#urge

This is a videogame that I have not played and came across by Youtube algo shoving up video titled Playing Urge To Save GALEand watching it without a single clue what GALE was or what Urge was or why I should care about how the video creator, Sir Butterd Toasty, introduces Urge as being that game with the piss meter—though, insisting that the game has much more merit, depth, charm, intrigue, sincerity than what would be gleamed by just flattening it down to that game with the piss meter or to dismiss it as some urination fetish game.

And, notably: it is a game that appears to take place in Florida, perhaps even around central Florida as one of the locales is called ‘Urlando’.

The part that sold me really had to do with one of the first attempts to save GALE (or just Gale, as, through the video or by playing the game we learn, is his name) had to do with “… then the second time I tried to turn him into a human toilet, which is a thing that you can do in this game, and then set him free into the wasteland” accompanied by footage of, indeed, Sir Butterd Toasty dropping the human toilet from his inventory and promptly realizing that he had not the means to actually release Gale from being a human toilet—which, graphically, looks like a filled body-bag with a receptacle where the mouth would be.

Again, this sort-of sounds like something that could be flattened down to that game with the piss meter but the setting does so much more than just the jokification of that premise: it is a world defined by urine as hazard, and I will explain it as I watched through the video: you accumulate pee, but you must not ever urinate in any locale that would cause it to be exposed to the atmosphere, because the urine of all living things is ‘contaminated’ with something that causes the urine to become immediately gaseous and affects both the weather and the inhabitants like a quick-acting radiation, causing a heavy fog to gather around the region which attracts mutants affected by the contaminated urine—these are giant insects, flying bladders, mind-rotten citizens, and more mutant once-persons—and how this environmental hazard is portrayed is done so immersively that it immediately affected my imagination. Peeing outside of sealed containers causes a urinous smoke to begin rising up towards the sky, and you can prevent this by burning the smoke away to help reduce the contamination; you can take ‘urid’ pills which flushes the contaminated urine from the body, presumably absorbing it in some way; you can find empty bottles or empty out bottles to pee in to contain the urine; you can pee into car engines—which reveals another part of the setting: that urine has been converted to an energy source and presumably the contamination stems from some part of this conversion—to fuel them and prevent the gas from rising; but you must not urinate in anything not sealed. You also seem to accumulate pee on a basis beyond just the normal human urge: witnessed by how the need to urinate rises when in the proximity of other urid-mutated creatures like the fleshy flying bladders, or by being exposed to the explosive urid fog of some mutants or the party drugs they take, or simply by taking damage —a portrait is created of urine becoming a fouler substance within the body that is permeating through the cells and multiplying itself and being called outward through the pollution in the air. It is more than needing to pee or drinking too much water, it is the body deconstructing itself into urine, by some process invented to coax abnormal urination to replace the old fuel sources.

Parts of the environment become encaked inside petrified husks of Urid, which must be broken apart by force, and in doing so releases more of the poisonous urine smoke—which must also be burnt to prevent the fog from becoming too dense; cities are partially adapted to reflect these dangers: fog meters are installed around several blocks to monitor the contamination level in the atmosphere; in the more metropolitan environments, some structures have decontamination sprays at their entrances.

I write all of this and wanted to write all of this, despite not playing it and just watching an hour long video on the game where a guy named Sir Butterd Toasty tries to save GALE, because this game completely fascinates me with how imaginative it is and how excellently the gameplay creates a narrative; it reminds me of STALKER in the best way and starts to pierce beyond the genres I’m normally interested in (while I loved STALKER and I think it is one of the formative ‘immersive sim’ titles, present day I really find those types of games a bit of a bore to play) and makes me want to buy it, just to support the developer, just to support someone willing to make something that is both so well-executely unique and is Floridian.