In a time when there is such a massive push to eradicate the humanity from art, Judero shows the vital importance of heart and connection.
Maybe it’s this head cold talking, but I feel like my life is filled with all of this endless, lifeless noise that I have willingly brought into it lately. Social media feeds try to dredge me into endless arguments or drown me in a deluge of mindless snippets of ideas – a torrent of pain, cruelty, perfection, humor, and delight that turns into an ashen slurry of pointless words that I scroll through, passing time that I don’t have to lose yet I keep spending as if it’s meaningless.
I play through games I don’t even enjoy to while the hours away. I slog through combat that is polished to a mirror sheen – battles so perfect and bloody that audiences cheer at the spectacle of more empty fields of nothingness interspersed with death made spectacle. I’m given hours of barren fields to meander, expending literal days in the emptiness so I can have another taste of interaction with the game machine. It’s so beautiful to look at, yet so utterly empty of meaning as I wander these vast worlds that feel like they just serve as padding between moments of battle interaction. Windows of striking places that are set dressings and little more.
I feel like I’m convincing myself that it should make me happy. That I’ve missed something others can see that I just don’t any more. I go back to old games to recapture the joy I once felt playing them, but I swiftly move on or I just keep plugging away, mind and heart disconnected, again as if I have infinite time to waste. As if my time is valueless when I have a loving family and children who smile at me with every waking moment. Who shout out for me once I walk in the door every day. Why am I wasting time that could be theirs? That could enrich their lives and my own?
So many things I’ve played or experienced have felt like I’m using them to forcefully fill in a gap – a means of telling myself I should be growing as a person or enjoying myself. It’s like I am chasing personal meaning within these simulated perfected worlds or in the words I read online. Not that this is anything new, but I certainly feel that I haven’t been able to find that meaning in some time. It all just feels like wasted time chasing that sensation. Not that there’s anything wrong with finding joy in entertainment, and not that there is anything wrong with a lot of these games. I just feel like I’m missing something. That I’m passively existing instead of choosing how I wish to exist.
Even my own writing – my own act of creation – which has all but dried up lately, is just lifeless. It’s surface level thought. Joyless. Seeing the loss of several writing jobs (with more likely to fall on the horizon), game writing crumbling to bits in general, AI impinging on so many creative spaces, and parasitic organizations gutting writing and games, it feels like what I do is meaningless. And that’s all on top of the world’s many horrific issues that make what I do feel so utterly ridiculous. Why am I writing about games and screwing around with SEO when the planet’s aflame and it feels like my neighbors are delightfully stoking the fire?
I feel like I’m not present or connected to the world, my loved ones, and the things I care about these days. I feel like I pour too much time into things that provide a fascimile of that connection and presence, wasting endless hours and days on them. I’m doing things as if I expect the problems to fix themselves instead of taking the purposeful steps required to make my life better and bring me back that joy. But I also often find myself wondering if I remember how to do that.
This bleak state is where I found myself when I picked up Judero again. I had given it a quick run through when I covered it a while back and enjoyed it a lot, but I don’t think I really stopped to appreciate it. So, sick with a head cold and deep in these negative thoughts about my writing, the world around me, my empty crawls through social media, wasting precious time with my children and loved ones, and feeling like I was chasing joy I would no longer feel, I started up the game and let it carry me away.
When I started the game, I was met with a fluffy pink bunny floating on a cotton cloud – Mab. Her squeaky voice begins the narration, drawing a genuine smile from me. She’s a strange companion for gruff, shirtless Judero, our burly protagonist, and his gruff delivery alongside hers – all played utterly straight, simultaneously cracks me up and sets the tone for this work. I expected her voice to provide me with some comic relief through the game, but her departure a short while later strikes me with sorrow. I run a gamut of emotions over only a few minutes, but I feel.
And after we speak with Mab, the game’s first song kicks in. Lord Gregory. It’s so utterly peaceful to listen to that I come to a stop. I don’t touch the controls. I don’t move. I just sit and take the song in, letting a sense of peace settle in over me. I spend so much time in games moving forward and “doing”, but here, I just wanted to “be” for a moment. To stop chasing after the next thing or activity or feeling and simply allow myself to exist in this period, letting it stretch out in my consciousness for a while. I just wanted to be in this place for a while. I felt present. I felt calm.
The mournful tune washes over me. I am terrible at music comprehension for some reason. It’s a weird quirk of my mind – I find it nearly impossible to figure out music lyrics unless I sit and read them separately. But I felt the deep sorrow in this song and started digging into it. I wasn’t just poking around the internet to pass time. I was looking into a song over three hundred years old telling a bleak story of pain and a weaponization of sex against women that feels just as pertinent now as it did centuries ago. And also how our children often suffer simply for existing due to the cruel beliefs of the adults in power of a time.
All of this hits me only moments after talking with what I felt was a silly pink bunny with a funny voice. But the game continues to strike me. I look out over the handcrafted grasses and bushes. The wooden hut. The figure of the shepherd and the chickens milling around him. It felt like Judero wanted me to just exist in a world tended by human creativity in this moment. All of it was woven from the work of Jack King-Spooner and Talha Kaya. The models were all made by hand. The music is sung by the creators. I know games are made by the hard work of their developers and it likely sounds like I’m splitting hairs, but this place felt connected with the hearts of the people who made it. Their hands crafted the actual world. Their voices gave it an emotional heartbeat.
As I explored, I only felt that sensation getting stronger. The game’s varied creatures capture a playfulness and horror in their clay forms. The combat is clunky, but being able to possess creatures to do interesting things in a fight or around the environments makes it feel playful and fun even if it isn’t polished to a Devil May Cry action combat shine. I just enjoyed it because it felt like I could feel the joy that the creators were trying to weave with it. It felt good to just immerse myself in the ideas they had that would shape the world and how we interact with it.
Judero‘s varied stories had a similar effect. There is a friendliness among the neighbors in each village that made me feel connected with the people and love helping them. Even so, that friendliness can hide the disgusting deeds and cruelities that people do to one another, and the unfairness of life in how these moments play out. There’s poetry and a cutting humor in talking with these folks, and again, with the handmade and hand-drawn characters, each feels like a distinct, memorable creation that gives me a sense of connection with the humanity of its creator.
I have never met Jack King-Spooner or Talha Kaya and don’t pretend to know them, but Judero gave me this sense of connection with something that they made. An emotional sounding board of their ideas put out into the world to bounce my own life and thoughts off of, and to find a connection with a world that was no less of a mess than my own, but one so brimming with personal touches and human connection.
While it may feel like creativity and humanity are being snuffed out and pushed aside, or that I myself am drowning in pretended human interaction and a loss of creativity, there are still things out there that capture that incredible power of the human heart. There are wonderful creators like King-Spooner and Kaya who will weave a powerful human touch into their works that can pull you from the wreckage of your own disillusionment and remind you of your connections with your loved ones, the lands around you, and the ages that have existed long before you. That you can feel despair about what you do with your life and where you seem to be passively taking it, but that you know it isn’t all there is. And that creating something of yourself in the world is always important. Especially so when you feel it isn’t.
It took seeing a world where everything is purposeful and connected – created with intent by someone – to feel that I can stop my flailing, bleak emotions. Judero let me see and feel how the disconnect I feel with the world won’t be healed by me wasting my existence on social media or worrying about AI or obsessiving over self worth over lost work or in chasing a feeling from games that won’t ever give that sensation. I need to look at myself and choose to create and live more purposefully and to weave my own intent to make my life, as well as those of others, into something better. To try to bring something of myself into the world and manifest it. I have to chase that connection and create my life with purpose.
For being a testament to the complexities of humanity and for taking us to a world infused with human touch on every level, Judero is our Game of the Year.
Judero is available now on Steam.
About The Author
Wow, Thanks so much! I wouldn’t be making games if it wasn’t for the support and coverage from this site. I’ve followed Indiegamesplus (and its former form) for like 13 years or more. Yous have done so much for indie games. This accolade means so much.
Best wishes,
Jack