Author: Got me.
Category: game
Company/Publisher: White Wolf
Line: Storyteller Series
Capsule Review by Charlie Merchant on 02/10/00.
Genre tags: Horror Gothic

You are dead.

Maybe you opened your eyes after a brief, confusing spell of darkness and found yourself sitting at a funeral, surrounded by your friends and relatives. As in a bad dream, you moved slowly to the coffin, your curiousity melting into terror as you found yourself staring down at your own face.

Or perhaps there was no spell of darkness, no transition. One moment you were breathing, thinking, feeling, moving through your life with your customary blindness, the next moment you were thrown violently from your body, your soul ripped away from the flesh forever. Rescuers were unable to revive you. Your heart could not start again. No drug could ever bring you back.

You are dead.

What is it that holds you here, still? There is no body to hide your passions within, no mask of skin to shield your thoughts, nothing corporeal anchoring you to the physical world. Yet you remain, you defy the postulates of biology and chemistry by continuing to think and feel after life has ended. It is only passion that holds you here now and the regret over all the things you were never able to accomplish.

Somewhere within your mind there lurks a creature more horrible than anything walking the face of the planet. It screams, cavorts and dances at the periphery of your psyche, demanding that you let go, that you surrender. It is a grotesque inversion of your id, a death instinct that mirrors the intensity and violence of the survival instinct you held in life. But, unlike your survival instinct, it has a thinking, scheming intellect that rivals, or even surpasses, your own.

The society you are in is bereft of comfort or hope. Fettered, earth-bound souls like yourself fight for power in an eternal war. The majority of those around you are part of one of three groups: the Hierarchy, the Renegades and the Heretics. The Hierarchy holds the most power, it is a massive, oppressive totalitarian system that enforces its precepts through violence. The Renegades are a poorly organized gang of diverse, scruffy outlaws that attempt to battle the Hierarchy with terrorist tactics. The Heretics are religious fanatics that cling to the belief of God and Heaven.

Regardless of who you join, regardless of what your goals are, it does not change the fact that you are dead. You can distract yourself with the battle from time to time, escape the pain of knowing that your loved ones are moving on without you. But as real as the ghost-world seems to you, you are intimately aware that you are only living in a bare shadow of the real world.

When you go too far, when you cross over the brink, you might be lucky enough to merely obliviate and become nothing. If, however, your shadow self wins and you are consumed, you will fall and become a spectre. As bleak and meaningless as your unlife is, it is paradise compared to this fate. A spectre has reversed every goal, ideal, proclivity he held in life and seeks to undo everything he once strove to accomplish. A spectre attacks his former loved ones with unreasoning hatred. Indeed, most spectres have only the barest of intellects, the most fragmented psyches. However, the truly dangerous ones, the Doppelgangers, remain outwardly normal and they penetrate the society of ghosts as spies, often doing irrevocable harm from within.

Wraith isn't a game about superheros or dragons or fast cars and big guns. Your objective isn't to gain massive amounts of experience points. Reaching through the shroud that sepparates you from the 'sunlit lands' and briefly touching the face of a former loved one is, in Wraith, a victory that outweighs all the pain and suffering that the 'monsters' inflict upon your character. You succeed, for the most part, by simply refusing to cease to exist.

I know this game didn't sell very well, I know that it is currently removed from the WoD bandwagon. This is my half-assed protest. The game worked very well as long as it wasn't used as a 'companion piece' to the other games.

Wraith was a game that made a great deal of people uncomfortable. There wasn't a lot to sepparate the player from his character and the game dealt with the issues of death and isolation that most people would rather just avoid. It did not attempt to make death pretty or attractive, it did not attempt to increase one's hope in the afterlife.

However, there was an -incredible- amount of hope in the game. The message of the game was that, yes, your characters are probably doomed, they're -dead-. However, you, the player, are -not- dead, and as such you can still exert control over where your life is going. When you played the game, you realized what a victory it was to *simply be alive*, which isn't something that a lot of other games touch upon.

It was a horror game. Unfortunately, most people either failed or refused to see that the horror evoked by the game was the palpable realization that one was wasting their life if they did not realize it was finite, precious and ultimately very fragile. Very few people saw that the hope evoked by the game was the hope that accompanies free will. While you are still alive, you can still affect change and you can still master your situation. Choices are always available to you. You are only completely robbed of volition once you are dead. And, according to the game, maybe not even then.

Style: 5 (Excellent!)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)

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