Part 21: Postmortem

Postmortem: What Was This Game Supposed To Be?

It will come to no surprise to astute observers of terrible games that Black Geyser came from kickstarter, but it's worth questioning what, exactly, Black Geyser promised to the people who have them money and why the finished product is such an incoherent mess. Now, a lot of this is going to be blanket speculation based on the credits on the kickstarter and the credits on the game, but rest assured that the more I look into these people the more terrible projects they've been associated with. I'm not going to do a complete breakdown of everything in the kickstarter, because their obsession with minutiae like Brewing and Drying is just laughable and tedious, and the constant invocation of "classic-style RPGs" - and the mention of Baldur's Gate in the trailer - is exactly what you'd expect from lazy nostalgia bait. We could talk about how they desperately wanted to ape the feeling in Baldur's Gate I where you wander around running into random crap like dryads who give you a game over if you make out with them or the gender reversal belt, but talking about the derivative part of derivative games isn't honestly that interesting.

Where's Rothgor?


I was going to make a joke about Poochie, but then I remembered that having people asking "where's Rothgor" whenever Rothgor isn't on screen would be much better than what we got.

If you watch the entire 5 minute promotional trailer/developer interview video at the top of the kickstarter or read through the promotional material the focus is on Zornilsa and how the player can choose to be a "defiant hero" opposing her or give in and surrender to greed.


Rothgor is never mentioned. The trailer shows a feminine hand moving pawns while narrating about the perfidy of the goddess of greed and heavily implying that Zornilsa is the real villain and that the game is going to be about confronting her. I don't think it needs to be stated that this would be a much better game than we actually got - at the very least, it would be a game with a clear narrative and you would have a goal to work for. This is eliding the elephant in the room which is that Rothgor and Zornilsa are essentially the same character. Both are evil gods who reward the wicked for doing selfish or evil deeds and try to trick people into making bargains - Rothgor makes bargains with Zoria's sister, and Zornilsa desperately tries to tempt the player with nonsense. Many dialogue boxes are wasted prattling on about their novel idea to form a team, but it's not really clear why they have to be two separate characters or why they need each other at all. This isn't like Paradise Lost where all Satan's followers argue about redemption before Satan proves he doesn't give a damn about any of them by arguing for them to be in hell, these are two allied characters who differ in... I dunno, desire to destroy the world? Now, I'm not sure how much to read into this, as evidence of the plot we know and are confused by show up in various kickstarter updates such as this 2021 update about religions of Yerengal or the worst temple in 2020. The Team of Evil appears in 2021. It's worth noting that the original release date for Black Geyser was 2019 and the kickstarter lists one Nick Macari as the Narrative Designer. This is notably different than the finished game.



Padraig C. Nolan, who we briefly talked about earlier, is listed as the Narrative Designer while Nick Macari is relegated to the role of "story consultant".



I don't understand what happened, but I can rampantly speculate! It's worth noting the original release date for Black Geyser was 2019, but the aforementioned Temple update in 2020 notes that the game is a much bigger project than the developers were expecting and thus release got pushed back a few years. After this 2020 decision suddenly we get Rothgor (oddly pronounced Roth-gar) trailers, updates on how the Rothgor cultist's highest aspiration is to be possessed by a "courier" - a concept that never appears in game, even with the Rothgor cultists we encounter - and a whole bunch of nonsense reminiscent of the plot we got. Remember, Mr. Nolan's web page links the time travel inception quest with Isla as example work to impress potential employers. So was there a last minute plot change brought on by a new Narrative Designer, or what exactly happened here?

Tower of Time

Looking at Macari's web page is interesting because it's mostly a bunch of games you've probably never heard of. He has an entire section of his website devoted to the craft of writing. It's worth looking at some of the articles he's written, because comparing what he says to do versus what Black Geyser actually does is a complete whiplash.


There's a lot about using loglines - a one-sentence description of the story - to ensure that the story can be followed by the reader and he places a lot of emphasis on how poor execution can ruin a great story idea. I'll admit I only read a few of his articles, but what I've read seems completely at odds with what Black Geyser became. I do not know how to summarize the story of Black Geyser in a single sentence, precisely because there is so much convoluted bullshit that goes nowhere. Heck, let's see what Macari has to say on themes:


It's interesting how little of this Black Geyser seems to have absorbed. The cynical among us might notice that to the right of the Writing Craft section there's a description of hourly billing rates, but if you told me that if I had to describe the theme of Black Geyser or die I'd tell you to pull the trigger. It's kind of a mess, but you know, Macari is a contract worker. It's entirely possible that the client threw out his advice entirely and went with their own nonsense, right?

Now we need to talk about the only one of Macari's works I'm actually familiar with, a game named "Tower of Time."



This graphic is taken directly from Macari's website describing the story of Tower of Time. It's worth noting that I don't recognize any of the names except Post Malone, and I can't find independent verification that Malone even played this game. Now, Tower of Time's story is bad enough I could easily make it my next LP. It doesn't have anything as offensive as Stygian's Coaly Willie or ATOM's nonsense, but it's not very good. The gist of the story is that a character named "you" - the most boring fantasy white man imaginable - has a vision from some wizard after finding a tower on a doomed world, and you return as an adult with some heroes in tow to explore the tower to maybe find something that can fix the world. A bunch of Age of Wonders characters show up as you get deeper into the tower, and while the game starts off reasonably promising with mysteries of who built the tower and what it is, the game ultimately explains everything in ways that are unsatisfying and don't make any sense. The tower was built by the ancient civilization that ruled the planet and has both advanced technology and magic. Magic was originally invented by an intergalactic alien empire from another dimension who ascended to being energy beings but then discovered they had to eat everyone and devour energy to survive. It turns out that using magic lets them into the characters' world so they can devour it, and the wizard realized this and trapped himself in the tower under a time spell to fight the aliens forever where they breached into the real world. The big reveal, once your "champions" fight their way through the tower, is that the wizard realized the laws of physics in the home dimension would make the aliens killable and also he summoned you and your heroes so he could kill all the heroes to steal the life energy of... seven people that would let him teleport the tower through space so a new civilization could rise and kill the aliens.

The story has familiar hallmarks from our time with Black Geyser too. A mysterious woman referred to as "the Tower Avatar" shows up to spew exposition but refuses to explain anything. It turns out she's a robot built to stop you from reaching the wizard. A bunch of random interdimensional Nazis named after Spanish conquistadors show up. The characters are all boring fantasy stereotypes who refer to each other with appellation such as "Noble elf". There's an entire section where you go to another dimension to be judged by different alien energy beings in a sequence that doesn't matter at all. Lastly, it has one ending - after making a huge deal of the player's ability to make moral choices - which doesn't follow from the rest of the story and is utter nonsense. Instead of storming the fortress of a completely different god than the main antagonist, the characters make it to the bottom of the tower, where the wizard explains he needs to drain their life force to save the world. The champions are understandably less than enthused by this notion, so you have a boss fight against the wizard and a mind-controlled "You", which enrages the characters who are upset about having to fight their friend. You win the fight, but the wizard says some nonsense and all the characters obligingly line up so the wizard - whose goal is to start a new civilization elsewhere - consumes the best and brightest of the dying world's people because he can't figure out how to get energy out of the tower's advanced fusion reactor. It's a very stupid ending and the Steam forums are full of complaints about it and the plot in general - but if you're familiar with Black Geyser much of this will be familiar to you.

The point I'm making is that Macari was involved heavily in the creation of Tower of Time and it suffers from the same flaws as Black Geyser. The characters are shallow and uninteresting stereotypes, and anything interesting about them is excised for cliches. The ending is unsatisfying and railroaded as the designated "smart" characters (Isla, Proteus the Tower of Time wizard) explain their idiotic nonsense and force the player to go through with it. I've written a lot about how things in Black Geyser don't logically follow, such as telling the king you have an alliance with the Rillow or Lord Frelsi drafting you to join Traitor Town to continue the war. I think a lot of it can be explained by this:


At its core it really shows that Macari has no clue what he's talking about. Let's go look at Moby Dick. Melville heavily foreshadows that Queequeg and Ishmael getting on the Pequod and joining Captain Ahab is an absolutely terrible idea, from Ishmael discussing the fate of the biblical king Ahab to the prophet Elijah showing up to warn them not to get on that ship. Melville makes it clear to the reader that this is going to end badly, but it makes sense for the characters to do so because Ishmael is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.


Thus when the Pequod goes down with all hands because Ahab insists on following Moby Dick while loudly swearing allegiance to the devil the reader is unsurprised, because that is the logical conclusion of the actions of the characters and their flaws that led them to this point. Then again, Moby Dick is a beautifully written story of mythic proportions while the excerpt from "Samurai Onyro" is a bunch of demons raping a woman while the protagonist and a mentor character debate whether or not the protagonist should intervene because it's a test or some nonsense. I started with Moby Dick because I really like it, but it's worth comparing to the Macari stories because they're all trying to do the same thing: show how a heavily foreshadowed tragic doom actually happened. The Pequod sank both because of the hubris of Ahab and because the denizens of the ship had their reasons for not resisting him. In Black Geyser, the Pact Prophecy is supposed to lead to a tragic ending where the heroes have no choice but to release the Dark Moon to stop the curse of greed. In Tower of Time the tragedy is that the characters all agree to die to save the world, even as they finally profess their love for each other and other maudlin nonsense. Macari and the other writers do not do the work to get to this point. Ahab dies strangled by the spear he dedicated to the devil, and the entire novel is about the choices he and the others made that brought them to this point.

In summation, the Black Geyser developers seem to have brought this man on to fix their script - and also act as a kickstarter consultant - and were sold a bill of goods. There's a lot of writing about themes and twists and storyboarding and ensuring the story has resonance to the reader, but none of this was actually delivered upon. Tower of Time and Black Geyser are both notable for being about nothing. The endings don't make sense and don't relate to the rest of the game's plot. I can't tell if there was a later attempt to rewrite their way out of whatever Macari gave them, or whether the developers went along with it, but ultimately the prime failure of Black Geyser is the story, and it's heartbreaking. It's clear from watching the kickstarter videos that the developer team was genuinely enthused about the project, and much of the cringeworthy lore has the excitement of a twelve-year-old kid talking about his Dungeons and Dragons setting. Now, Black Geyser as written was never going to be a good game, but it's not hard for me to imagine that if the artists and programmers hired someone who could actually write we'd get something that was actually enjoyable to play.



Now that's it! We're done! There's not much more to say about this game, so we can all go on with our lives.