A Love Letter to Hardcase <3

Thursday is my friend. I met her because she was talking loudly and passionately about Songbirds. She did a read-along thread on Bluesky. We’ve talked a lot since then. About games and other things. When she made Hardcase, I was immediately smitten with it and knew I would write something about it. I say all of this to say that this is not a review. I am bias. No, this is a love letter.

Dear Hardcase,

I wouldn’t be playing Citizen Sleeper right now, if it weren’t for you. Which is a massive compliment. So often it’s the other way around, right? You play a video game, get inspired by some use of mechanics, and go to find a TTRPG that suits that vibes. Or you create one yourself, citing it as inspiration. You are a game that is in direct response to Citizen Sleeper, so I should have started there and then found you, but instead I found you, and now I want to go backwards and see what I missed from my initial brush with Citizen Sleeper.

This isn’t even to say that you are reduced purely to your inspiration—we are all standing on the shoulders of giants, and the giants you’re standing on are sporadic and wonderful. You are a book that is in love with other tabletop books. You are a book that wants to share that love with others, much in the way that Citizen Sleeper is in love with Blades in the Dark. That energy of sharing and wanting to be shared is found on the first pages, when you say you are modular, that you should be taken apart and pieced back together, as if you yourself are a spaceship and I can take you apart to make you faster, or add a gun on the nose if I feel violent, or add more places to sit and stare out into space if I’m feeling homesick and melancholic.

When reading you and playing you, I started remembering my time with Signalis, which is so funny to me because you aren’t from there, so to speak. But, in much the same way that Signalis is a love letter to survival horror and is a game pieced together from the media that inspired it, and wears that media proudly, and yet is able to transcend those inspirations and homages and allusions to become something that is whole, with a unique identity to itself, you too have accomplished that impossible task.

I can point to the modular bits and see the timeline of the mechanic: clocks from Blades, stress from me(?), basic move from Apocalypse World, and on and on and on. But even though I can point to those and say “this is where they come from,” it doesn’t lessen you one bit. It makes me even more enamored that these pieces have created something new. Something infused with a very 1980’s fascination and fear of space capitalism. A world that is at once recognizable in its mundanity (I am transported back to the warehouse job from my early 20’s, only now I’m in orbit of Saturn) and so spectacular in its specificity.

You really come alive in that specificity. Every NPC begs me to role-play them. Every locale desires me to haunt it. I want to roll the slots until I get every outcome. I wanna waste my money on cigarettes and snacks. I wanna do drugs and get psychic powers. Roll tables, my god; your use of roll tables is intoxicating—each entry isn’t just a possibility, but a truth that exists in the world. Reading each of them in order creates mood, vibe, atmosphere. It clears the fog of war that pollutes any new setting, worming its way into my brain ridges. Even in the work, the bounties and the salvage, everything makes me feel like I’m present. I’m living it. I’m working paycheck to paycheck and wasting spare cash on whatever I can just to feel something. To feel alive? No. To feel the itch of starvation again.

You understand the trap of capitalism. It’s ultimate goal of distraction and obfuscation. You understand that the systems in place aren’t there for me to be able to change them. That they all exist in opposition with change. I think it’s poetically terrible that the only way for me to escape that life in Hardcase is not death, but “fates worse than death” (your words, not mine). And those fates are jobs: cigarette quality control smoker, retail worker, biological crash test dummy. There’s no retiring. No revolt or revolution. What system is truly built to enable those? The system is built to keep me here, keep me docile, and keep me glued to my screen as I waste my nights playing “Conqueror,” the game-within-your-game that provides me a way to continue my daily grind, only in a digital space this time (much, much better).

You are part of the Capitalist Horror genre, which I think Cyberpunk was born from and is nestled inside. Sci-fi greats like Neuromancer, Alien, and Blade Runner are trendsetters in this genre. Literary greats like The Great Gatsby and American Psycho delve into the horrors inside a person ingrained and in-love with the trappings of the genre. Jacob Geller found it in video games like A Night in the Woods and Tacoma for his essay “Capitalist Present, Collective Future.” And I find it horribly biting and painfully real, here in Hardcase.

Thank you,

Snow

You can find Hardcase on itch.io.

And you can find Thursday on Bluesky.

To support writing like this, there’s my patreon or my substack (where you’re reading this). I’m on bluesky as well, for less-words and more-posts.