'Road to Ruin' Is a Gorgeous Cyberpunk Game About Forgotten Tech

Road to Ruin is a video game, but it doesn't feel like one. Created by video game designer Tom Cooper, the game explores the shapes and sounds of the retro technologies we take for granted in an experimental, impressionistic fashion.

Its unique concept and game play, with its mysterious drifting through surreal landscapes soundtracked by industrial tones, places Road to Ruin firmly within the ongoing gaming revolution which seeks to liberate the form from bombastic violence, elevating it instead to powerful and complex art.

"I was interested by the fact that we don't pay attention to the shapes and sounds of the older technologies we are exposed to, like power lines or electrical transformers or street lamps," Cooper said, noting that he wanted Road to Ruin to communicate the feeling that these technologies produce in him. "We live with them every day and we don't think of the effect they have on us. They kind of exist in our blind spot."

Cooper got his start in video games as a tester at the startup Silverback Games, publisher of hidden object and adventure titles, where he learned how to 3D model. But he credits the Halifax Game Collective, a Halifax, Canada-based group of game developers and enthusiasts, and its month-long video game jams with enhancing his abilities and confidence as a developer.

The game's modus operandi was conceived at one of the Halifax Game Collective's recent jams. These jams feature specific themes, which act as a type of creative limitation for the participants.Road to Ruin grew out of the "Elder Technology" jam, a theme that Cooper said was open to conceptual interpretation. (For those participants who do not want to debut games at the jams, they are welcome to create and present game art or ideas regarding game development.)

For Road to Ruin, Cooper settled on an interpretation that led to some very surreal visuals, where players drift psychogeographically through strange industrial landscapes. At times it resembles what the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson'sSnow Crash always looked like in my imagination: colorful, geometric shapes popping in and out of a void.

Players will also be struck by the absence of characters in the game. It's as if you the player are the last person on Earth, wandering around a desolate landscape with still functioning technology.

With influences ranging from sculpture and architecture to painting, Cooper sees himself as part of a movement away from the factory art of AAA games toward experiences more focused on emotion and sensations, which he feels can help change the way games are viewed by the public at large.

"Games have a bad reputation because people who play games are often seen as reclusive and escapist and games are seen as adding very little value to people's lives," he added. "I also think many of [the major studios] are morally bankrupt and manipulative as they are trying to steal money and time from people."

With Road to Ruin, Cooper aimed to make an impressionist game. Cooper also wanted to craft an experience inspired by the likes of Jonathan Blow (Braid) and Jenova Chen (Journey, Cloud, and Flower), two indie game developers Cooper cited as having explored the form as a true artistic medium.

These influences, along with the "Elder Technology" theme, gave Cooper the perfect context in which to explore his own artistic gaming vision. For him, the theme produced a "fuzzy felling or some vague images of industrial shapes and sounds."

Like the indie video game Error City Tourist, which I recently profiled, Cooper built Road to Ruin on Unity 3D, a cross-platform game creation system currently revolutionizing indie game development. Cooper considers Unity 3D a powerful tool that empowers designers to create dynamic game environments in a very short period of time. The platform allowed Cooper to pull off Road to Ruin's uniquely post-industrial atmosphere. Aiming for simplicity, Cooper only wrote a tiny amount of new code, while the other tools he used were freely available.

"I did this because I wanted to see how far I could push creating with the simple things," Cooper said. "I wanted to see how much emotion I could convey using just the basics. I find it interesting to get away from being a skilled technician and focus more on the final game and not how it was made."

Much of this philosophy has to do with the problems that Cooper sees in the game landscape.

"I think video games in general have a lot of problems to overcome," he said. "I see a lot of games as having a lack of emotional depth. Plus they are also really alienating to people who don't play them."

Cooper feels that developers have only just begin to tap into the true potential of video games.

"l think video games are still in a kind of Charlie Chaplin black and white movie stage where they used slapstick and violence because it is a simple way to elicit emotion," he said. "I think video games are the future of art because you could potentially have a game that contains every sculpture, every movie, and every painting within it."

"Games right now focus on largely one emotion—a sense of power or achievement that traditionally has served mostly young guys," he added. "They turn to games because they don't feel they have a lot of power in their lives and we have a strong need to feel powerful, but that is not all that games should be."

Cooper would instead like to see games harness that power to convey complicated ideas and emotions. Ideally, gaming would then become a space where everyone could find something meaningful across a vast multitude of titles.

While Road to Ruin was a small project for Cooper, the impact has been deeper than he anticipated. From what he has seen, gamers are really responding to it. Cooper finds it encouraging that people are trying to dig a bit deeper into their games, and in doing so, seek out other rich and fulfilling alternate experiences.

Download the game over at Tom Cooper's website.