⸮ɘm яɒɘʜ υoჸ nɒƆ

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My first experience entering the game world is defined, first and foremost, by shock and awe. VR games are a wonder of the modern world, but the struggle to keep up with higher graphical demands is like sisyphus with his rock. Higher pixel counts and graphical fidelity are a never-ending climb for the heights, one that’s gradually crippling people’s ability to actually play games, demanding higher levels of computers to match. VR headsets, by virtue of the sheer amount of things that need to be animated, usually don’t tend to bother too much with making things photorealistic, relying on immersion through movement and engagement instead.

It would seem that whatever absolutely insane, hyper-fixated maniac designed MEAT did not hold to that particular philosophy.

I emerge from a strange sort of bulb, or some sort of pulpy fruit, oversized to fit a humanoid body. A long and slender hand, multi-jointed as it was in character creation, breaks through the thin, translucent skin of its surface, and a flood of fluids makes things a bit dizzy as my POV spins and collapses out.

I can see individual waves of goop rolling over the ‘camera’, like a camera pointed up into an egg yolk. As my ‘eyes’ focus and adjust, a massive skybox starts to come into focus, roiling above like a distant ceiling in a deep and horrifying cavern. There are long stalactites, reflecting against a surface that might be stone or might be some other form of dark, strange meat, distant and hard to glimpse. Some of the stalactites are so massive that, even from what seems to be an atmospheric height, I can see the shapes and spirals that make them up, like nautilus shells grown together on an unimaginable scale. Several of them drip long, thick streams of liquid, like waterfalls that dissipate to clouds- but the colors are off, just a bit left of anything like water. One of them even connects to the ground below, swaying in the wind like a string of spit.

Speaking of the ground.

I turn my avatar over, the camera controls a weird mix of intuitive and awkward. The avatar’s body seems to follow my headset’s movement more than my hands, but miming getting up off the ground allows me to properly synchronize with it.

It’s… prairies.

In what feels like a twist on old-fashioned RPGs, or callbacks to something like Zolda, I find myself and my avatar in the flesh-themed equivalent of a grassy field. Small fronds of… what might be fur? Coat the terrain entirely, washing over soft hills and subtle bumps. Every few hills there’s a tree of some sort, bare of any leaves and bone white- in fact, maybe literally made of bone.

Looking up further, I see that I’m in some kind of valley or caldera, with massive mountains all around the edges. Unlike the stalactites above, they don’t seem as… natural? Looking at them, I feel more in mind of giant scabs, maybe, or some sort of shrapnel stabbed into the ground and grown over. They look weirdly out of place, even as they deform the world and trap her in a massive landmark.

A wet noise echoes over the plains, and I turn to look back where I “spawned”. The remains of the fruit I emerged from are visible, a long vein or sapling retreating back into the hill I’m standing on and dragging them with it. Even as I watch, the goop I spawned in from fades into the hill, until the place where I’m standing is no different than every other hill in sight.

And then… silence.

Huh. Well… might as well start exploring?

I take a step forward and-

OBJECTIVE: LEAVE THE VALLEY

SIDE-MISSION 1: FEED

SIDE MISSION 2: GROW

I actually flinch back at how loud the announcements are. They don’t appear as sounds, but the sound of their pop-in is like thunder, and the words glow in the air above me like a fireworks show in the sky. Unlike the rest of the world, shaped purely into the meaty aesthetic, the words appear a lot like the SYNCHRONICITY tag, flickering with a weird static at their edges and glowing down onto the world, bluish-grey in material.

I wave my controller / hand up at them, trying to see if there’s any sort of prompt or something I can interact with… but no, nothing. They’re massive, and floating way above the rest of the world, but the biopunk style of their writing makes them feel mechanical compared to the weirder spaces down here on the floor.

Alright, good start! An objective is as good a tool as any to get thing rolling.

“Alright, Ilia,” I mumble to myself, “time to get funky with it.”

I hit the “menu” button on my controller, and blink as a few boxes of text appear in front of me. They’re not like a traditional setup, though- they have the same blue-grey makeup as the letters at the top of the world, and when I wave my hand at them too much, they move out of the way, like they’re real in-game objects. Hitting one of the options, the box shifts, words fusing and reforming into new ones..

Lo and behold, the character sheet.

{MANIFESTATION OF [00000000]}

GENUS: ESURIATIO AUTONOMIA

SPECIES: FLESHLING

STATS:

ADAPTATION

🔺🔺🔺

CANALISATION

🔺

EVOLUTION

SYNCHRONICITY

🔺🔺🔺

SKILLS: N/A

MUTATIONS: N/A

ORGANS:

* CUTANEOUS

* FLESHLING SKIN

* SKELETAL

* FLESHLING BONE

* MUSCLE

* FLESHLING MUSCLE

* FLESHLING TENDON

* CIRCULATION

* FLESHLING CIRCULATION

* FLESHLING PUMP

* RESPIRIUM

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

* FLESHLING LUNGS

* GLANDULAR

* FLESHLING LIVER

* FLESHLING ADRENAL

* NEUROLOGOS

* FLESHLING BRAIN

* PARASITIC INFESTORICA

* SENSORIA

* FLESHLING SENSORIA

* DEGUSTATION

* CYCLIAL DIGESTER

I wave my controller at the words that appear on the box, trying to select them to see if there’s anything else- but they dart away, shifting like they’re using the same physics engine as everything else. Now that’s immersive- fuck a videogame stat screen, they just put floating biocubes that write stuff to you. Weird? Absolutely. Fun? Damn right.

This, like all good character sheets, raises questions right alongside potential answers. While the title at the top of the character sheet is interesting (calling me a “manifestation” of something?), it’s the organs that I’m most curious about. Skills and mutations? Cool, they’re included- I also don’t have anything in them, so it doesn’t matter. The organs though? Quite a few of those!

I can’t select them, but if I hover my hand over them, eventually, more text pops up, spiraling out from the original words.

SPECIES: FLESHLING expands first;

A Fleshling is a weak and hungering thing, bound to inadequate form. Humanoid, this species sits barely above the ranks of bottom-feeders, existing only to be hunted by greater hungers and to populate the least important parts of the food chain. Passingly clever and holders of complex graspers, they come in a variety of forms, all of them delicious, most of them weak.

Well, always good to get official confirmation of my deliciousness.

Scrolling down, I swap over to the individual organs next, hovering over them one by one. For the most part, the descriptions are all quite similar, tracking one-to-one with the descriptor of the overall species;

FLESHLING SKIN: The outer covering of a Fleshling, possessing base flexibility and little else. It holds in the other systems, if only barely.

FLESHLING BONE: The internal framework of a Fleshling, maintaining its overall shape and allowing it to move and survive impacts. Weak, porous, and overall flimsy.

FLESHLING MUSCLE: The strands which allow a Fleshling to create force, motion and torque. Tire easily and have minimal density.

The trend goes on like that for a while, basically just describing what the organ’s function is and then insulting it. Whatever a Fleshling is, it’s pretty clear that the system or gameplay designer has a rather low opinion on the starter class for the game, and every single description goes into detail about how lackluster, unimpressive, or bare-minimum level they are. It’s kind of funny, actually? I enjoy it, at least. A little bit of wittiness can go a long way if you ask me. Still…

There’s something to be said for a starter class being the weakest point in the game, that’s basically how you make the progression actually work for most people, but I’ve had a bit too much experience with hating my body over the years to be fully comfortable with the descriptions. The fact that I can change them, in theory, is encouraging, but…

Then again, just like in real life, it might well just make for good motivation to start some good old-fashioned biohacking, get to installing some “aftermarket mods”. Heh. Fun way to talk about HRT.

There are, however, two exceptions. Something called a CYCLIAL DIGESTER and the PARASITIC INFECTORIA both stand out as exceptions to the rule that all organs fall under the same type as the base species I’m starting as.

CYCLIAL DIGESTER: An unnatural addition to a pathetic Fleshling, this digestive organ allows its host to gain more than the base level of nutrition from what it consumes, and grants the Fleshling omnivorous eating habits.

Sounds simple enough, though the note about a “unnatural addition” stands out. Something meta, maybe? The game itself finding an immersive way to explain why I can (one would assume) eat crafted items or other things in the game? But then… why not just make Fleshlings omnivores in the first place? Either a weird distinction or a nifty way to expand on the worldbuilding. Either way, fun!

The other stand-out organ is even stranger, even as it reinforces the “worldbuilding” explanation.

PARASITIC INFECTORIA: A fragment of one of the great Flesh Beyond, remade into a tool for a replica of its purpose. The Parasitic Infectoria remolds a body that it might feel the influence of strange outer beings, though all but the strongest of wills are erased at the touch of that which it channels.

Now that fucks.

A lovecraftian horror sort of explanation, one seemingly intended to explain the player’s own presence, transforming metanarrative into actual narrative. Apparently I, the “Entity”, am perceived as some sort of outer being, entering the game’s world through whatever this organ is. The fact that it’s in the NEUROLOGOS category right next to a Fleshling brain (which is treated just as harshly as every other Fleshling organ by the game’s descriptors) likely indicates where it’s located, and the reference to something called a “Flesh Divine” is tantalizing in and of itself. There’s aesthetics, there’s worldbuilding, and then there’s lore, and this reeks of that good, delicious lore of it all. Every time I find something new, it makes the game-world seem larger, the amount of production time and effort required higher. It doesn’t quite seem possible that this could be an indie game, which only furthers the mystery of it all.

To put it simply, VR games advanced enough to even have these sorts of mechanics and graphics have only existed for what, five years? The sheer amount of effort required to do this on one’s own, or with a small, unfunded team would need… probably double that, and prophetic knowledge of exactly how to code ahead of time for things that didn’t exist. Frankly, I’d be stunned if I found a big-budget triple-A game with this level of detail and those have teams of dozens, sometimes hundreds of employees.

Who the hell made this? And how is it not what everyone is talking about?

Well, no point sitting around thinking about it. Closing out of the menu, I look back out at the prairie. The objectives given were clear- get out of the valley, with (theoretically) some bonus goodies if I do the sub-objectives of “eat somethin good” and “get bigger”. The latter options push for exploration, and I am more than happy to deliver.

I start walking down the hill, trying to see if I can’t grab onto some of the fur-grass as I do, the purplish tone bright against the white and crimson of my avatar’s body. Delightfully, the answer is yes! My avatar plucks a handful of the material, though it still feels like there’s a slight delay in responsiveness. Almost immediately, a prompt appears in the corner of my vision.

MATERIAL ACQUIRED: Decorative Filament

Let it never be said that they are inaccurate in their descriptions! That is, in fact, what hair is!

I look around for a prompt or something to pull me into an inventory system, but nothing of the kind comes up. None of the buttons bring it up either- menu just brings up the same character sheet as before, without even an option to exit out. Seeing as my avatar is a naked, feathery homunculous, I also don’t exactly have any pockets. Not besides a prison wallet, anyways, and I’d rather not find out if they coded that into the game just yet.

Which leads to an easy conclusion about what to do with this newly acquired resource.

I eat it.

There’s a weird sort of humming, haptic feedback sensors going wild trying to translate something, and I experience delightful disorientation as my camera angle shifts with an animation of chewing. It’s actually kind of cute, the idea that the developer took the time to program in a chewing animation. It takes a few seconds, longer than I expected, but I’m rewarded with a fresh blue-grey, staticy flesh-box:

MATERIAL CONSUMED

ADAPTATION ACQUIRED

My avatar’s flesh ripples, and along the lines where I chose to have feathers grow, small patches of fuzz appear, spreading from there to cover most of my skin. Before long, I’m covered in purplish fur, blending in with the environment a lot better- and doing a good impression of a really fucked up mascot, probably.

That was fast, though! And definitely fits into more than one of my objectives, giving me a nice bit of context for the whole “Consume” and “Grow” of it all. Would I get more than one adaptation if I’d put more of my “blood” into the stat? Would it take more eating if I’d put less?

Graaah! Nothing’s getting answered by just sitting around and thinking! I have proof of a way to advance and meet my objectives, and an intrinsic motivator to start putting a bunch of whatever I find in my mouth; what more could any good gamer need? I pop open another can of Monstrous, feeling the artificially colored caffeine flood down my throat, and get to stepping.

Interestingly, I notice that the camera wobbles again, out of tune with the walking. I take another step, and nothing. Hmm. A sip, and- ah! There! The eating animation plays again!

Weird. Did someone code in for the animation to play when the player leans their head back? Getting even more ridiculous, but the idea that someone took the effort to do something so small is invigorating, and I can’t help but laugh.

“Whoever made this needs a prize,” I mumble. “And probably a lot of therapy.”

I keep things moving, walking down the hill and occasionally grabbing a bite of hair-grass as I go. It doesn’t happen every time, but as I eat more and more of the stuff, the fur seems to change, sometimes getting longer, something shortening and getting poofier, and going through cycles of growth as I chew. By the time she reaches the bottom of the hill, I’ve cycled through a couple different versions, though it doesn’t seem like it’s making some kind of crazy, hyper-special adaptation yet. Or maybe I just need to do something more engaging, vary it up, eat a crapload at once. Possibilities, possibilities!

But focusing on the grass, I start to notice that it’s not all standing still. It’s flowing, turning one way, then the other, and in some places… in some places, in small patches, there are more abrupt shifts, usually at the lower points, between the hills. The presence of movement in the starter zone can only mean one thing...

Enemies!

With a smile and a mouth full of both spicy chips and fantasy hair-grass, I waddle my avatar towards the closest source of movement, eager to see some good old fashioned modern videogame violence!