Review of Narrative in "Lisa: The Painful RPG"

Plot Overview

When the player opens up the game, they’re immediately met with a simple box of menu options juxtaposed with the image of Lisa hanging from a noose. A slow, ominous song, fittingly titled “The Siren’s Call,” plays over this menu as though it’s begging the player to continue. This menu never changes and the player must thus be reminded of Lisa’s suicide every single time the game is started up. This image ends up looming over the player just as it looms over Brad, connecting them together even if the player may not realize it at first. Though this may just seem like a simple menu, it subtly ties itself into the plot in an important way by putting the player into Brad’s headspace whenever they start or continue their journey.

            Lisa’s actual gameplay begins with a brief look into Brad’s childhood. In the opening scene, a group of bullies accuses someone of stealing their ball, which leads to Brad taking the blame and getting beaten up for it. There’s a notable lack of solution to this exchange. Brad may have stood up for his friend, but doing so just results in him getting hurt and the bullies getting away with it. His friend thanks him and apologizes, but nothing more can really be done. The player gains control of an injured Brad and starts the walk home. Brad encounters his neighbor on the way back, but the man just passively victim blames him and does nothing to help. Once Brad gets back to his dilapidated house, Marty yells at him for getting beat up, throws an empty beer bottle at his head, and sends him to his room. Regardless of what the player inputs in this scene, Brad takes control and silently runs upstairs. Along with efficiently providing information on Brad’s backstory and foreshadowing the subsequent events of the game, this opening sequence forces the player to experience Brad’s pain alongside him. In doing this, the game creates an emotional link between player and avatar while establishing that Brad is still his own character that makes choices outside of the player’s control. Most games either give the player full control over their character’s decisions or almost no control whatsoever, but Lisa changes up this dynamic by allowing the player agency over some choices while also forcing them to commit to choices that Brad makes himself.

            After Brad cries in his room and the title fades in, the scene quickly shifts to an older Brad taking a pill called “Joy.” After swallowing it, he notices an abandoned baby left on the ground nearby. Bewildered, he tries to comfort it and carries it back to his friends Rick, Sticky, and Cheeks. The trio finds out that the baby is a girl and suggests taking her to Rando, but Brad refuses, stating that this is his “second chance” and that she needs to be protected from the wasteland once she becomes a woman. A montage then plays where Brad and his friends raise the girl, who they name Buddy, as he battles his addiction to Joy. He seems to have developed a form of PTSD, repeatedly seeing visions of Marty and Lisa and relying on Joy to make them disappear. The girl, meanwhile, grows up and develops an intense curiosity to explore the outside world for herself, though Brad refuses to let her leave the house without him. Once he finds out that she’s been taken, he sets off into the wasteland of Olathe to get her back. Though there’s almost no gameplay in this section, it provides vital information about Brad’s adult life and introduces an important fragment of Buddy’s character to the player.

            From here, the game opens up in the form of branching paths and side quests while still following a linear story. The general progression of gameplay consists of exploring the environment and finding items that allow the player to progress. Along the way, the player encounters multiple hostile NPCs trying to mug them, as well as peaceful NPCs that usually just talk about life after the apocalypse. Some characters can even join Brad’s party if he does side quests involving them. In addition to these people, the player begins encountering strange, disfigured creatures called Joy Mutants. It’s not initially explained what these mutants are, but it becomes increasingly clear as the game progresses that they’re the result of humans that take too much Joy. They embody the end result of drug addiction, grotesquely conveying the way drugs change people and make them completely unrecognizable.

            Drug abuse is so integral to the game that there’s even a core mechanic revolving around Brad’s addiction. Brad is potentially one of the most powerful party members in the game, but he regularly goes through periods of withdrawal in which his stats are severely decreased. The player can rectify this by giving him Joy, which fully heals him and gives him a high that makes all of his attacks deal critical damage for a while, but they may also try to abstain from Joy completely for the chance to change the story in some meaningful way. Whether or not Brad succumbs to his addiction is thus entirely up to the player, though Brad continues to see hallucinations of Lisa regardless of drug intake. These visions usually just stand over cliff edges in silence, but they also occasionally taunt Brad, asking him why he cares about Buddy more than her. Her presence is always felt, unable to be forgotten or ignored by Brad and, by extension, the player.

            Pressing on through the pain, Brad continues his search for Buddy until he eventually finds Rick bleeding out. When Rick refuses to tell him where she is, he picks up a nearby spiked club and threatens to torture him until he talks. The player regains control in this moment and must actively press the button to hit him, even if they might not want to. Rick relents and begs him to stop after a few swings, but Brad takes control away from the player and keeps swinging anyway, leaving his old friend almost dead. This is another key moment of the player losing agency to the character, the distorted visuals of the scene implying that it’s due to his addiction. From this point on, the player may begin to feel like Brad’s conscience, trying to steer him towards the right decisions but often losing control in a drug-fueled rage. However, even when the player does have agency, it never really feels like there is a right choice.

            Soon after the encounter with Rick, Brad gets ambushed by Buzzo and his cult. In this scene, Buzzo captures one of his party members at random and gives Brad the choice of either letting the party member die or getting his arm cut off. The player also has the choice to challenge him to a fight, but doing so is futile as Buzzo is impossible to defeat. If Brad’s arm gets cut off, his stats are reduced, he’s barred from performing certain abilities, and he suffers from withdrawal more often. However, if the party member dies, they’re permanently dead and thus rendered unusable. The player really feels the weight of their decision through gameplay, making the decision seem all the more meaningful even if it has no direct impact on the plot.

            The next segment of the game consists of another hub area where the player goes through a series of subplots before progressing. These subplots aren’t necessarily important to the overarching story, but they provide interesting moments of worldbuilding and humor. The story progresses when Brad finally finds Buddy hiding in a cave, waiting for Sticky to come back. She’s resistant to leave, insisting that Sticky cared for her and made her understand her value to the world, but Brad forces her to go with him regardless of how she feels. Agency returns as a major theme in this scene as Brad, the character that exists outside of the context of the player, strips Buddy of her right to choose.

They quickly get ambushed by Buzzo, who holds Buddy hostage and threatens to hurt her unless Brad takes Joy. The player loses agency again and Brad agrees to take the pills until he blacks out. This scene proves particularly impactful if the player has been avoiding taking Joy throughout the game. It suddenly feels as though this effort has no meaning because Brad would be forced to spiral back into his addiction regardless. Games that offer the player choices without expanding into branching narratives are often criticized for their “illusion of choice,” yet Lisa purposefully uses this illusion to keep the player constantly hoping that they can make an impact. The player’s lack of control over the story is meant to parallel Brad’s lack of control over his actions, creating a mutual disparity between intention and consequence.

Soon after this, Brad finds Sticky bleeding out against a rock. He initially reminisces about how they became friends because they both had abusive fathers, but he then goes on to criticize Brad for being unfit to take care of Buddy, even heavily implying that he molested her. Brad gets ready to kill him in a rage, but Rick suddenly jumps in the way, begging him not to do it. The player is given the choice here to either kill them or let them go, but the latter choice just results in Sticky later attacking the player and inevitably dying anyway. The player may have agency over Brad’s decision in this moment, but Sticky’s own choices are what lead him to the same fate.

Immediately after this, Buzzo captures Brad yet again and forces him to make another choice. The player must choose to let Buzzo either kill three of their party members or cut off one of Buddy’s nipples. Brad’s torture truly reaches its peak here, as whatever choice he makes will inevitably make him seem like more of a monster to Buddy. The illusion of choice thus comes into play again, and all the player can do is weigh the consequences of each option and hope that Buddy will forgive them for whatever one they pick. Brad then enters the final hub area only to discover that Buddy has stolen someone’s boat and used it to escape to a nearby island. This segment of the game consists of another series of subplots that follow Brad gathering materials to create his own boat. After the boat is built, he sneaks away from his party as they sleep and sets off to the island without them. It’s clear in this moment that Brad doesn’t have much of an attachment to them, seeing them more as a threat than an aid. All that matters to him now is ensuring Buddy’s safety.

The island consists of a lone house surrounded by countless empty beer bottles. When the player enters the house, they find Buddy having a conversation with Marty. Brad silently watches Marty show genuine compassion for her, trying to convince her that taking Joy is a bad idea, until she eventually notices him standing in the doorway. The player is then immediately given the choice to either kill Marty or let him live, but regardless of what is chosen, Brad goes into a drug-crazed frenzy and readies himself to kill. Buddy jumps in the way and begs him to stop, explaining that he saved her life, but Brad just kicks her out of the way and initiates combat. Marty weakly fights back against the player, but all he can do is kick up dirt and scratch, making him incapable of dealing any real substantial damage. In the middle of the fight, Buddy suddenly gets in the way to shield him. The player may panic over this, trying to sort through any possible options to avoid hurting her, but the fight doesn’t progress until Brad hurts her. Using the player’s desire to avoid hurting Buddy, the game directly incorporates the player into the story as an entity separate from Brad, a representation of the part of his mind that understands what he’s doing is wrong. After enough damage is dealt, she backs off and the player must finish off a visibly injured Marty. At this point of the fight, he refuses to fight back and uses most of his turns to just cry, meaning that the player has to kill someone that doesn’t even want to fight anymore. Once the battle is over, Marty assures Brad that he’s changed and proceeds to apologize to Lisa. The scene then fades to black and cuts to Brad waking up outside. Realizing that Buddy stole his boat, Brad uses a corpse to sail after her.

The player reaches a new mass of land and walks Brad through a quiet, empty landscape. The game slows down a lot in this moment, intending for the player to reflect on everything before the plot progresses to its end. This doesn’t last for long, however, as the moment gets abruptly interrupted by slashing sounds in the distance. The camera pans over and Brad sees Mr. Angoneli, Sticky’s father, cutting up Buddy’s face. He claims that she’s all his and that he’s “branding” her with his personal mark, which quickly leads to combat. Brad occasionally sees Mr. Angoneli in his hallucinations, but this is otherwise his only major appearance in the overarching plot. He acts as a sort of scavenger, a skulking antagonist that seems unimportant until it’s too late. After defeating him, Brad walks over to Buddy and hands her his poncho to cover her wounds. However, Buddy rejects him and calls him a monster for killing Marty, saying that he was a better father to her than Brad ever was. She then runs off, leaving Brad behind again. The text “Brad’s body is feeling strange. He has become a failure” appears, and Brad’s class even changes to “failure” to reflect this. This is Brad’s lowest moment, yet he still feels an irresistible urge to move on, just as the player feels the urge to see the game to its conclusion.

Brad continues through an empty camp, the last moment of calm before the game’s climax. Once the player moves past this, they encounter Buddy alongside Rando’s army. Brad tells her to run away with him, but she just runs headfirst into the army instead. The player’s three active party members suddenly interrupt, appearing to each say their piece whether it’s to reluctantly tell Brad that she’s the future or outright say that they only joined the party for the girl. Brad nevertheless responds that he needs to save her and then initiates combat with his party. Once they’re dead, he goes on to defeat the entire army in waves, progressively making them more and more afraid of him as the battles go on. He also develops the abilities “scream” and “cry,” which are abilities that are notably often used by Joy mutants. The battles end with Brad completely covered in arrows, warning Buddy to stand back as he slowly shuffles over to Rando. Rando states that he doesn’t want to fight, but Brad initiates combat anyway with him anyway. The player has no agency over any of this; they’re simply forced to submit to their avatar’s actions. After defeating Rando, the player slowly walks Brad over to Buddy. She berates him for ruining her life and hurting her, and Brad solemnly kneels down and cries in defeat. The only thing he can muster anymore is a simple request. He asks Buddy for a hug. The player takes control of Buddy in this scene, having the choice to either hug him or not. Regardless of what she does, however, Brad inevitably falls over and dies, fully completing his transformation into a Joy mutant.

Strongest Element

The best thing about this storyline is the unique dynamic it creates between player and character. It subtly creates an important distinction between the two, making the player directly feel like a part of the story as a result. From the looming imagery of Lisa’s suicide to the player’s brief encounter with abuse at the hands of Marty, the player and Brad are instantly linked through and motivated by Brad’s pain. The player is Brad to an extent, attempting to make good choices for him through the limited amount of agency the game offers. The futile option of sparing Marty proves that Brad’s actions in the end are not his own; otherwise, why would the player be given such a choice in the first place? Brad and, by extension, the player are ultimately controlled by his addiction. Lisa beautifully uses the medium to its full potential, immersing the player into the character of Brad in order to convey an idea of what it feels like to be an addict.

Weakest Element

I think that the pacing of the game’s narrative has some major flaws. The subplots within the first and second hub areas, though somewhat unimportant, feel appropriate and do a good job of building the game’s world, but the third hub area is fairly uninteresting and feels like an overly abrupt interruption of the major plot. On the other hand, so many climactic events occur in between these hub areas that they end up feeling sensationalist and exhausting. The segment between the second and third hub areas, in particular, is cluttered with so many plot details that would’ve felt more realistic had they been spaced out more evenly. Throughout this segment alone, Buzzo ambushes Brad three times. Though the game is meant to be exhausting to an extent, this simply feels exhausting in a counterproductive way.

Lessons for Future Game Narratives

·       Incorporate story elements into the gameplay: A lot of Lisa’s story elements are incorporated into the gameplay in some way. For example, throughout Brad’s transformation into a Joy mutant, he slowly starts learning attacks that Joy mutants know. In the fight against Brad’s party members, some may actively try to hurt Brad while others refuse to do so. These are small details for the most part, but they really add to the immersion of a scene and specifically allow the characters to be presented in an intuitive way. Game narratives should always be incorporated into the gameplay; after all, play is what distinguishes a game from other mediums. 

·       Incorporate the player into the narrative: Lisa is very unique in that it makes the player feel like a part of the story separately from their avatar. Though the player is supposed to project onto Brad, it’s also made clear that he is his own character that makes decisions independently. Most of the decisions that he makes himself, however, are a result of the Joy, meaning that Brad and the player consistently have a mutual lack of control over what’s happening. When Brad loses control and the player acknowledges that he’s doing the wrong thing, they take on the role of his conscience, acting as a voice in his head that can unfortunately do nothing except go along with his actions. The relationship between player and avatar is rarely brought up in games, but delving into this relationship more often could potentially immerse the player further into a game’s narrative.

·       Don’t be afraid to be political: In the games industry, there’s currently a stigma around using games to make a political statement. The idea around this is that games should focus more on being fun than making a statement. Not every game needs to be politicized, but insisting that games shouldn’t be political at all is disrespectful to their potential as an art form. Lisa doesn’t shy away from the political, placing themes of gender and abuse at the center of its narrative while still managing to be a fun game. If a developer wants their game to be political, then they should be allowed the freedom to do so without facing backlash from the community.

·       Don’t be afraid to be weird: For lack of a better term, Lisa is strange. Whereas many other game protagonists are brave heroes that want to save the world, Brad is a washed-up drug addict that wants to save one person at the expense of the world. Whereas many other games try to maintain consistent tones of either seriousness or absurdity, this game combines the two with funny, outlandish gags taking place between a painfully dark main plot. The game’s soundtrack creates a genre all its own, a weird mess of stock sound effects that somehow manage to come together in a coherent and enjoyable way. Though some may be put off by it, Lisa’s charming quirkiness is exactly what allows it to stand out against the massive variety of other games that exist now. The developer had no reservations about making this game weird, which allowed the project to become something truly memorable as a result.