Co-operation and Competition in 'A Way Out' [Spoilers]
A Way Out sees each player control either Vincent or Leo, as they orchestrate a prison break to pursue their shared goal of revenge. The two work together to look out for prison guards, solve puzzles, and navigate high-speed motorcycle chases.
Throughout their shared struggles, they strike up a friendship. It’s hard not to build trust in a man who’s saved your life, or helped you see your newborn child. You can even goof off together between tense moments, with arcade games, darts, and horseshoe hoopla.
[If you’ve got this far without noticing the spoiler warnings: I will very spoil this for you if you keep reading.]
After all this, betrayal: Vincent is a cop. He turns on Leo at the last moment, and attempts to arrest him. The finale of the game sees the two fight to the death - and when that happens, all the minigames make sense.
You cannot get through the game without co-operating, but all the minigames are explicitly competitive. When I took a prompt to arm wrestle, the game paused and waited for my partner to join me, instead of pairing me with an NPC. We both button-mashed for over a minute, switching between fond shit-talking and complaints about how our hands hurt. Even a casual wheelchair wheelie threw up a scoreboard comparing who could hold one the longest. Nearly every casual interaction with the environment became adversarial.
At the time we joked about it being the two men refusing to openly share intimacy (“it’s the intricate rituals”). Then the ending happened, and it clicked. The minigames were consistently telling us that, despite appearances, Leo and Vincent were never actually on the same side.
Oh, Also
Speaking of wheelchairs! Creator of the Combat Wheelchair for D&D (and professional disability consultant) Sara Thompson wrote about Geralt of Rivia as a disabled protagonist in The Witcher for Eurogamer. The piece is a summary of and response to their viral thread earlier this month about the character’s disabilities from the books - a worthwhile read even if you caught the thread the first time round.
We should look at how disabled characters are in some of our most iconic media from the beginning, and it’s only through reinterpretation (or fannish denial) that these layers get removed. As Witcher showrunner Lauren Hissrich noted in her response to Thompson’s original thread, she had initially “not thought of it further than: ‘Geralt has some pain, onto the next thing.’”
Ruth Cassidy is a writer and self-described velcro cyborg who, when not writing about video games, is probably being emotional about musicals, mountains, or cats. Has had some bylines, in some places.
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