I played: Adios

Adios1 Doc Burbank Adios (Mischief, Kanas USA, 17 March 2021) intriguingly obscure arthouse game by Mischief (that’s the American one, not the French one – which seems to be dabbling in Horse games),2 Rattle “It’s a mess” (4 February 2025) Youtube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRpgTIyyj48> so obscure that it doesn’t have a Wikipedia page and only received 9 professonal reviews on Metacritic.3 “Adios PC Critic Reviews” metacritic <https://www.metacritic.com/game/adios/critic-reviews/?platform=pc>

In the tradition of many arthouse games, the events of the game are largely pre-determined, with the focus being on how the player chooses to interact with them and inhabit the viewpoint. How well it achieves this seems to vary wildly, but I remain confident that its worth examining for how it reflects upon gaming trends in the 2000s & 2010s, the role of interaction in games and building emotion.

Adios is not a conventional game in how many people define it. The residents of r/TwoBestFriendsPlay feel that it was probably better as a short movie,4 LostHuaun “So, I’ve played Adios after seeing Woolie’s first video and… good story… I probably would’ve liked better as not a videogame” (9 December 2021) Reddit <https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/rbz13k/so_ive_played_adios_after_seeing_woolies_first/> and Rob Zacny of VICE felt it was a great story but not “a great game”.5 Rob Zacny “‘Adios’ Has a Great Story to Tell, But Isn’t a Great Game“ (25 March 2021) VICE <https://www.vice.com/en/article/adios-has-a-great-story-to-tell-but-isnt-a-great-game/> I disagree, I think is a rare example of a game that achieves immersion through cartoony graphics and emotional fidelity.

If you haven’t played it, and are interested in the idea of video game immersion as an opportunity to inhabit a complex character – I highly recommend it.

Spoilers ahead as I overthink a unique indie game and gaming in general.

The banality of evil

In trying to explain how the Nazis, or at least Adolf Eichmann, seeming changed from being regular people into monsters – philosopher Hannah Arendt proposed “the banality of evil“.

The game begins with the farmer (the player character) concluding to make the change in his life, and then talking to a hitman who has arrived with a van full of “meat” to be fed to the farmer’s pigs. Nothing is ever stated about the source of the meat, and it becomes clear that either party really thinks about even as they come across obvious points of reminder.

You talk about the quality of the bacon from the pigs, nobody talks about where it comes from. You shovel manure, nobody thinks about what becomes of the “meat” consumed by the pigs. The only time a thought is alluded to is when the hitman asks that if pigs, if they’re as smart as he heard recently, “know”.

A screenshot of the game, with a breakfast scene in a spacious kitchen, he hitman in his suit sitting opposite the player - and dialog options, as well as the option to inspect the salt on the screen.

Both are cogs in a machine of evil. An unnamed, unexplored criminal enterprize that murders people with such frequency that they have need of a dedicated individual who receives substantial reward. The game introduces that the arrangement was originally a necessity, the farmer needed money to pay for his son’s treatment.

Much of the first three quarters of the game is the building up the image of the farmer through his many interests. Every aspect of the farm and his hobbies that he shows to the hitman is pleasant and some part of farm life that he loves. He finds it relaxing to milk goats. He has a horse, because a farm should have a horse and he finds the beautiful animals to be comforting. He develops his own photos.

In the final sequence, titled “The End” the player has the task to call Bill, the farmer’s estranged and angry son. This puts the true cost of the arrangement and the lifestyle it led to in focus. Bill will no longer speak to his father, he is too angry over a decision that the farmer made to put his wife – Bill’s mother, in a care home where her dementia frequently led to her feeling scared and abandoned.

A screenshot in the kitchen, the player is on the phone (an old handset model), there are three dialog options, only "1. I missed you." is available - "2. Please odnt' hate me." and "3. Because this is the last time we'll ever get to speak." are greyed out.

But the farmer wasn’t always this way – in his youth he was a marine in the Vietnam war – first as a Recon operator (special forces) then as part of the Press Corps when he realized that held greater potential to make a difference. He had the great romance of coming home to find his high school sweetheart had waited for him rather than take the easy option of marrying the rich kid.

Then, at some point, he became a man who was paid by the mob to dispose of bodies by feeding the pieces of them to his pigs. At first, to save his son, and then to pay for the lifestyle he came to use as distraction from what he did. He collected not just pigs and goats, but a dog and a horse – comforted by their innocence and immunity to the corruption that had taken him.

All these simple pleasures and the ease of his role, his position as a cog in the machine, allowed him to shift from bold agent of change to banal agent of evil.

A snapshot of gaming

As well as a morality tale, Adios is a fascinating snapshot of gaming from the 2010s, with elements popular from the time given their own twist and adaption.

The first, most striking and one of the most interesting elements is the importing of title card style from Control.6 Control (Remedy Entertainment, Finland, 2019) The bold white text. The dramatic sting accompanying it. It carries all the drama and weirdness when the titles are “The Shovel”, “The Goats” or my favourite: “The Soda”

This scene is, on the face of it, about those soda machines. They’re regular soda machines. I promise.

It’s fitting, as while Control is more overt in its weirdness – its a story both about the banality of evil, and the taking control of one’s own life before its too late.

It’s also difficult not to think of it as a reference to the slow burn experience of Red Dead Redemption 2,7 Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games, New York USA, 26 October 2018) much of the game consists of the sort of slow tasks that make up the work Arthur can do at camp – and of course there’s a fishing mini game. It has the same rustic feel – taking place on a farm after all.

It’s appropriate, the farmer and Arthur both seek redemption after a life of ill and both leave it until they have no real choices left. Arthur is undone by tuberculosis, and the farmer simply by time. Both go through periods where they cannot make decisions, Arthur in his youth, the farmer at the end of his life.

Like Gone Home,8 Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, Oregon USA, 2013) Tacoma,9 Tacoma (The Fullbright Company, Oregon USA, 2017) and Dear Esther10 Dan Pinchbeck Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, Brighton UK, 2012) – the game is essentially a story that you direct with no real “fail” state. You don’t have to redo skill tests, you don’t dramatically alter the course of the story. You’re there to guide your own experience of the story, and discover what has come before and made the end of the game the inevitable.

Some of the conversations, especially to the end, also make use of a function that was, in not pioneered in Depression Quest.11 Zoe Quinn & Patrick Lindsey Depression Question (The Quinnspiracy & Patrick Lindsey, USA, 2013) The blocking out of options that the point-of-view character wants to take, the things they want to say, but they emotionally can’t.

This one is the feature which really hits to the core of the game’s focus.

The choices we can’t make

While a lot of people who commentate on Adios, and make walkthroughs, etc comment that the decisions you make don’t matter etc I would argue that not only do the choices you have matter, but the choices you don’t have do.

Because you have a lot of choices and opportunities in this game – particularly in the free roam periods. You can examine countless item, you can go up to your son’s room and listen to music, you can feed countless apples to your horses – watch your animals graze.

You can’t choose not to spend the day with the hitman, you very explicitly can’t kill the hitman to save yourself (even when there’s a shotgun in your hands and him in your sights). You must spend the day, and should (ideally) linger in the decisions of how to spend the farmer’s last day – with the full awareness that it is his last day.

Lingering in these decisions is essentially key to putting yourself in the shoes of the farmer – choosing how to spend the finite time you have left now that you’ve made the choice, and how you want to appreciate it. This is, fundamentally at odds with the completionism and speed runner mindsets that are popular. That makes it worth considering, worth thinking about.

In his 2019 Red Dead series video,12 Noah Caldwell-Gervais “Home, Home on the Console: From Red Dead Revolver to Red Redemption 2” (10 November 2019) YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2utf6yph_QQ> at 1:41:00 Noah explained how the first time he played Red Dead Redemption 213 Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games, USA, 2018) his enjoyment was undercut by his refusal to linger. In seeking to consume the content as quickly as possible, he did not give himself the opportunity to appreciate the experience of it. He later points out how the game undermines itself in places, where it makes the “correct” approach unworkable or unmanageably inconvenient – such as game hunting.

Like Red Dead Redemption 2, Adios has some areas where the intuitive and efficient methods are completely counter to the intended gameplay. The last meal in particular is odd since the controls for handling items in the kitchen make it comically awkward to try to use the chopping board, so it’s easier just to dice everything in the fridge.

Obviously, this is mostly due to the limitations of what you can accomplish with a commercial engine and a small development team, but it speaks to the difficulty in reaching these kind of feelings in video games – the way that the creator must struggle against the current of the trends and instincts in gameplay. Adios is not the first to struggle with this, but has done admirably despite this obstacle.

The sense of dread

There is an ongoing argument, which I find infuriating, where various critics will argue that certain types of games “need to be hard” because the difficulty and the many instances of a game over is what gives them the feeling of oppression, of dread, of struggling to find hope in the darkness. As someone who played the infamous brutal Ghosts ‘n Goblins14 Tokuro Fujiwara Ghosts ‘n Goblins (Capcom, Osaka JP, 1985) when it was a current arcade machine, I reject this framing.

The feelings and atmosphere of seeking hope in the miasma of despair in games like Dark Souls,15 Hidetaka Miyazaki Dark Souls (FromSoftware, Tokyo JP, 22 September 2011) Bloodborne,16 Hidetaka Miyazaki Bloodborne (FromSoftware, Tokyo JP, 24 March 2015) Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice,17 Hidetaka Miyazaki Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (FromSoftware, Tokyo JP, 22 March 2019) and Pathologic18 Nikolai Dybowski Pathologic (Ice-Pick Lodge, Moscow RU, 9 June 2005) doesn’t come from the many game over screens and walls of frustration. This is intuitively obvious when you watch how the people who enjoy these games play them.

This is not to say that there’s an inherent problem with incorporating game overs into the design, especially in the manner that say Bloodborne does – where it becomes a means of transition. Rather, there is a wide spread misattribution in the gaming community due to fetishizing of difficulty.19 Nora Blake “Writing About Dark Souls is the Dark Souls of Writing About Dark Souls” (23 February 2020) Medium <https://norafblake.medium.com/writing-about-dark-souls-is-the-dark-souls-of-writing-about-dark-souls-256b302a329>

Because sure, the first time you experience something theatric its overwhelming, but you quickly find yourself adapting – at which point you start finding yourself making bizarre decisions that exist not for the narrative of the game, but success in playing the game. In a lot of ways this undermines the rest of the work that goes into creating the effect, because instead of wandering lost in the streets you’re making a beeline for the event that’s going to get you the best outcome and upgrading your character to wield items you’re not going to find for 20 hours.

It’s the same dissonance that transforms cosy games like Stardew Valley into stressful exercises in building spreadsheets and executing itineraries with precision not even required in colony collapse simulators like Oxygen Not Included or Rimworld. It’s what leads to speedrunners skipping Hideo Kojima’s sacred ladder climbing scene in Metal Gear 3.20 Kyle Campbell “Metal Gear 3’s infamous ladder scene got broken by speedrunners” (12 April 2022) USA Today <https://ftw.usatoday.com/story/tech/gaming/2022/04/12/metal-gear-solid-3-ladder-glitch-speedrunning/81339567007/>

Sense of dream comes from, first and foremost, the willingness of the player to engage with the themes and motifs of the work, and then the creation of those themes and motifs in the work. Amnesia: The Dark Descent21 Mikael Hedberg & Thomas Grip Amensia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games, Helsinborg SE, 8 September 2010) accomplished this pretty basic mechanics but tricks like a shifting camera and incentivizing the player to never actually look back and take a good look at the monster in good light.22 The Click “Amnesia – The Dark Descent: Barricade & Monster Fun: Live Commentary” (5 January 2011) YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkWr_CBSxGI>

Food for pigs

No matter what choices the player makes, no matter how much they have the farmer take advantage of his final moments – the game always ends the same. The farmer finishes his final meal, and waits in his dining room where the hitman enters and shoots him without a word.

Fade to black, and we hear the sounds of the pigs eating.

This isn’t the conclusion of your choices in the game, this is the inevitable conclusion from when the farmer first decides to end his working relationship with the mob. But, in another way, his end was inevitable due to the choices he’d made to lead up to that situation – prolonging it for another week wasn’t going to erase his regrets, mend his relationship with his son, or give him another moment with his wife.

The writer of the game, has stressed on BlueSky that this is a major point of the game.23 Doc Burford @docseuss.bsky.social (7 March 2025) BlueSky <https://bsky.app/profile/docseuss.bsky.social/post/3ljqkdf53rs2k> Adios is not a power fantasy, but rather a game about the experiences of someone who has very little power at the time we inhabit them. I agree this is an important thing in our media, the need to come to terms with our own limitations and ultimate destiny in a safe space.

Unless you’re an aging pig farmer with an estranged son… who disposes of bodies for the mob – maybe then it’s not such a safe space for you.

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