Finding Life’s Value in Anodyne 2: Return to Dust

Nova spends weeks in Dustbound Village. What would be a dungeon is recontextualized as a collection of living spaces, places of worship, and paved streets. Nova returns to the same squares on the map despite there being no treasure awaiting, no tasks to complete. She begins to take comfort in purposeless existence; despite skiving her mission, she makes friends, real intimate connections. But the seed implanted in her body won’t allow her to take comfort in it for long.

When Nova returns to The Center, C Visionary is introduced as Palisade’s replacement. In contrast to C Psalmist, Nova’s other caretaker, C Visionary is robotic and progress minded. Where Psalmist fills the role of a religious figure charging Nova with a divine quest, Visionary seeks to incentivize Nova—and me, the player—to continue exploiting herself for the sake of The Center’s goal. C Visionary introduces metacoins, a currency scattered across New Theland that Nova can use to purchase unnecessary unlockables. C Visionary is “gamifying” Nova’s quest to offer some sense of reward, a pointless sidequest to distract from the hollowness of her assignment.

And I collected those coins. I bought nearly everything the store had to offer, despite knowing the empty feeling it would all bring. It’s the sort of consolation prize we consign ourselves to accept; the shitty birthday cake our bosses give us once a year, to be eaten off the clock. The deployment of the metacoins also reveals how hollow collectathons are as a gameplay element; they’re scattered across all the areas Nova has previously visited and fail to add any meaningful mechanics. It’s senseless, self-aware padding, meant to obfuscate the cost-benefit of Nova’s mission (and, perhaps, games as a whole).

Collecting coins is lonely. The game’s 3D environments feel desolate and empty, and amassing coins is a solitary task. Attaining them instilled in me a distinct feeling of disgust with myself, as if my base desire for completionism was enough to justify what was a clear waste of time. I felt reminded to put more conscious thought into the actions I make while playing a game. Is there joy in sidework? Am I rushing through, failing to take in the majesty of the environments around me? In many ways, games prey on people like me—people with ADHD that speed through meaningful encounters and hyperfixate on menial repetition, gay young adults seeking a sense of belonging within virtual realms—which, when portrayed as acutely as in Anodyne 2, fills me with an intense discomfort. Games assure our work will lead to something awe-inspiring by their inevitable conclusion (or, if they don’t have an end, that we will find a spark worth chasing indefinitely).

The Center’s promise is similar: if we work hard enough and abandon all our earthly desires, we can attain a goal so lofty and mythic we can’t even envision its awesomeness. If Nova is able to complete her mission, she can achieve The Anodyne, which will halt the progression of Dust wholesale. But The Anodyne guarantees that no one will ever “feel” again. The popular saying goes “it takes a village to raise a child”—in New Theland, there’s a village within every person, waiting to be fostered and yearning to connect. The Anodyne ensures that the borders between these villages are strict and well-maintained, never intersecting.

Ultimately, Anodyne 2 finds hope in nothingness. If we’re all on a path of doom, we may as well spend the time we have with people we love. If we spend all our time blinded by work, no matter how gallant the end goal may be, we neglect to nurture the people around us and fail to stack up to the immense pressure we put on ourselves. Our bodies are our own, indelible from our desires and needs. We can sever ourselves from the toxic systems we internalize as our beliefs. We are privileged to live in a time where we acknowledge the interconnectedness of work and our personal lives—work takes a toll on us emotionally, and the lines between family and coworkers are sometimes blurred. We feel the urge to present ourselves as invulnerable to our parents and our bosses alike. It’s a facade that inevitably breaks the spirit, made trivial by the ease in which we are replaceable.

Anodyne 2, at its core, finds pleasure in taking a minute for yourself. Sometimes the grind isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.