The Stack

In the ending credits of DROD: The City Beneath, Caravel Games announced that they were going to take a break from DROD before starting on the final episode that wraps up the story. Their next game was going to use DROD-like mechanics, but in a different setting. It was to be a story for children, concerning a war between the kingdoms of Frogs and Mice. But at some point they changed their minds and turned the Frogs and Mice game back into a full-on DROD. Thus was Gunthro and the Epic Blunder born.

It fits peculiarly into the canon. It’s not the final episode they had planned — that’s The Second Sky. It’s a story about Beethro’s grandfather Gunthro, as told by Beethro to his nephews, during his retirement following the first game, before he decided to go back underground. Every once in a while, we get Beethro’s narrative voice-over, or an interrupting nephew asking questions. Thus, the game can employ unreliable-narrator metanarrative trickery, much like Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. At one point, Gunthro suddenly gains the ability to swim stealthily through shallow water, just because Beethro’s audience thinks it would be cool. And once you get this narrator-granted power, you can go back to previously-visited locations to cross water that was previously impassible.

At another point, there’s a sequence of rooms where you can switch control between Gunthro and some soldiers under his command — it’s essentially the “clone potion” mechanic from TCB but without the potion. One such room can only be solved by locking Gunthro in the room and leaving as one of the squaddies. The game itself doesn’t care which avatar you’re controlling, and doesn’t distinguish them graphically, but one of the nephews notices the inconsistency and complains. Beethro just shrugs it off: “Maybe I got confused”. If I’m not mistaken, TCB also had rooms like this, where you had to leave Beethro’s original body behind and take off with a clone. (And even if it never made this necessary, it definitely made it possible.) But here, there’s this extra layer of fictionality to shield us from the disquieting implications.

Presenting it all as a story told to children also provides cover for any tonal inconsistency resulting from the fact that it was originally designed as a story for children. If such inconsistency exists, that is, which I’m not really sure of. The overall feel of the thing seems pretty storybook-like to me, sort of like Chicken Little with added violence, all very stylized and structurally repetitive. But the world of DROD isn’t a terribly realistic one to begin with, so the only thing that’s really different about this story is that it’s a little less grotesque and nihilistic.

The story up to the point I’m at right now: In the very beginning, Gunthro witnesses the murder of his king, the king of Rasarus, at the hands of a captain from Tueno. (Both Rasarus and Tueno figured into parts of TCB.) He goes to rally the Rasarans to avenge this aggression, which means finding and in some cases rescuing a bunch of leaders and heroes who will be necessary for the offensive, each of whom is in the depths of a different level. This enables a nicely nonlinear hub-and-wheel design that should help beginners to not get stuck. Once you finish with that, you spend a level getting to Tueno, only to find that all the NPCs you had gathered previously have gotten lost in various caves and things, and need to be rescued again, a second hub-and-wheel. That’s as far as I’ve gotten this time around, but I remember that the whole casus belli eventually turns out to be a mistake on Gunthro’s part, and that this epic blunder results in his exile from Rasarus.

Also, it all links up with the Rooted Empire at some point, which is curious. Beethro doesn’t yet know about the Empire at the point when he’s telling the story. But I don’t think the game is really any more concerned with consistency around the story that within it. It’s a mixture of Beethro’s off-the-cuff embellishments with things that really happened, some of which Beethro may not know about.