Imagine a world where you’d have to sell your soul, not to survive, per se - you’re already surviving, just look at everyone around you, you’re doing just fine - but to succeed. Imagine you had to do miserable things, hold the power of other people’s lives in your hand, while also knowing your actual power is nigh non-existent. It would be miserable, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?

Wouldn’t it?

What lovely friends we have

Distraint is a 2D horror point and click. You play as Price, an apprentice banker, rising through the ranks with his new employers by distraining people from their homes. After one such distraint leaves an old woman homeless, Price is wracked by guilt and forced to confront his demons while balancing the question of whether he can actually be a good person.

I will be blunt. I did not particularly enjoy Distraint as a game. While it may not be as reliant on moon logic as its fellows in the genre, needing to meander back and forth across a map to get a specific object and use it in a specific way is never my idea of fun. The horror imagery and scare chords also detracted from the fundamental horror the game was trying to convey, turning what otherwise felt like an examination of inequality and the fundamentals of our modern economy into something campier and more reminiscent of the worst horror games I’ve played. For those looking for immersive and self-reflective horror, Distraint’s gameplay and attempts to build atmosphere distract from that story.

But god, if it didn’t still manage to resonate with me.

"Nom nom nom" isn't appropriate here, is it?

I used to work in the tech industry, building things that actively made the world a worse place for the people living in it. For my first job, I could justify it to myself, arguing that no, working on maps didn’t make the world worse, that maps let people see the world and understand what’s around them, and that I was helping make the invisible visible for millions of people. I would say all this to myself while the company I worked for churned through hundreds of workers, chewing them, berating them, and spitting them back out the curb with nothing but an insufficient paycheck to show for the experience. I tried for years to justify it, and I couldn’t. There is no justification, at least not beyond the basic fallacy that growth at all costs, that profit is fundamentally good, and referring to people by their dollar value rather than their humanity is a valid way to approach others’ lives. If you’ve ever searched for a reason, a motivation, anything to help understand how I’ve gotten to this point in my life, it’s this. I refuse to be complicit in the exploitation of others, and that’s how where I worked for years operated.

So I left, and I burned it all down behind me. It was the right thing to do.

Except, that’s not how capitalism works, is it? There is no opting out, no way to escape the system. I live in the Netherlands, a country whose wealth is fundamentally built on centuries of exploitation, and whose wealth continues to rely on a system where the lives of those in the global south mean nothing. I drink tea harvested by labourers I will never see, eat chocolate farmed by enslaved children, and look out my window at the towers of banks built on profiting off poverty. There is a perpetual underclass - there has to be, that’s how capitalism works - and the only way to survive is to participate in that system.

Except it’s not. I can survive just fine. I can survive off the nothing I’m paid, move somewhere cheaper, cut back on everything but the essentials. I choose to participate because I want to do more than survive. I want to succeed.

I choose to be complicit in the exploitation of others. I distrain. It’s all I know how to do, and it’s killing me inside.

Distraint is not a good game. It seeks - intentionally or otherwise - to be a critique of capitalism, but its game elements get in the way of that critique. As a point and click, it’s plodding; as a horror game, it’s campy.

But for this one, very specific audience, dear god, did it resonate.

Developer: Jesse Makkonen
Genre: Point and click, Horror
Year: 2015
Country: Finland
Language: English
Time to beat: 3 hours
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/Q3kTuJ7E3FE