Remnant 2’s Losomn asylum surprised me with an unexpected twist

As someone who’s both played video games for decades and has a “bad brain,” I’m used to feeling emotions ranging from simple annoyance to outright disgust when it comes to gaming’s treatment of folks living with mental illness. Remnant 2However, it was a pleasant surprise to me that the media at large showed a small measure of compassion towards disadvantaged groups.

While playing through the Adventure Mode I visited areas that I had missed. Remnant 2, campaign, I discovered an asylum in the Losomn slums I’d never seen before. Losomn is an intriguing world — a sort of industrial-era London with a high-fantasy twist. Due to the game’s randomized elements, most of my visits to Losomn are spent either in a ramshackle parish defended by elvish peasants wielding flintlock rifles and pitchforks, or in a gaudy castle split between two realms and controlled by opposing monarchs.

Image: Gunfire Games/Gearbox Publishing via Polygon

It was in the first place that the asylum is located. I knew it would be an old-timey mental hospital from the man babbling nonsense outside the door. So, I braced myself for what could happen. Modern-day psychiatric care is far from perfect, with adequate treatment often relying on one’s ability to pay exorbitant amounts of money to insurance companies or private rehabs rather than depend on state assistance, but it’s almost heaven compared to mental institutions of the past.

As I entered the abandoned asylum, my senses were bombarded with the typical cliches. The halls were choked with barricaded furniture and wheelchairs. Inmates in straight jackets were huddled together in corners or under makeshift shelters. They self-soothed with manifestos and affirmations that they couldn’t understand. But when it inevitably caThe following are some of the ways to improve your own ability. time for combat, I wasn’t attacked by a mob of mentally ill escapees; rather, the nurses treated meThey hailed me as a “runaway” patient and tried to control me with insults, knives that were rusted.

Remnant 2,’s asylum — not to mention the game at large — never once forced me to kill characters struggling with illnesses. It’s not just that. Developers have made it virtually impossible. In Morrow Sanatorium every patient is treated at least in mechanical terms as a friendly NPC. When you aim your sights at them, your crosshairs will turn green instead of the usual red. Bullets that you fire will pass harmlessly through. There are other places. Remnant 2, lets you gun down wildlife for no reason; I wish I wasn’t so surprised to see a video game not relegate mentally ill characters to the same fate.

Image: Gunfire Games/Gearbox Publishing via Polygon

Losomn’s slums take obvious inspiration from the days when patients were locked away in disgusting conditions, abused by their ostensible caretakers, and forgotten by “polite” society, and so I fully expected my visit to the asylum to involve eliminating the patients housed within. It’s what many video games do, after all: turn sad, desperate people into grist for the power fantasy as if they were just another monster to be bloodily dispatched. Remnant 2, It is generally not a good experience, and I didn’t think it would be able to buck this trend.

After being diagnosed with OCD, one of the very first games that I played was Burial at Sea, the brand-new expansion at that time to BioShock infinite. I liked the main game, for all its regressive faults, and I was ready to numb my anxiety with a trip back to the series’ underwater roots. Burial at SeaThe emphasis was on stealth. This meant that you often sneaked up to the sick and deformed denizens in Rapture while they were ranting. At one of these occasions, I was shocked to see a flapper in a rabbit mask voicing the unhealthy and obsessive feelings that drove my real-life compulsive behavior. It was a strange feeling to want to beat her into a pulp. This person was going through the exact same thing as I was. She was not entitled to the same compassion, even if she did not possess the same murderous rage as all the basic enemies in video games.

Image: Gunfire Games/Gearbox Publishing via Polygon

I don’t remember how I resolved that situation, but since then, I’ve paid close attention to how other games handle mental illness. It’s not surprising that the answer to this question is usually Not very well. The majority of Diablo 4This game has been out for just over a year. You could say that cannibalism is not something anyone would do without some slack, but research shows those with mental disorders are often the ones who suffer violence, rather than being the perpetrators. With that in mind, why do video games always feel the need to use psychological issues as shorthand for “bloodthirsty monster”? Can’t said monsters just be monsters without the ill-advised connotations, or better yet, can’t depictions of mentally ill folks simply trying to live their lives be more widespread?

I don’t like to be this guy. I don’t share Twitter infographics on how to awkwardly remove words like “crazy” from your vocabulary, and I certainly don’t think developers harbor some deep-seated hatred for mentally ill characters that manifests in allowing players to slaughter them without mercy. My shock at the news was a result of my own ignorance. Remnant 2, doing the bare minimum to humanize its institutionalized NPCs — and believe me, its depiction is still far from perfect — indicates how much work needs to be done to destigmatize mental illness in video games. We’re all going through something. But more than that, even those of us whose struggles result in ugly thinking and behaviors (sorry Tumblr, it’s not all twee memes about innocuous intrusive thoughts) deserve an opportunity to see ourselves as more than just an unwashed horde of violent freaks, useful only for the experience and loot we drop.