Total Chaos

Today's subject was nothing more than it being my lucky day. Searching for a suitable world to explore, I started to browse by year and couldn't find anything that was catching my eye. At least until I went back to the dawn of the new millennium and came across Total Chaos by DarkShadow. I had heard of neither game nor author before, but with that name/author combo, it sounded like it might be one of those games that tries to be rather serious and dramatic while coming off as unintentionally humorous. The kind of game where you have an evil corporation doing nefarious deeds and an experiment goes wrong, or a researcher goes rogue. Something fails, and now the world is in peril. Games like Dark Soul with it's "you have been promoted to be food for the experiment", or Fabrication with its mysterious disappearances and gruesome murders come to mind.

These are games whose elevator pitch seems like it could be a cool experience. Who doesn't want to infiltrate the lab/mansion/top secret facility, uncover the terrifying truth, and probably flee the scene before the whole building goes up in a giant explosion? From what I've seen in ZZT though, rarely do these games do a whole lot to maintain a spooky atmosphere. Instead you get text that tends to be meaningless to the player "Project: Nebula", "Code Name Xenon", the "Malek Files". MacGuffins to lure you in, that if you're lucky will have you shooting at enemies that don't accidentally shoot one another constantly. They are games whose authors think will have players hooked on the mystery that offers no depth, obvious clues, and a clueless cast. In trying to come up with any such games that actually succeed at all, the best I've got is Jami's Undercity, a gothic dungeon crawler against creatures of the night who you long to join.

Jami, this game ain't.

Total Chaos quickly reveals itself to be a total comedy, with its laundry list of quotable dialog in the intro alone, ruminating on computers, robots, and humanity's destruction by their own creations. It's an action game without any action, relying completely on its storytelling to compel players to see if mankind can somehow win an impossible battle with metallic monstrosities. It fails miserably, but in such a fun way that I was absolutely compelled to find out what was going to happen next. How absurd could things get? That's what we're going to find out.

Everything About The Future Sucks

A big part of what makes Total Chaos so fun to see now are the little bits of accuracy in its prediction of the future. It's a world where thing don't seem to be getting any better. The plans that are made are obviously going to fail. The villains are inept and have no real goals. People are going to die because it's easier to write them off rather than figure out a way to solve a problem without casualties. Then, when somebody tries putting in the work, it's actually incredibly easy and it turns out that all of this could have been avoided by having the slightest interest in anything other than protecting their egos and power.

In what's now that not so far future of 2032, things are pretty bad. See, man invented the computer, and that was pretty great, until plans were hatched to use the computer to destroy the world as we know it. Robots are being built with plans for them to be unleashed on New Year's Day, marking the dawn of the age of robots. This is all a good thing. These are the good robots, made by Robo Tech, the robot company.

However... Robo Tech's CEO Niles (no last name given), has plans of his own. Ten special robots were built for the purpose of war, and should any of those robots "malfunction", humanity would instead find themselves entering the age of death. These war bots are the most powerful weapons mankind has ever known, easily capable of bringing an end to civilization as we know it should they be asked to.

Civilization itself has seen better days. In the future, the world? the city of Delfrak? something else?^[1] Well, one of those things is divided into an upper and lower world. (It's probably a Midgar thing). The upper level is for the important people, and the lower level is for everyone else. It's teeming with crime and violence, so travel between the two is highly regulated. Those that want to reach the upper world need explicit permission, passes, and to get through security at a number of elevators dedicated to the purpose.

For years Robo Tech has been the recipient of significant support from the government, but when intelligence discovers the company plans to produce these war machines the money quickly dries up. This in turn leads to Niles deciding to use the robots to wage a war on humanity.

When the president realizes that Robo Tech plans to use their war bots to take over, beginning with the lower world, he launches a counter-offensive of ten men to try and stop the robots. Nobody is particularly confident that this will be able to stop the robots, but there is a contingency plan.

Each soldier carries with them an experimental explosive known as a "pickle bomb". Any one of these bombs is capable of blowing up the entire lower world. Also everyone who worked on the pickle bomb project has been pre-emptively killed to ensure their silence. The president has everything under control. Things are going great. Continue to attend any New Year's Eve parties you were invited to.

A few cabinet members actually object to the idea of blowing up the entire lower world, with reasons ranging from "some lower worlders are hard working people" or simply because "Hey the surviving lower worlders will absolutely try to kill us if we do that". The commander in chief reassures everyone that his men will kill any survivors, and that while some nice folk from below will have to die, all of humanity will be destroyed if the robots cannot be stopped.

But all of this should come as no surprise to anyone reading this. It doesn't need to be 2032 for politicians and CEOs to act only in their own personal interests. I mean, shoot, 2032 is an election year.

Robo Tech has set loose their robots. The president's men are having a hard time stopping them. The lower world, and more are at stake. It's up to some guy to reach the president and inform him that his plan won't work. Should CEO Niles be killed to stop the robots, they'll instead continue killing without orders. Something else must be done before the humanity is truly doomed.

Unfortunately, amidst the chaos (just a regular amount. There's not yet total chaos), said messenger is killed as well. As he dies, he enlists our hero to finish the mission, leading the player on their adventure to save the world from killer robots, a maniacal CEO, and a president who considers him and everyone else in the lower world to be expendable.

For something newly dystopian, there's the fake ID that the player is given upon meeting up with his first contact. This ID has "ten points" on it, which can be lost by doing illegal activities. Run out of points, and you'll get thrown in jail. I'm not sure if the framing of this is supposed to be taken as merciful, letting prison be a threat for repeat offenders, or if the government can no longer be bothered to deal with law enforcement until you start going to extremes.

As a gameplay mechanic though, the idea that your character can take a limited number of illegal actions without consequence sounds like a decent gameplay mechanic that ZZT can handle easily enough. Do something nasty? Lose a point or two. Perhaps you'll have moral choices where you can do something more easily for points, or be a good little citizen and find a more complicated solution that doesn't require criminal activity.

Maybe it's not even a morality thing. Perhaps players will have to break laws, but need to picky about how often they do so. Get some ammo by robbing a store? Steal someone's car to get somewhere faster? Kill or spare an uncooperative Robo Tech employee? These could be ways to branch the narrative while still allowing it to tell one singular story, changing only the details based on your choices, and encouraging players to try other options on additional playthroughs.

Ha ha just kidding.

The points system comes up once in the game and using them up is mandatory. There are no "gameplay mechanics" here. You may not realize it, but this is Total Chaos. At no point is the player in any danger of being imprisoned, and in fact no law enforcement is even seen. The gameplay is devoid of any security worries that aren't just hypotheticals, leaving the game's baffling narrative to exclusively drive home the message that this is a police state.

And when you do lose those points, it's not from being caught, but rather exchanging two points for some information about security codes. Again, there's a neat idea here in terms of story for a world where passes on crime can be exchanged so freely like this. That neat idea will not be explored.

I Neet A Hero

And just who is this man being thrust into the middle of this mess that's our only hope to save this world?

Grak.

Humanity is doomed.

Our protagonist, is a rather unlikable twenty year old man named Grak. What a dreadful name. This poor guy isn't doing so good in life, and that name can't be doing any favors. It's not even a bad "future" name. With Total Chaos being set in 2032, Grak had to be named in 2012. That's only another decade after this game's release. Perhaps DarkShadow thought there'd be some radical changes in naming conventions in the near future.

But poor Grak is all alone when it comes to the absurd names. While most characters are just "Man" or "Lady", the characters that do get named have far more expected monikers. Steve reports the news. Bob runs a gun store. Larry is a soldier. Niles founded Robo Tech. Captain Mortak is about as silly as it gets otherwise, though being a last name it doesn't come close.

Even the author seems quite aware that Grak is not an appealing protagonist, describing him as a man "who has no brains".

Grak spends his days being bored that nothing exciting ever happens. He's unemployed, but does have an interview scheduled for tomorrow morning that will hopefully land him a security job. He isn't exactly qualified for anything prior to the robot attack beginning, and seems more likely to be the kind of security guard put on the graveyard shift spends his hours eating donuts and watching TV while criminals sneak in effortlessly.

As Grak watches the news, hoping to see someone burning alive??? he learns about the president breaking ties with Robo Tech, and of the plan for secret agents to destroy the company entirely. This is classified information that was accidentally broadcast (I mean, it worked for Code Red), and the response from the government is extremely swift.

The video is abruptly cut, gunshots and screams are then heard before the station goes off the air permanently. Rather than put two and two together, or worry about this "a robotic army is planning to take over the world starting ...now" he simply changes to another station.

When it too is no longer live, he gives up and goes for a walk.

My man, you just learned that the fate of the world is hanging in the balance of the president's best men being able to defeat the robots and Niles of Robo Tech or else an era of machine rule will begin today. You just heard people being killed on live TV! This is not a boring day!!

At least he's interested in getting a gun. That's reasonable at this point.

Grak's aloofness to everything happening around him makes it so hard to feel anything other than frustration with him. He is constantly running into mangled bodies, or bleeding-out survivors not long for this and having no reaction.

The dying man trying to alert the president that his plan will only lead to an endless war bot rampage has to basically rehash everything Grak just learned from the news minutes ago. The poor guy has no alternative but to put his faith in Grak, the worst man for the job, asking him to deliver a letter to the president before it's too late.

Grak is incapable of showing empathy. He's quite excited when on the same board he finds someone's dropped wallet and takes the cash, but not before calling the person who lost it a loser.

That wallet probably belongs to the dead person on this board with a bullet hole going through their skull. That'll teach him to drop his wallet.

Maybe he's not the worst person around. He may not show much enthusiasm for his sudden mission, but he does at least acknowledge that it needs to be done. Not having anyone else to pass the task off to, he visits his friend Bob's gun shop to ask for a free gun.

No, the $500 he just found will not be used to purchase anything here.

He also lacks a "gun license", so Bob adamantly and repeatedly refuses. He would lose his job if he sold/gave somebody a gun who wasn't properly licensed! Grak refuses to listen, or even try to explain the situation in hopes of getting the rules bent in his favor.

Instead he threatens to kill his friend.

Later, Grak narrowly avoids being caught in an explosion. Not through quick-thinking or anything, just by having his elevator arrive at ground zero moments later. Upon learning a soldier was "just following orders", Grak chews him out for almost killing him.

Only after making it clear that he's very upset that he was almost killed does Grak then point out that the explosion almost certainly did kill some other people. But not Grak, so feel bad, but not too bad, you know?

While Grak rides the subway to the white house a fellow passenger offers him information on how to safely get past the security there which has been ramped up for obvious reasons. The man wants some form of payment for the information, and $500-haver Grak refuses to pay or even hear what kind of information it is.

"Screw you" he says, being so completely sure that he can make do without the information and complete his mission to reach the president that if failed will lead to the deaths of millions or perhaps billions. ...Before immediately backing down that is.

At the end of the game, Grak finds himself jumping out of an airplane while disguised as a soldier allied to Robo Tech. He's sent there on a mission to destroy the resistance, but serendipity means that the injured president is being kept safe there, allowing him to finally deliver the message that by this point it seems far too late to deliver.

His methods of persuasion are the same as ever. There's got to be a better opener than this.

I do not like Grak.

Nothing But Bangers

I was somewhat reluctant to feature this game because it's really such a sparse experience. A big part of what changed my mind is the non-stop barrage of great lines. Right from the start, the game's story convinced me to at the very least play the game and see where it went.

Like, how can you not immediately want to see more of this?

The entire time playing, all I could think of was that I stumbled across a game almost as absurd as Secret Agent Chronicles, a game where players have a monkey that they received a board earlier run up and kill a guy.

Presidents are always saying this.

A drug dealer on the streets offers Grak a free sample of unnamed drugs, only to refuse to do so if you call his bluff. Plenty of ZZT games have strong opinions on drugs and alcohol. DarkShadow doesn't seem to know what he thinks, getting cold feet at the idea of having to write any consequence for taking the dealer's offer.

Hell yeah, title drop.

The first time you find an item that gives you health and it's a chocolate coin. What an odd pull. It's also bugged and doesn't go away so Grak can eat infinite coins. You will not need to do this.

Robo Tech, currently waging a war, continues to offer tours. Honestly everyone in this game is business as usual despite what's going on around them.

This sums up Grak about as well as anything will.

• ^[1]Total Chaos can't decide on its scope. A big part of Grak's journey is trying to reach the White House. He first has to make it to the upper level, and then take a tram/subway to Washington D.C.