Hi, I’m Hamish Black and welcome to Writing on Games.
There’s a scene near the start of Wolfenstein: The New Order in which Blazkowics is ruminating
over his current situation from his wheelchair.
He solemnly speaks of a temporal disconnect, of seasons passing in the blink of an eye
and trying to build a picture of his situation from scant, fleeting details over an indeterminate
amount of time.
It’s a rather eerie image of a character who was once the original video game embodiment
of a distinctly American machismo, asserting his nation’s values in the thoroughly righteous
cause of slaughtering every Nazi in his path.
Now, though, the roles are reversed and BJ is on the defensive.
In thinking about the game as a whole, I keep coming back to this scene, because it feels
like the genesis of an ethereality that permeates the experience.
See, even after BJ awakens to joyously cut a Nazi throat, the world he awakens to feels
like a mere extension of his previous mental state; both time and place are hazy, characters
come and go and die, you flit between scenarios and never get a full grasp on what's happening.
In a word, and I didn’t think I'd be saying this about a Wolfenstein game, it's dreamlike.
Dreams turn out to be a key theme throughout the game; I mean, it literally opens with
BJ being jolted awake from his vision of a more peaceful existence.
The beauty and importance of this theme, however, come from the fact that its presentation goes
beyond the surface level.
It's made apparent through cinematography, scene transitions as well as the game's handling
of mechanics, genre and temporality.
In short, it's everywhere.
It became clear to me, for example, in the way BJ and Anya suddenly jolt from the train
that they’re on, to the destination.
Not only is it a drastic tonal shift from their brief moment of romantic joy to the
grim reality of their situation; it occurs with such a flash that it genuinely made me
question if it had actually happened or not, if BJ had merely conjured it.
It got me asking questions about other parts of the scene, which share equally jarring
contrasts – we go from mercilessly slaughtering an entire Nazi checkpoint to simply getting
coffee on a train in a few brief moments.
A train with high ranking Nazi officials on it, who apparently had no idea that many of
their colleagues had just been brought down by a single man.
Hell, with the amount of Nazi killing BJ has done over the years, surely he’d be the
stuff of legend at this point.
But nope, he just happens to be on a train with a high-ranking official and no one bats
an eyelid.
It reminded me of that scene from Inception where Cobb states – “you never really
remember the beginning of a dream; you always end up right in the middle of what’s going
on.”
And in the same way as that film, thinking about the implications of that in Wolfenstein
shatters the illusion somewhat.
All the weird temporal jumps that occur, from BJ sneaking into a concentration camp or stealing
an officer’s uniform and just appearing on the moon entirely undetected, all have
you asking - just how did I suddenly appear in this situation?
It's a question that's never really answered.
It doesn’t matter, you don’t need the details.
You can try to piece things together as you go along through newspaper clippings and the
like, but who cares about details when you’re there to kill Nazis?
It all serves to give time and space this weirdly hazy feeling, where you question what's
real and what's not, like you're sleepwalking into situations because as BJ, you're just
there to kill Nazis and as a player, you're doing whatever the protagonist has been sent
to do.
You just...
do it, even if you have as much of an understanding of the context as BJ does.
It's a haziness that's reflected in the cutscenes, where not only does soft focus gives the literal
appearance of haze, but also whose composition often goes against cinematic tradition in
order to create distance.
It's apparent in the way the shaky camera floats around, creating a lot of lead space
that you expect to be filled, but has the characters focusing the opposite way.
Cuts are sudden and often land on shots that don't give you a full picture of the scene,
closing in on characters using canted angles to highlight instability.
But, again, who cares about this stuff when you're there to kill Nazis?
Yes, I get that, this endeavour is made hugely cathartic due to its grindhouse presentation,
where BJ is a walking tank of a man blasting through these hordes with hulking shotguns
akimbo, taking the world back from the Nazis... except, he's not really a walking tank, is
he?
You go down surprisingly quickly if you're not racing between health packs; dual-wielding
weapons isn't that much more effective than just holding one and, most importantly, the
Nazis are everywhere – they feel endless at times.
This is a franchise helped define the notion of bombast in first person shooters and this
instalment very much foregrounds that idea.
However, what feels equally as satisfying; what saves ammo, health and ultimately time...
is treating it like a tactical stealth shooter.
It's yet another disconnect that serves to distance you as a player from the realities
you have come to know regarding mechanics and genre.
It's safe to say that all in, it's a fairly destabilising experience.
The question then remains – why do this?
Why heighten this sense of surreality in a game about killing Nazis?
Because, and bear with me here, I don’t think the game is about defeating the Nazis.
It’s not trying to dictate to you the horrors of war or that Nazis are bad – it presumes
you’re a decent human being who knows these things.
The game is very deliberately setting them up as incongruous, as not only the victors
but as something so bewilderingly monolithic (I mean, BJ can't even escape them by leaving
Earth) that taking the world back from them feels genuinely impossible.
Ultimately, how can you destroy something whose scale you have no means of understanding?
And so emerges the central premise of The New Order – the Nazis here are the extinction
event in The Road; they are the indefinable apocalypse after which we find our characters.
And like all good post-apocalyptic fiction, the focus is not on finding a way to undo
that apocalypse; it’s about magnifying the personalities of the characters surviving
its consequences.
The Nazis are here; how do BJ and co assert their existence in the face of that?
When BJ and Anya are presumably trying for a baby, he tells her that he wants it “like
this” – it’s a positive sentiment, that he’s found someone so important to him that
he’s willing to brave starting a family even under dire circumstances, but there’s
that subtle and painful acknowledgement that “like this” will always be “like this”;
that they’ll never be able to fully change things.
It's a really raw moment, but the game is full of them – from Fergus or Wyatt dealing
with their survivor complex, or J navigating his conflicting feelings about BJ as a person
versus his place within an imperialist framework; these moments cut to the core of the characters,
of their values in ways that simply would not be possible if one could just defeat the
enemy.
By subverting norms of genre, cinematography and temporality in order to distance BJ from
reality, the game is able to place you in this dreamlike world that BJ inhabits; one
that frames him as a human being rather than a righteous killing machine, and one that
does so by framing your goal as a player as somewhat inherently unwinnable.
As such, the game turns what could have been a needlessly preachy take on the horrors of
war into a deeply personal, surprisingly affecting character study.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece on Wolfenstein: The New Order.
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And with that, I’m Hamish Black and this has been Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.