The Friday Game: Let's Play - Ancient Greek Punishment!

When the Indie Games blog digs up a button-masher called Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment, it’s hard not to become a little curious. Luckily, Dr Pippin Barr’s latest rewards curiosity rather richly. It rewards it, as the name suggests, with torture.

Dr Barr is a specialist in ‘video game values’, and his newest offering provides five different scenarios for its players to explore. All of these hinge on punishment, and all of them reveal that, when it comes to the Greeks, punishment was often thematically preoccupied with a single idea: futility. Whether you’re Sisyphus pushing that boulder up the hill only to have it roll back down again, or Prometheus bound to a mountain, pecked by an eagle, and cursed with – this still strikes me as kind of strange – a regenerating liver, the punch line comes quickly, and is then endlessly repeated for comic effect.

Still, there was at least a fair amount of effort expended on finding fresh ways to drive futility home back then. Philosophers, if nothing else, tend to be rather playful. Tantalus was tormented by fruit he couldn’t reach and water he couldn’t drink, for example, while the Danaides, whose miserable existence had eluded me until now, were forced to endlessly fill a succession of leaky baths.

Ancient Greek Punishment is essentially a mini-ungame collection, in other words, with each legendary torture scene hinging on the same mechanics as you bash the G and H buttons on your keyboard, in order to better experience the howling void that lurked at the centre of the classical world. It’s a kind of Daley Thompson’s Decathlon of human misery, and it’s all rendered sweetly disturbing by some chunky C64-styled sprite work.

If I had to define the tone of Ancient Greek Punishment, I’d suggest it was a game that quietly mocks its players, much as its protagonists are mocked by their torturers. Futile endeavours are ultimately about humiliation, and there’s definitely a taste of that in the way you’re given interactive options that enthusiastically sap your energy while taking you no closer to any kind of end-game.

It’s entertaining stuff, in other words, nasty and witty in equal regard, and it’s all a lot funnier if you’ve had the good fortune to play any of the God Of War games. There too you can see the ancient past come alive through the medium of QTEs. There too you can experience that strange collision between agency and design that only videogames can deliver.