Virtue And A Sledgehammer Review – You’re About To Witness A Lot Of Love

The internet brought so much to those of us fortunate enough to have access to it. Often too much. There’s no comprehensive look at even a day of information or art. This has been true for decades, and now, those numbers are diluted, faked, and inflated further by the pseudo. Though we’ll never see everything we want, even if we stop getting more right now, we’re told to want more instead of sharing the little we find. Yet, in this vast abyss, there are people like you, making video games. Hoping they’ll be seen through them. Hoping you’ll be seen in them.

When one of the robots in Virtue and a Sledgehammer mentions that they and your character’s mother don’t get to play Rummikub much anymore, I felt something shift in my brain. Rummikub was a sort of math equivalent to Scrabble in my household. Apologies to all the Rummikub-first people out there. It’s about creating chains of numbers, swapping your number tiles around with others through increasingly complex strings. Unlike with Scrabble, by the end you often cannot tell where the game started. When it’s over, it seems like everything has been replaced.

That robot has the memories of a neighbor. A software created by Pratelle’s sister Nina after seeing the inexplicable sickness of their mother, Merche. I wonder whether the person whose memories are inside this robot only played Rummikub with Merche before she started to change, or whether they got to play as it got worse. I wonder how different it felt. I’ve not played Rummikub with my family for a long while either. I wonder how it’d feel now?

You can listen to the machines, you can leave some of them be, but the only real interaction you can have with them is to press one of the three buttons that charge up Pratelle’s sledgehammer and attack so hard that they ragdoll into the wall behind them, collapsing the building. The environmental destruction is impressively cathartic and satisfying among the rest of the violence. You get to control the power of a swing, changing between a shove, a horizontal attack, and an overhead slam depending on how long you hold the button. Sometimes only the full power will do the job.

The entire city is just walking robots with implanted memories. Replicated pseudo-humans. Nina studied the chemical reactions she claims are the entirety of a human being and replicated the state the humans were in at the time she started the digitization process. At the start of Virtue and a Sledgehammer, Pratelle crashes her car into a tree, walks out into the only place that ever knew her, and sees it all be nothing but walking data. And all she has is a sledgehammer, sitting in the back of her trunk. Right next to her mother’s corpse.

I walked alongside Pratelle, area after area. Some robots expressed a plea, asking us not to go through with the destruction. Others, based on the town’s many homophobes and racists, threw out slurs, because that’s presumably what those people would do back then too. You eventually learn that practically everything about these people could have been reprogrammed for these robots if they asked for it. Some crave to forget a tragic accident at the local sawmill, now turned into a robot-production factory. Some crave not to feel grief at all. Do you?

Virtue and a Sledgehammer is the most intense game I have played in a long time. The first half was nigh-unbearable. I play so much every year, and even among indies, few feel as cutting edge. Even smaller games take a lot of time to make, and some of their writing ages by the time they’re out. Only one game from earlier this year felt even remotely close to this. I’m sure some of the references found here will age the game faster, maybe cause some eyerolls. But it’s a challenging story meant for the people right now. One I desperately needed.

They have all our data already. It’s all there, and it’s just waiting to be reproduced, now with a perfectly realistic image and voice, not just a robotic body with numbers flickering on a computer screen. One slip in some law process and this will be everywhere. It already is everywhere for public figures. You’re so close to seeing a normalization of a recreation of your dead mother standing in front of you at her own funeral.

For the past few years, I thought back to all those stories of artificial intelligence before artificial intelligence as we know it now. Games like Detroit: Become Human, Mass Effect, Nier. Movies like I, Robot, Ghost in the Shell, Wall-E. I’ve thought about how embarrassingly few sci-fi books I’ve read. Apologies for not having a point of comparison there. We used to love stories about AI becoming human. Now, it’s not some CGI or a humanoid with cords sticking out of it. It’s an AI recreation of a dead victim forgiving the accused, interpreted in the court of law as an act of forgiveness.

They will use everything they can to make us be part of this. They need this; they put their entire life on the line. For it to succeed, they will use everyone you know, everything they know about you, all the data points they’ve collected—including those stories you’ve loved back in the day—to tug on the souls that their stale constructs lack. They’ll say it’s already done. You’ll be presented with a finished product whether you like it or not. Someone you loved, standing in front of you, talking to you like they did back then. What now?

What will you do with your sledgehammer? Will you make Pratelle strike, or will you use it as the last resort? The world turns red, the music swells, it keeps going, intensifying from area to area, with only the brief sounds of broken glass that snap you into some memory before you’re back in hell. Pratelle remembers the times she spent with her mother and her sister, and all the thoughts that rattled through her brain before she picked a response to one of their questions. You pick one for her, but unlike in a lot of much less interesting choice games, it’s clear that she internalizes all those options. She’s all of them at once.

These options often contradict each other. When Nina asks Pratelle to choke her to the point of unconsciousness just so that she can better understand her own brain, Pratelle sees three options before her. Does she do exactly as told? Does she release sooner? Or does she grasp harder? If I pushed her towards that last option, would all that’s going on right now not just… stop? But Pratelle is her own character. She has agency too, but is clearly at a very uncertain part of her life. Ready for a whim to take hold. You are that whim.

She’s hurting inside. Her inner voice tells her to stop thinking of them as people, but there’s something there that tells her otherwise. It’s something we have to fight because we are human. We’ve personified everything for as long as we’ve lived, from giving nature its gods to buying a pet rock sold for just under four dollars each. We grieved for things that were never real. Now it’s not an abstraction, and it hurts so much. How much more can we hurt? I thought we had a bit more time before it was all embraced fully, but it seems I was wrong. We’re forcing it now. I guess I’ll have to suffer sooner so that I can see it end sooner.

There’s always hope in death. Pratelle is grieving. More and more memories come back to her. A song plays, sung by Beícoli, who’s also the composer for another favorite of mine, a 2023 indie metroidvania on a motorcycle: Laika: Aged Through Blood. One of the many incredible parts of that game is its soundtrack, which haunted me so badly that I thought I wouldn’t be able to finish it. But I persevered. There’s no avoiding these emotions once they set in—you have to see it to the end.

I felt the same way many times throughout my mere three-and-a-half hours of Virtue and a Sledgehammer. So many moments I don’t want to spoil where I physically crumpled, fell forward, and stared at the floor as my gut yelled at me to stop whatever it is I’m doing. The people of the past who wrote those stories of something magically gaining humanity could never have known what they’d do to me. But I think the developers at Deconstructeam and Selkie Harbour knew exactly what they were going to do to me with this game. I think they understand the hurt profoundly. Virtue and a Sledgehammer is about facing the change that has to happen for you to commit to your beliefs.

I played its demo in June, a few weeks before my birthday. Back then I called Virtue and a Sledgehammer the “voice of a generation,” and now I think it’s far more than just a voice. Despite its fairly limited controls, all the walking you do, or interaction boiling down to just hitting things with a hammer, it’s truly only something my two decades of experience with video games could have given me. All the expectations, the good and the bad of my time with the medium came together to make me feel so strongly about calling it one of the best video games I’ve played.

I think I’m going to ask my family about playing Rummikub soon. I found it recently in a little-visited drawer in my room. We’re all a bit busy this month, but hopefully we can make it happen some time before Christmas. I don’t want to regret not spending time with them. Not being there when they have so much on their plate. I feel so bad for all the times I just hid from my family, my friends. I don’t want to pretend I don’t see them falling into this AI shithole anymore. I know where it all leads, I was just hurting too much to face it. Now, I can move with conviction. I know I don’t ever want to see a world of robots and sledgehammers.

Mateusz played Virtue and a Sledgehammer on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing, and our score will not be changed.