You manage to teleport yourself to Slaeter's Sea. You are hit by a hatchetfish; you die. You zap yourself with a wand; you die. You grow an extra finger; you die. You commit magical genocide on a race of bats, heavenly rangers appear; you die. As you continually perish, the game deletes your save file but keeps your ghosts around to torment you; literally a case of anti-experience points. The more you lose, the harder it gets. Become careless and the forest outside the village screams with ghosts and zombies, former selves come back to punish you for not being strong enough.
From the simple graphics to the deliberate pace of weapon acquisition, every aspect of Ragnarok is tinged with the sadness and fury of Norse mythology. Vast forces swirl around you, and the epic quest will be fulfilled through divine luck and an iron will much more than skill or experience. As the game world grows and you can escape into all the realms of Midgard, the monsters grow more powerful by orders of magnitude, all capable of smashing apart your hours of play but urging you on with the promise of dropped loot and an edible corpse.
Underneath the rhythm of difficulty and weirdness sits something utterly unique; you are being slowly religiously converted. Not into the literal worship of 16-color gods only a handful of pixels high, rather your approach to the game can take on any form, as long as it adjusts to the possibility of the next keystroke teleporting you inside the stomach of a Hel dragon, having an entire class of items written out of existence forever or finding yourself deep in a mushroom-powered hallucinogenic death sequence. The result of this abusive relationship is the player gradually becomes more Norse in his style and method of play. They simply have to in order to climb over Yggdrasil, the world-tree and finally across Bifrost, the rainbow bridge to heaven where the gods are already half-dead, having waited so long for your arrival.
Make Me a Believer
RPGs have always been steeped in eschatology; the study of the end of the world. Heroes go from sleepy amnesiacs to saviors and Gods in a matter of hours, without ever disturbing the gel in their hair. By the time we reach the end we are a walking inventory of potential. Like all good saviors, death is impossible, and we can roll back the stone to reveal the save file. To save the world, heroes have to be blank slates, their paths to greatness inevitably slicked with blood.
Norse heroes are different in one subtle way: They are equals of the gods in every respect, who are mortal, bound by laws and have gods and giants of their own to fear. There is no resurrection, only rebirth. Forget becoming the God of War and reveling in vaguely homoerotic triumph on a brooding throne; the real battle has just begun. Norse mythology is, and always was, playable. Every journey is heroic. It demands people accept chaos, and then shows them how to tame it. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the falcon cannot hear the falconer - the hero wades in, eye-deep in hell, and prays for good fortune.
Ragnarok is ultimately a gaming paean to an ancient way of life. It is neither faithful nor meticulous, but acts as a manual for true believers. To be Norse is to know you're already doomed, and the gods are coming with you. We are trained through the game's trials and errors - through actually eating the corpses of our failures - to understand it wasn't all feasting, horned helmets and heavy metal. A true test of faith.
Christian McCrea is a freelance writer for The Escapist.
