The Dark Queen of Mortholme

How much empathy do you have for video game bosses? In the midst of working out their attack patterns and perfecting our tactics to defeat and kill them, do we ever stop to think about the impossible situation they are trapped within? As players, we are given countless opportunities to slowly improve, but they remain firmly stuck in their increasingly predictable moveset as we dance around them and bring them to their knees (most of the time). They are puzzles to be deciphered. And then killed. The Dark Queen of Mortholme brilliantly and empathetically explores how one boss – the titular Dark Queen – feels about all this.

The Dark Queen of Mortholme is a short-form indie game (a first playthrough will take about 45 minutes) which takes place in a single room, more specifically the Queen’s throne room. And what a room it is. The lighting is sublime. Warm candlelight acts as a visual counterpoint to the cold moonlight pouring through the huge Gothic windows onto mirrored marble floor. The vaulted ceilings tower above the looming presence of the Queen’s throne, which is placed at the far right of the room. The pixel art is exquisite. I never tired of looking at this room. 

The game opens with the Queen seated on her throne, waiting. Enter from stage left, crawling on hands and knees, a ‘snivelling underling’ who announces that a marauding intruder has mercilessly ‘slaughtered’ the entire Royal Guard. The underling is afraid. The ‘creature’ who is attacking, they tell their queen, is ‘relentless’. A monster. This is the first sign that this game is going to question our assumptions and challenge our preconceptions around stock characters and tropes in action-adventure video games. The underling – the kind of minor enemy we’ve all thoughtlessly killed while making our way through many a game – is succinctly humanised in their reaction to the seemingly callous slaughter they have witnessed. 

The butcher of the guards, it turns out, is ‘The Hero’, who bounds, full of brio and confidence, into the throne room, accompanied by a minor heroic theme. The Hero and the Queen face off from opposite sides of the screen (as convention dictates, the hero to the left, the queen to the right). The character models are excellent: the huge queen, clothed in moody black, purple and spots of red, with a spiked crown atop her head, towers over the brightly clad little hero. The animations are also top-drawer, bringing to life the antagonists as they spar across the screen. Although you’re now expecting it, it’s nonetheless a great moment when, at the prompt ‘use analogue stick to move’, it is the Queen, not the plucky hero, who responds to your input. You will be the final boss, battling the hero. Let the fight begin!

The first fight ends comically quickly. However, this is not so much an end-of-game boss fight as a tragic story and metanarrative about the unenviable role of bosses in video games. The tragic trajectory of the Queen’s story soon becomes apparent. This plays out through the uneven and unfair combat (even her second phase might not be enough to save her); and, most importantly, through the brilliantly written dialogue, which is deeply informed by knowledge of the action-adventure genre. It is funny, thought-provoking and a little bit heartbreaking. Conversations between the Hero and the Queen are as much of a dance as the combat itself. Recognising and unpacking each of the tropes that are being playfully deconstructed is so satisfying and fun. The writing is beautifully concise and deep.

The combat itself quickly becomes purposefully frustrating as the theme of repetition plays out over each encounter. Each time you dispatch the Hero and head back to your throne for a well-earned bit of evil gloating, the intrepid Hero returns, again and again, from screen left. (The animation of the Queen slowly turning her head when she realises the player/hero has returned is wonderful). And they are stronger. The Queen’s prominent health bar is suddenly under threat, as the Hero chips away at her, learning her attack patterns with each failure (an enlightening enactment of the power fantasy that partly fuels our love of games). The Queen futilely declares that she is ‘not here to be figured out’, but unfortunately, the Hero is constantly being ‘fed with failure’. Of course, a video game death is really just a respawn and a chance to do better next time, something that’s not always so easy to do in our own lives (another reason why we love games so much, perhaps?). The Queen soon feels cumbersome to control, her attacks clumsy. 

As players, we often assume that bosses have all the power, but are boss encounters actually unfair fights? The implied player behind the Hero is learning and getting better, while the Queen, programmed to behave in certain ways, is trapped in stasis, stuck in their behavioural patterns, unable to change up tactics. The Hero is vitalised by the player; the queen is trammelled by her creators, by the game developers who coded her. 

It’s a tragic position to find oneself in, and you can’t help feeling deeply for the Queen. (In my two playthroughs, I was unable to best the murderous hero. It might be impossible? But there’s also some implied political commentary baked subtly into the dialogue. The Hero represents change, the hope that the status quo, the existing power structure embodied by the Queen, can be toppled. The Queen can’t change; she can only grimly cling on to power. In this reading, the self-satisfied and rather arrogant Hero suddenly becomes just that, a hero, who learns how to make change happen, how to topple stagnant, corrupt ruling elites. The game becomes a political allegory, turning one’s thoughts to the ‘bosses’ who seek to cling on to power in our own world. Perhaps the fortitude and resilience we hone playing video games could, just maybe, be used in other areas of our lives?

However, the process of humanising the supposedly evil boss is never lost sight of. The Queen is a sad, lonesome figure who is completely cut off from the world. It’s certainly lonely at the top for her. A strange kind of connection grows between her and the hero. Could it be that they need each other? Perhaps the isolated Queen desperately yearns for companionship? The beautiful animations after each of the hero’s deaths certainly suggest this. Or perhaps they represent the competing cycles of progress and reaction? Perhaps the game is a hopeful retelling, through the enactment of a boss fight, of how people can bring about change, as well as a very human story of the isolation, paranoia and deep dysfunctionality that, as history has taught us, is the sad fate of tyrants. A parable for our times.