Food Fort

I threw out democracy momentarily here, for an end of year reset. The patron polls for Closer Looks have a habit of newer additions often winning over older ones, and at this point some have been on there for quite some time. That doesn't matter with the ones that I pepper the polls with, but it sure does for people who are pledging a not-insignificant amount of dollars each month to be able to nominate something that there's no guarantee will ever be picked. I've seen patrons go three for three with nominations immediately needing to be replaced, and then other worlds have been on there for ages, providing no return for continued contributions. So with the year drawing to a close, I decided that I'd do a reset of the polls entirely, and make sure that every patron nominated game gets its article. There are still poll slots available as well if you should happen to want in future polls with confidence that you won't be left hanging.

And of the two games on the list, I decided to go with the far more modern game Food Fort, an experimental world from early 2020 that just so happened to align its release right around the when COVID 19 began transforming everyday life. It's a game where you and your partner hide away in a fort filled with food while the world outside falls apart. A successful strategy until food starts running low and your partner begins to get sick. But it's a game that's no mere adaptation of shared fears over the pandemic. It's really using its world as an excuse to tell a tale about overcoming anxiety, even in situations where that anxiety is quite warranted.

So grab a snack and make yourself comfortable as we enter the food fort and learn what it takes to save a loved one.

Set in the last days of a crumbling civilization, the world doesn't look half bad. The landscape is still green, your fort is structurally sound, and nobody is going to bother you. All the world's problems are outside, and you are inside, safe and able to weather whatever storm may come to pass. You and your partner decided that the best way to spend their last days on a dying Earth is to enjoy good food and each other's company.

It's been going rather nicely, but shutting yourself off from the world around you can make those moments of dealing with reality that much more difficult, and now the greatest test yet is about to begin. Food is starting to run low, and worse, your lover has gotten sick and requires medicine if they're to survive.

Food Fort presents players with a very straightforward to-do list in order to ensure survival. You must leave the food fort in search of food and medicine, and make it back home safely.

The world outside is scary, but author applebaps believes that no matter how bad it gets, we all have the power to make it more manageable at least. In Food Fort, you aren't expected to save the world. It's too far gone to save at this point. Instead you are asked to do something more manageable, simply to make your last days comforting ones.

It's a game about dealing with anxiety, recognizing what purpose it serves and the ways to dismiss it when it's not helping. And it does a pretty good job of it too.

Exiting the fort, your quest is politely telegraphed. A central hub presents three new roads, blocks off one of them, and then goes so far as to place gems in the shape of an arrow to make sure your focus is on the task at hand.

A helpful sign reveals where the roads end. There's a grocery store, the food fort, the pharmacy, and the inaccessible wasteland. Though the game looks surprisingly bright and cheery for something set in the last days of human civilization, closer to Toxic Terminator than War-Torn. This is no Town-like. The guidance is to save you the time of entering locations with nothing to be done yet, while the game's narrative prevents you from straying off a clearly designed route for the game.

The old-fashioned board designs make it easy for applebaps to transform ordinary spaces into obstacle courses for the player to navigate. The grocery store is less a realistic store like the titular BUYSO and more like Town's prison. applebaps blends the gameplay of old with the story of new in a way that makes the game difficult to place in time when going by visuals alone. The older sensibilities on display are cleverly used to add stakes to a game whose outcome would otherwise feel like something the player has too much control over given the theme.

Inside the grocery store, gray corpses litter the building. The greeter's response to seeing a living shopper is one of pure terror, screaming at you to leave them alone and just take whatever you must. All the while the player's eyes, well-worn from the gleam of gemstones collected in so many ZZT adventures prior, can't help be be drawn to the shelves. No food is there, but there are plenty of torches and many gems to line one's pockets with. Surely, you'll need both of these things if you're to accomplish your mission.

And then, just as you finish your vacuuming of anything of worth, a warning flashes across the bottom of the screen. "The food giver has died". Mere minutes into the game, it stings to see. Yet it's impossible to blame anyone but yourself should you fall for it. Your reason for entering the grocery store is to find food. Instead of doing that, I went about grabbing everything else I could, pretending that this was just another ZZT adventure, and that nothing bad could happen to me, its main character.

All you need to do to get the food is talk to the food giver in the corner of the screen. His colors may be a bit muted, but he is the only white object in a sea of dark gray. Missing him means you were focused on something other than what mattered, and for that there will be consequences in the future.

Of course, that raises the question of how he died, and applebaps has a simple answer for that. As a dangerous space fitting of a 1991 adventure, the store's security system has gone awry, and spinning guns placed at the end of each aisle are now firing wildly at anything in their path. A large pile of bodies sits between the food giver and one of the guns, creating a fuse of varying length based on how often the gun rolls to shoot. If you're focused on your mission and notice the man in harm's way, there's a tremendous amount of time with even the worst spinning gun RNG that you can pick up the food no problem.

Afterwards, you're even welcome to grab all the supplies on the shelves, and in fact, will need to at least take a few torches for the pharmacy ahead.

applebaps seems quite good at guessing how players will behave. The items on the shelves were enough to get me, and then afterwards, despite nobody daring to stop me, I couldn't help but head to the cashier, shoving aside a few gray bodies so I could check out properly as the world ended around me.

Technically, nothing stops you from going the long way around back to the store entrance and leaving without getting rung up. The greeter said it was okay, so I wouldn't call that stealing, but part of being a good person is making things easier on the people around us. Getting in line (you don't have to pay) is itself a small kindness, and one that will be rewarded with another.

The cashier meanwhile is stripped of power by the nature of her job. She is a cog for employer Capital Co., with a very specific set of actions she's allowed to perform. applebaps reminds us that to matter the uniform or what anyone else may say, there's always an opportunity to extend kindness.

Being polite to her catches her off guard. It's the end of the world, and I assure you that people are not being kind to retail workers while they panic shop. You can't do a whole lot as the world ends, but you can still be nice to each other. For treating her like a human being, she returns the favor, giving you a key to the store exit to save you a little bit of walking.

This moment in particularly really highlights the game's message of how even kindness for kindness' sake will be appreciated. You don't need to take the shortcut. It saves mere seconds of your time, most of which was already spent heading to the registers in the first place. Yet, even if the key is meaningless for progress in a ZZT game, you'll appreciate it nevertheless. Nothing would go differently if you had to walk around, and yet it feels nice to be given a key, to receive a favor because little acts of kindness are something people should do for one another when they can.

Depending on the path taken, leaving the grocery store means successfully checking off an item on your shopping list, or it means wondering what comes next. The protagonist's anxiety will soon become a major part of the game, but even here before it's introduced proper, a player realizing they didn't get any food will instead get something they didn't ask for: an overactive imagination. As a person playing a game the stakes are low, especially for a game where you can restart and grab the food in under two minutes, and yet, you don't want to give up and start anew because you don't know for sure that you've failed your mission. With hope, you can continue.

If your mission has been a bust, you now get to start asking a number of questions in your head: Can I find food somewhere else? Is there some way to succeed without food? Would this game be so cruel as to allow me to fail? Can I learn from this and at least obtain the medicine?

And you can even come up with some plausible answers. The game didn't end when the food giver died, so surely there's another way. You must be able to succeed somehow, as it would be rather bold of applebaps to lock the player out of victory because they made one itty bitty mistake. ...There's almost certainly a bad ending for a game like this though. Am I doomed? Should I even try to obtain the medicine if my ending is going to be bad regardless?

Spend as much time as you like questioning yourself. Answer those questions however you please. Just know that whether you take a minute or an hour to imagine what the game will do next, nothing you do will be able to change what it actually does.

Successful or not, the only thing to do next is to head to the pharmacy for the medicine. The game gates players from going here early by having the board be dark, making it important to grab at least a few of the torches at the grocery store. You can do some weird things in this game if you force the game in that direction. It's not worth the effort though, as all you'll get for your troubles is the assumption that you failed due to not having flags set that were skipped over instead.

The pharmacy, unlike the grocery store, doesn't come off as a real space turned into an adventurer's obstacle course. (You enter from the top, not the passage as shown in the screenshot.) It's not really much of anything. Turning the lights on will draw more comparisons to low-quality ZZT worlds than anything else, but the space still has clear purpose when visited in the dark.

That purpose is pretty much just burning down your torch's light a bit. Depending on where you enter the board from, the initial key needed to get inside may be hidden from view. Once inside, another key is guaranteed to be seen be players. This key lies at the end of the world's saddest maze, which can be bypassed entirely by continuing in a straight line once entered.

I'm certain it's deliberate. There's a read to be had about how we introduce difficulty into our lives all by ourselves. This time, focusing so much on the objective makes it more difficult to reach with attempts to immediately pivot in the direction the key is known to be found only ever extending the time it takes to reach it.

Although to even get into the little maze, you have to deal with the pharmacist, who is having a much more difficult time with the apocalypse than the scared and tired retail workers at the grocery store.

Unlike the grocery store where people dying all around you doesn't interfere with business any more than a few "wet floor" signs, there's no effort to sustain normalcy here. At the grocery store, they can simply apologize for the inconvenience, and let the customer move around the obstruction. They might not realize it, but they have it pretty good. The end of the world is taking a much different form here, coming to a close not from disease but from a giant worm that consumes everything in its path.

So you won't find any shelves stocked with medicine, or any shelves at all for that matter. The only thing that remains to even hint that this place is a pharmacy is from there being a pharmacist still here. The pharmacist has no interest in keeping the business running, having been reduced to babbling now that he's lost any hold on the world he once knew. Everything instead replaced with the worm. Listening to his final screams before dying from numerous bites, the pharmacist drops the key to the maze and moves on to the afterlife.

Meanwhile the giant worm is nothing more than your typical ZZT centipede. It's not even all that long compared to the trope of newer ZZTers making one that hits the stat limit. Still, the player is unarmed so even a worm of more modest size can be fatal.

The worm is surprisingly adept at sneaking up on you. Due to the limited visibility, it's easy to assume that the centipede will do laps around an enclosed space, letting the player sneak by from behind. This plan is a recipe for disaster as without fail, every time I entered the worm's lair, it was just about to hit the out-of-sight cyan key and turn around instantly. It really does devour!

What I love here as well is that you can see an energizer in the middle of the room, orbited by two smaller worms that are trapped within the walls. The energizer would allow the problem to be solved, but without access to it, it becomes somebody else's job to deal with the worm. Food and medicine. That's all you need to do.

Reaching the back exit of the pharmacy, you'll come to realize that there was no medicine to be had. This is where things get a little more abstract. Having failed your mission, it's time for the game's villain to be introduced. It is not the plague. It is not a worm. It is something we've all had to deal with, "the voice at 2AM".

The voice (not THAT Voice) is your anxiety manifested into a dark shadow. Your fears are made real, and they stand before you to tell you all the horrible truths you can bear to hear and then some. You could not save your partner. They are going to die. You will be alone. Everything is falling apart. You should just. Give. Up.

You're then asked a very real question. What now? Neither option is much of a plan, but applebaps is here to teach us that nothing good will ever come from giving into despair. No matter what happens, you must have hope. You may not have the medicine, you may not even have the food, but there will be no opportunity to change the future if you stop pushing for a better one.

The alternative is despair. To blame yourself for being unable to find medicine, and to dwell on your partner's inevitable demise. Despair as you blame yourself for being unable to succeed at something that there was never any promise would be attainable in the first place.

You can see your partner at the end of the board, reminding you to come home safe. The words of a caring partner linger on the board, serving as a reminder that they do care about you if you'll listen to them rather than the voice.

Waking from your emotional nightmare (at least the board title is "Pharmacy Nightmare"), you return to the crossroads where your search began, though things look a little different. The pleasant greens of plants have been dulled to a drab gray. Returning to the fort is accepting defeat, and so you begin to perceive it as a cold place you do not wish to return to.

The cashier from the grocery store is also here now, running down the path which seems to be overrun with ...slime. After a few steps she'll flag you down and initiate conversation with you of her own accord. She remembers you, introduces herself as Jane, and politely asks if you remember her.

You can be nice, remember her, and get into a little conversation about how the search for food and medicine is going, or you can be a jerk who doesn't bother seeing a worker as anything other than a tool to be used for your benefit.

One of the only issues I have with the game, is that it doesn't actually track everything players do. While that can often be a big ask in ZZT, the simple linear nature of this one combined with the fact that plenty is being tracked, makes the omissions a bit strange. One such thing not handled is whether or not you actually got the key from Jane while in the grocery store. She'll still speak to you as if she had, regardless of if you were a jerk to her and didn't actually get the key or if you simply went back around to the entrance. As it's not tracked, you can also lie, leading to a weird narrative where she remembers something that didn't happen, you claim to remember it too, and you both bond over a made up version of the encounter.

The lack of a check for if you were rude to her, along with the way the game doesn't have a specific path for lying about remembering her are extra strange as being a jerk to her sets a flag that could be detected. Being a jerk here will also set the jerk flag, and soon enough it will be checked to determine the outcome of some things making it an odd omission here.

The road back to the fort meanwhile is blocked off by something that can be as scary as the voice at 2AM: a mirror. The mirror is no villain though, unless you choose to make it one. While the voice tells you what you are with no room for rebuttal, the mirrors asks you to gaze in it and figure out who you are for yourself. It holds the key to the medicine, but only those who are worthy of it can receive it.

Yes, I see you raising your hand. I know what you want to say. "Nobody isn't 'worthy' of medicine!". Good news, the game immediately addresses this. The very first prompt is as direct as it gets, asking if you're worthy with only yes and no responses to choose from. If you say no, the mirror challenges this belief.

You can double down, insisting to yourself that you are indeed an awful person that deserves nothing. The game gets a little confused here, checking if you don't have a MURDERER flag set. If that flag isn't set, you return to the main path of conversation as if you had said yes, which checks a few other flags to determine where to go next. If the flag is set, you're told that you can be a jerk some times, but all you have to do to stop being a jerk is to stop acting in a jerky fashion. Easy. And hey, at least you're not a murderer.

This gets you the medicine and the mirror becomes a yellow key for later. I think the flag intended to be checked here was JERK rather than MURDERER.

Of course, you can also just say "Yeah, I deserve to have the medicine my partner needs to live", as anyone would. This however does lead to some actual judgment, and a big mess of code and labels that does something rather interesting with some of the flags that may apply to you at this time where depending on how you approach the mirror the same flag can lead to you obtaining the medicine or being rejected by the mirror.

I suppose this makes it one of the better examples of your decisions mattering. Here, as you analyze yourself, depending on the way you look at specific traits determines how those traits weigh in your favor or against it. To be a jerk and feel remorseful is different than being a jerk and thinking nothing of it after all. This creates a rather unusual scenario for ZZT games with any kind of "morality" tracking, where your deeds alone aren't the sole arbiter of whether or not you're a good person.

There's even a specific path where you can miss the food, and still get the medicine. But let me tell you, it's not the path I was on where I said I didn't get it because I wasn't fast enough. That just led to me being recommended that I turn down the game speed if I need to. My gamer cred torn to pieces...

The various paths through the mirror's dialog lead to a number of words of wisdom. These words are the form taken by the medicine, offered up as a small piece of advice for how you might make things better for yourself and others. You can learn about enlightenment, the importance of showing compassion even when it seems pointless, how all it takes to stop being a jerk is to stop doing jerky things, and how just being alive means you have value. These messages aren't random fortune cookie messages, but tied to your answers and actions.

I don't think the philosophy of this game is going to change anyone's perspective on life, but it is positive, affirming, and uplifting. The expectations for a ZZT world are a lot more basic, and tuned to gameplay rather than life guidance. This could have been a simple check of yes/no for food and yes/no for being a jerk and only getting the medicine if you did everything right. The idea that failure doesn't make you a failure can be a welcome thing to hear, and even more powerful if you really have this conversation with yourself rather than just seeing it played out in the game here.

Also, one of the branches leads to you being called an "Undertale genocide route taker" which, damn.

With or without food and medicine, the only place you can go next is into the wasteland where another encounter with the voice awaits.

This time, the voice asks if you've given up yet. The choices are then specifically designed to put players that didn't find both items in a bind. You can lie, saying that you found everything, or you can choose to give up.

Giving up leads to an actual game over. After all, if you're not going to keep trying, you're not going to succeed.

Lying doesn't go much better. The voice isn't stupid. He knows just as you do that you failed and begins to repeat that you are a liar, and you know it. Knowing you cannot defend yourself from the accusation, he strikes, putting all those horrid thoughts into your mind. Your partner only likes you because they pity you. You're not cool. You're not interesting. They saw you could provide them with food and medicine and acted rationally to survive.

You can try to deny the thoughts, but the voice is never interested in what evidence to the contrary you may have. They simply provide you with something you can bring home to your miserable fort where your partner is going to die of some combination of starvation and disease because you are worthless.

You receive some bullets.

If you actually do have everything, and want to rub it in their face, they move the goal posts. Oh sure, you could in theory save your partner with these supplies, but you still have to make it back before they pass away. You just can't win with this guy. ...which is kind of the point applebaps is trying to make here. There will always be something you can feel helpless about.

There is one last piece of the board that needs to be mentioned. A scroll lies in the middle of the road that contains a poem.

I adore this. Friendship ended with "slimes create", now "And the dry stone [gives] no sound of water" is my new best friend^[1]. I really like the imagery here. Even in this dying world, life goes on and there are more survivors than you might think. Yet our hero is unable to see this, so focused on what they can no longer find that they fail to notice what remains. Food Fort isn't the only game to drop the author's poetry, but it may be the first time where my praise isn't followed with "I hope you keep writing and improving, small child."

The player character though makes no comment on the poem. It is a treat only for you and I.

Poetry distractions aside, the player is likely to be in a hurry here, fearing running out of time and being unable to save their partner even if they manage to find everything they need. Fortunately there isn't actually any timer mechanic in play, even if the winding narrowing path through the wasteland seems like a great place to insert such a thing. All the while you are constantly chasing someone who looks like your partner. The game calls this object "False Partner", and the first time I played I thought the game was just being consistent with Jane walking home. (They don't match.) I think there's a missed opportunity here as the partner is so far ahead that there's no sense that you're really chasing them. It plays like a walk through a few boards with no rush or tension, and the walk is the same regardless of how well you're doing in the game.

Finally you make it to the starting hub once more, this time with the only road forward being the one that leads to the food fort. All that remains is to get past the doors of food, medicine, and something else...

Along with one last encounter with the voice at 2AM. This one has a very different framing from the previous to. Regardless of your success, you have at the very least begun internalizing the fact that this dude sucks and you really have better things to do than listen to anything they say. This time, no matter the outcome, you're ready. At least, you think you are...

There's a real boost in your confidence here. Despair is no longer an option. You have gone out on your mission, and are about to come home safely. This "third thing", whatever it is, can and will be found without anxiety haunting your every step.

The voice has one last play left to run. To conjure any possible way that the protagonist and their partner could wind up separated. They died while you were gone. Also, they walked out because they hate you. They did both these things. Give up.

And so it all comes down to the final choice. You can listen to your anxiety, causing the voice to defiantly demand that if you want to head back to the fort you'll have to shoot them. With your recently acquired bullets, this is actually an option, and yet again the voice uses these moments to define you as a person, one who is violent, worthless, and doesn't deserve happiness.

If you rise above it, and refuse to listen to the voice, they give up and hand you the final key. As a final act of leveraging power of you, they refuse to tell you what the key represents. The player though, no longer cares to hear anything from the voice, nodding and ignoring the last attempt at goading you into some reaction.

At this point, three locked doors stand beside you. The food and medicine both provided keys when acquired, and the voice provides the final one, which puts you in an interesting space if you haven't managed to succeed fully. While the game is using flags to track whether you should get the good or bad ending, there's just no way to ever return to the fort if you don't succeed.

Maybe it's an oversight, or maybe it's deliberate. Failing your mission and never returning home feels appropriate for a game where failure means giving into anxiety and assuming the worst. Your partner won't survive, and so you cannot bring yourself to return to them. Which is a pretty awful way for it to end from your partner's perspective. They'd be left to starve or die of disease alone, never knowing what happened to you, being forced to spend their last days with no company other than their own 2AM voice, a voice that would have all kinds of theories for your fate in the outside world.

And it works if you take a different interpretation where the player hasn't given up, even if it is true that they've lost. I can also imagine the player refusing to go home empty handed, returning to the search no matter what it takes to come home with everything they need. Perhaps their partner can romanticize this as well, believing that they are out there in a ruined world refusing to give up.

It does still mean that you just have to quit the game though. As the game teaches, we can imagine a number of hypothetical scenarios, but until they come to pass, they are mere fantasy, whether that's the brave hero pushing himself onward to find medicine, or the coward who would rather flee from their shame and abandon a loved one rather than face disappointment. Regardless of which is true, both roads lead to an abandoned food fort.

There is an actual bad ended coded onto the final board, that can't be reached due to the lack of keys. In this one, your partner still greets you warmly, only to then begin repeating "Welcome home, my love" over and over until you realize that they were an illusion this entire time. Your partner may not have ever been there at all, and there's a suspicion that you spent your time alone in your fort with only the voice at 2AM for company. The implication here is that now aware that you are alone and have nothing to hope for, you can only use one of those bullets on yourself, ending the game.

Or you could succeed instead! And return to your partner's loving embrace, living out your next several years in peace in the fort. Now with newfound confidence that allows you to accept that you'll have to head out for supplies again someday, only this time able to appreciate what you have while you have it.

The End Is Here

There is an obvious historical event that one can't help but think of when playing Food Fight, especially given it's early 2020 release. I'm talking of course about the COVID-19 pandemic. You may have heard of it.

In February, COVID was (depending on where you were in the world) still mostly just that strange new disease that would probably amount to nothing, but it was getting harder to ignore as it gained foothold in basically every country. A reckoning was coming, we just might not have wanted to see it. Yet, even if it's easy to interpret Food Fort as being born from COVID anxieties, I don't think the timing lines up for that being the case. If it is, it's deliberately trying not tie itself to a real world pandemic. No mention of COVID or of any disease occurs in Food Fort in favor of keeping it generic and timeless.

But now, years later, it's difficult to distance COVID from the events of the game. This is a game where two people stay indoors for as long as they can possibly manage in order to weather a storm. It's a game where the act of going grocery shopping is a major obstacle. One where a sick partner sends the protagonist into a spiral of guilt and worry that their partner is going to die and they're incapable of doing anything for them. It's a world where what was normal is long gone, and the struggle of trying to navigate a world that no one was prepared for.

While the COVID comparison is the most obvious and relatable read on the game, and one that in now is almost impossible to not see above all else, the world of Food Fort's malady is left considerably more abstract. COVID-specific ZZT games would come later in the form of Agent Orange's The Quest for Coffee, a game about getting one last coffee before the businesses need to close their cafes, as well as my own COVID Maker 19 world, vent art about trying to keep oneself free of disease whose short term impacts were not good and whose long term impacts were still unknown while working a job where customers would stop at nothing to not have to show a little decency to the people around them.

applebaps didn't make a game about COVID, they made a game about anxiety, and their world happened to align with the feelings of 2020 so strongly that seeing the game as one about COVID-specific anxieties is going to be the first impression of anyone who lived through the year. It's a fate it cannot escape, though I feel labeling it as "the COVID game" sells its messages about overcoming anxiety and reciprocating kindess short.

The world of Food Fort isn't one ravaged by only a debilitating disease, but rather a number of simultaneous disasters which have no way of stopping them. The game's populace is resigned to the fact that they are riding out the last days. There is no hope here for things to get better, only a wish that the end of the world can happen without constant worrying preventing those still alive from enjoying what little time they have left. The game is more about overcoming anxiety, even when your situation is one where the feeling is to be expected.

Everyone in the game has their own coping mechanism. For the protagonist of the game and their partner the method of choice is to shut out the outside world. The Food Fort for which the game is named, is a simple place where the couple has decided to simply lock themselves inside, eat their food, care for one another, and shut out all the sources of worry. The pharmacist has opted for the route of welcoming the destruction, cheering on the destruction of a giant worm which endlessly grows and consumes the world around it. If it can't be fought, perhaps then it can be celebrated for the unstoppable force that it is. The handful of retail workers dutifully maintain a store which no longer gets any customers, standing at cash registers whose lines are littered with the desiccated bodies of shoppers who perished abruptly and unexpectedly. They will continue to fulfill their responsibilities even if it means dying on the clock.

applebaps doesn't give any clear answers as to how the world found itself in this state. They don't because it's not something meant to be explored and understood. It is only something to be accepted. By spreading the destruction of society across a variety of causes, nothing can steal the focus. There's no warning to be heeded about the follies of war, no zombies with an unquenchable hunger for flesh acting as a commentary on the way we live, no rogue AI hellbent on destroying humanity. All that matters is that time is short, appreciate it while you can, and make your exit with no regrets. Stop worrying and start doing.

It's a brilliant tactic to avoiding the fate of any creative expression that finds success. The audience can't over-analyze and chase shadows looking for clues that somehow explain everything in a way that fits tidily under a single wiki page. All questions of "lore" are inherently futile to look into because there's too many places to dig. We're not supposed to know what killed the shoppers or how long the player and his partner have been locked away in the food fort. It's not relevant, and rather than allow the game to be strip-mined for anything that can support a hypothesis, applebaps lays a defensive minefield instead. When every sign of destruction stems from a different cause, it's impossible to draw connections that don't lead to a tangled mess.

That said, the game isn't entirely without subtext for the observant. There's more to the world than its destruction, you just shouldn't focus too much on the literal destroyers of slime, plague, and worms. There's the "el problemo es el capitalismo" undertones that applebaps may not dwell on, but they don't exactly sweep under the rug either. The grocery store is owned by "Capital Co". The building is filled with dozens of dead bodies. And yet, the employees are unable to stop working. No disaster that can befall the world can lead to a retail worker being allowed to stop working. No matter how little sense it makes for the store to have anyone else in it given its condition, the worker must continue to toil. The greeter has been traumatized by abuse from customers shopping in a panic. The food giver dies on the job, not from any of the over the top disasters befalling the world, but from a malfunctioning security system willing to employ lethal force to deter anyone from taking food.

Contrast this to how the workers themselves treat you. The food giver happily hands over everything they've got left. Jane the cashier doesn't charge you for it. Looking out for each other is put before keeping the obviously dead business propped up in the hopes of collecting one last paycheck. It takes the building itself being consumed by slime to convince its employees to go home. It takes the complete destruction of the business for the workers to be finally free to end their shifts a little early. Only the voice at 2AM wants to hurt you. The people do not.

The pharmacy has a sign for "Capital Pharmacy", though it's hidden in the darkness of the board during gameplay. During the following nightmare scene, the slogan changes, but you can still read the name. The shared ownership of all two of Food Fort's commercial spaces is all it takes to establish that this is a massive conglomerate that wouldn't dare do anything for their employees that would cost them a dollar, no matter how extreme conditions get.

But if you're looking to discover that Capital Co. has been doing unethical slime research or if they made a giant worm because it was supposed to be the next big thing (literally), you're looking at the world the wrong way.

You Can't Unsee It. Sorry. I Mean You Can't See It.

The one real issue to be had with the game is how difficult it is to see everything it contains. The ideal playthrough is going to consist of heading to the grocery store, getting the food, then heading to the mirror and getting the medicine. With the essentials covered, you'll then have no trouble getting past the voice at 2AM for the third key and you'll get a happy ending. It's a straightforward journey about learning to not give in to your fears.

If you screw up though... then the game gets complicated. Objects will check for flags being set as well as flags not being set. Dialog menus change whether those flags leads to successes or failures, but the game has a number of branches that seem to have contradictory requirements, as well as some bits that are outright impossible to see without cheats. It's hard to say what's a bug, what's an oversight, and what may have simply been discarded as not fitting in with the rest of the game.

None of this will be noticed during a normal playthrough, even if you fail to acquire the items. There's little hint that some conversations with the voice have more possibilities to them than just success/failure. Take a look at the code, and you'll discover that there's plenty going on under the hood.

The thing you'll notice right away when looking at the game's code is how a number of NPCs are coded to react to being shot. Normally only the food giver is in any danger of this. The player only gets ammo on the bad path and only at the very end of the story. There's no way to turn around and shoot anybody, but most of them are coded to handle it. It's a very 1992 thing to do as seen in The Crypt and Ezanya. By the time of Food Fort, shooting NPCs just to see what happens has long since fallen out of favor.

But, if you cheat up some early ammo you can kill a few characters. Just as in those older titles, it's mostly used as a way to guilt the player for doing something needlessly cruel. The greeter dies with a smile on their face. Jane can be killed in an identical manner both in the store as well as when you encounter on the street. When she is killed, the game really rubs it in.

It emphasizes that you just killed a human being for no reason, and now you have to carry that burden with you, either confessing to your partner or keeping it a secret for the rest of your life until the guilt becomes so overwhelming you have to tell someone.

I don't really get why these are options to begin with, and I guess they really aren't since you have to cheat, but at some point applebaps must have considered that players would be able to shoot everyone, and how they should react. I suspect it was scrapped because it really clashes with the theme of the game. The player here is a nervous mess sure, but they're not a murderer. And if they were, well, I'd rather the player learn to stop killing everyone they meet before working on treating their anxiety issues. Going on a massacre simply because you can just doesn't mesh well with finding positivity even in despair.

The game also tracks these murders. The conversation with the mirror changes significantly in such a situation, and leads to an amusing line where the player is described as an "Undertale genocide route taker" for doing such a thing. Needless to say, applebaps doesn't encourage you to do this, and seems to have realized it wasn't worth even including. It does make for interesting digging at least!

Final Thoughts

Food Fort was a title I enjoyed when it was new, and one that I was glad to revisit. Now that it's no longer 2020, it is far easier to recognize it as more than another COVID game. This is a game about realizing what you need to change in your life to make it better for you. If anything, it's more comparable to Atop the Witch's Tower, giving you a mission and making you confront what you can do when that mission is unsuccessful. Food Fort strives to show you to hold on to hope, surviving in a hostile world through kindness, and in turn making the world just a little less hostile. No amount of being polite will save this game's world from an inevitable demise, but it will make it easier for those clinging on as long as they can to feel better while they do so.

This is the only game I can think of where the message remains the same regardless of your success. Bad ending or not, the player shows progress, learning to stop listening to a voice that only brings them misery. Nothing good will come from beating yourself up because you can't navigate situations successfully 100% of the time. The game puts players in the worst possible situation where a loved one's life is on the line while managing to emphasize that circumstances are beyond your control are not your fault. There's no amount of self-flagellation that will bring your partner back or allow you to find food when there is none. It is scary, and something to mourn, but it is not something to punish. Everyone deserves the medicine after all.

• ^[1] The poem is an excerpt from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland.