with the world-building gradually sprinkling on new horrific sights, both real and those only in Brad’s tortured mind. About an hour into the game you’ll encounter your first mutant, a hulking abomination that looks like it wandered out of a David Cronenberg movie. Jorgensen is unquestionably a master at crafting incredibly detailed and disturbing sprites. The monsters here are easily on par with the most grotesque creatures from Tamashii [2019]. The first mutant boss you face is especially disturbing because its horrific visage is topped off with an unassuming smile. Yet the horrors of mutants and gore are nothing compared to all the twisted shit going on inside of Brad’s head. He is constantly haunted by visions of Lisa and her suicide and moments where reality seems to shift and break around him. Here the game gives way to dreadful surreal imagery that is often the stuff of nightmares.

While the game excels in storyline, characters, setting, and art style, it’s let down quite a bit by its combat system. Lisa lifts its combat system more or less wholesale from Earthbound [1995], being essentially a turn-based combat system where you select everyone’s actions at the start of a round of combat and then watch them play out. This is far from the least pleasant RPG combat system that I’ve ever seen (Parasite Eve [1998] with its turn-based but not really combat springs to mind from my recent playthroughs), but it is for obvious reasons not terribly exciting. Fortunately, the game, unlike a lot of RPGs of its style, does not feel the need to load you down with constant combat. Instead, it gives you a smaller number of battles with hardly any random encounters outside of a few select areas. There are tons of unique minor encounters in the game, many of which will stick out in your mind as especially humorous or interesting. One of my favorite one-off battles is with a blind bandit (he’s wearing two eyepatches!) who misses every attack says “didn’t see that coming” when you put the smackdown on him. Since there is a limited number of encounters this also means there is a limited amount of loot, effectively bypassing the issue that many RPGs have where the player can simply grind their way past any problems they encounter or get more money than they have items worth buying.

The soundtrack is… Unique. Composed by Jorgensen himself it is a bizarre mix of discordant sounds and funky melodies, with the most memorable track being “Work Harder,” an upbeat techno song that samples a grunt from Shenmue 2 [2001]. Seriously, you have to listen to this shit for yourself to believe it. Even the brief musical cues that play throughout the game are bizarre. Take the surreal, semi joyful noise that plays whenever a new party member joins your group or the serene church organ music that plays when you go to sleep which ends with a discordant blip upon waking.

Those who have followed my blog for a while will know that I take issue with the way that most games depict mental illness. As I mentioned in my review of A Short Hike [2019], I find the way games like Celeste [2018] and Night in the Woods [2017] try to dress up their serious topics in right cartoony graphics and cheeseball humor “troubling. Invariably they feel either like they are trying to force children into contact with concepts that are too mature for them, or they are worried that their adult audience will not have the emotional fortitude to deal with serious topics unless they are wrapped up in the most blandly inoffensive package. The former is cause for some concern while the latter is just downright pathetic and I'm left wondering whether I should feel insulted or disgusted. There's just something fundamentally wrong about the presentation in games, a wrongness that creeps in and leaves an otherwise inoffensive game with a sickly taint.”

I also really don’t care for the grimdark miserable approach that games like Hellblade: Setsuna’s Sacrifice [2017] use instead. Mental illness is, of course, no picnic, but it is also not an unrelenting slog of misery and despair. There’s a reason why so many depressed people run humorous meme accounts and tell hilarious (and often wildly inappropriate) jokes. This is the humor that Lisa: The Painful not only depicts but positively exudes. We have jokes about kids burning to death, jokes about gang rape, jokes about coprophilia, in addition to jokes about all other manner of sick shit. Lisa: The Painful is a sidesplittingly funny game, even when it is at its most fucked up, and for that reason, it captures the peculiar warped viewpoint of depression better than any other game I’ve played. The world is bleak and hopeless and the only method available to you to keep on going is to find it funny, even when’s facing you is more tragic than comic. Lisa is one of only a very few games that can make its players laugh uncontrollably and cry irreconcilably.

Not that you need to have a history of mental illness to appreciate this game. This is a game that I’m sure any patient player could grow to appreciate and love. Sure, it’s more than a little rough around the edges but at the end of the day Lisa: The Painful is a game that everyone should check out and experience for themselves. I must warn you… Lisa: The Painful is not always a pleasant experience to play through. It is a deeply disturbing and emotionally draining experience. The game even advertises itself as “a life ruining gaming experience” (this is pure hyperbole of course, though it can certainly be a ‘day ruining gaming experience’ particularly for more emotionally frail gamers). Nobody should judge you if you’d rather spend your meager free time collecting all the gems in Crash Bandicoot: The N-Sane Trilogy [2017] instead. But, for those willing to take a journey into depravity and madness, Lisa is more than worth your time.