Khs Exclusion Zone - Tumblr Posts
“She was wronged.
They only tried to love her and honor her here.
She will be vilified once her name is learned, but it was her sisters who broke her up and threw her down.
Gods above, it makes me want to cry just thinking about it.
How long she must have lain there under the sand. Hurting and lonely and angry and not knowing what she did wrong.
I don’t Know how to pray to her, I would if I could.
You deserved better. This was not your fault.”
Exclusion Zone Makes My Eyes Sweat
KHS, it seems, possesses such an uncanny talent for writing the most underrated and downright raw narratives in general, but there's just something so specifically emotionally wrenching about what you could probably call the "climax" of Exclusion Zone- aka, my second favorite of the twisted tales within Haunted Cities, vol 4.
And therein Exclusion Zone lies an event that makes it stand out so far from the rest. There is a moment very, very far from the scariest experience I had in Haunted Cities, and yet this is still the one that haunts me most of all, and maybe that was the way it was meant. You simply enter the ruins of a long abandoned tower, and you recover a note written by a deceased researcher.
It's not a moment that puts the player inside the jaws of a hungry house. It's not a scene where dark angels are coming to gnaw off your skin, you aren't swallowed by any ravenous gardens, and if anything, the music in that tower makes it almost a calming moment. The atmosphere is serene and comforting, like a temple, or any sacred ground should be. You are, true enough, being bombarded with lethal amounts of radiation, seemingly to no immediate consequence, though.
And like that, it happens, and then you leave the site once you finish your exploration. You show up, do your job, and head back. Yet here I am still trying to put together what exactly about this game's conclusion makes me so deeply... sad and disturbed, in a way games have rarely managed to do, and I have my best guess:
“She was wronged."
As extreme and surreal as the story unfolded is, the feelings it immerses you in are something so grounded and relatable, to me- The sympathy and sheer powerlessness of being an observer in the aftermath of a great tragedy.
To stand there in the epicenter of so much death and sorrow, which happened all and only because everyone was trying the best that they ever could, and it just… wasn't enough. And no matter how much you can mourn for their fate, or wish you could even just say how sorry you are, maybe for them, or maybe for how cruel of a world it is at all, but there's nothing you can do yourself but just.. feel that empathy for them. So you do.
And the revelation itself is a jarring, shocking thing, especially if you save the tower for the last to visit on your run. These gentle, final words pouring with so much humanity in a setting that’s so lifeless and cold. I already had an idea of what was coming, I got the games purely because of the Jacob Geller review, and I don’t think my enjoyment was any bit lessened by the spoilers.
There’s no villain to blame for the tragedy of the fallen goddess and those people who built the tower, save those nameless sisters some unfathomable, untouchable worlds away. There’s no implication to some fruitful lesson or honoring of the disaster’s victims. If anything, your closure is only in the assumption that the pitiful girl will be demonized and remembered in infamy for her suffering. What became of her, whether a final peace or an eternity left to her pain, no one can even know. Your discovery of the truth? As ultimately meaningless as that of the corpse left behind in that cursed ruin. What could you be left to do?
You silently grieve, probably just because no one else will. Probably because of a strongly felt connection for the wrongs you've faced yourself, whatever times you wished someone had been there with the same message, as little as it would have changed. It's a very unique and specific thing to invoke in an audience and I guess I'm appreciative and impressed such a game did so in such a short and potent fashion. It's part of what makes Exclusion Zone one of my favorites of the collection. It vaguely reminds me of Looming, too, which is another indie game built around a similar theme of retelling a story through archeology. I just really found that neatly powerful, and powerfully neat, and I hope I'm not the only one that did.
“I'm sorry, sister. You deserved better. This was not your fault."
"you good?"
no man, kitty horrorshow games make me cry
Oh,
to sink down in the tower and weep
as the fury of Her pain rips through my flesh
and the weight of her despair takes me under
and leaves behind my bones
like her false stones, forgotten on the shore.
Would She hear my prayer, or does She sleep
Far beneath the sand and seaward thresh?
Did her sisters tear her forever
asunder
could she be made less alone
if I followed her to be forgotten, another memory deplored?
Oh,
To dunk my head into that reddened stream
and float in the tunnels beyond the bounds
where the lost ones linger, and mutter, and
wallow in their past
and speaking without hearing,
forever stuck in another time.
Would I wallow too, stuck between the world and a dream;
Only by the next new trespasser to be found?
Would I join them to murmur and muse and idle while I rasp
Drinking it, always fearing
made too a prisoner of my mind?
Oh,
To be the offering laid at your feet, willingly or not
Or perhaps the reluctant acolyte breaking the earth.
Should I have been the keeper lapping from your well?
Or would you rather me as the blood within,
carried from the husk between your roots?
As either I’d learn the song of the trees, of bugs and rot.
I would be faithful to the soil, wrought to fill its dearth.
As either I’d know the sights of graves and bloodbells.
Imagine what beauty that’d flourish from the flavor of my sin,
If I joined the whispers beneath my boots.
Oh,
To follow the path that you carved for me,
the one that rounds the hill and leads to your home.
To bow at your throne of tendons and jaws,
and flayed by my welcoming host’s hands;
I’ll be stripped of skin, unwound, unraveled.
Certainly at once in hers I would truly be
as snug as the grub laid to fester in wasp’s comb,
Twsited and formed anew, witnessing with awe
as my fodder inspires someone else’s plans.
What a family I’ll find, down a road untraveled.
Oh,
To pursue you down to your starving center,
to feel the teeth clamp down and crush,
to be your hapless dweller betrayed
and feel the acid’s unforgiving burn.
Just how would your vengeance taste?
“So, so sorry” I may cry, too late to realize what I’ve done wrong.
What if I could be foolish enough to enter
and vivisect you from foundation to truss
and become your cruel traitor repaid,
given the punishment I must deserve?
A vagrant morsel, a hungry house: both wastes.
“Finally again,” we may sigh,
“evermore to someone I belong”