Mathew Henderson's Roguelike

Reviewed by Julian Day

(House of Anansi Press, 2020)

Where is the place for myth in the modern world? What do we tell ourselves about those we love, and how do we manage belief in an age of luminous technology? In Roguelike (House of Anansi Press, 2020), Mathew Henderson’s second collection of poems, the world becomes a mutable, breathing organism, a place in which myth and storytelling collide against the real. In Henderson’s poems, the living and the dead share a mutual and often computational space: physics follow from imperfect programming rules, surroundings become sprites and polygons, and the textures covering everything are taut and always threatening to tear apart.

This is a collection immersed in video games, informed by online vernacular and the particulars of this technological age: Roguelike takes its title from roguelike games, a genre of computer games loosely based on Rogue, first released for Unix in 1980 and ported to early home computer systems in the years thereafter. In roguelike games, the player takes the role of a character forced to navigate a hostile world for some loosely-plotted purpose. Originally envisioned by its creators as a kind of single-player Dungeons & Dragons, Rogue places the computer in the role of dungeon master, materializing the player at the top of a deep and randomized dungeon, tasking them with retrieving the mythical Amulet of Yendor. In the player’s way stand fantastic creatures and nagging hunger, forcing the player to dive deeper, the ultimate outcome being the amulet, starvation, or death. And death, in roguelikes, is permanent: the player can save their game and come back to it later, but after death, the savefile is erased, and the player is forced to start a new character again.

While many roguelikes remain faithful to Rogue’s fantasy roots, a number of games in the last decade have branched out thematically, notably Cogmind (2015), in which you play a robot capable of building itself up in innovative ways through the use of scavenged parts, and Caves of Qud (2015), wherein you wander the strange and deadly wastes of a post-apocalyptic landscape. But in roguelikes, regardless of theme, the world becomes a kind of second, shadow character, both companion and competition, one in which the dead step out through walls, plants become sentient sources of information, and where there’s a chance you might choke to death on the food you find.

The games themselves, however, are not the direct subject of these poems, and form instead a lens through which Henderson explores themes of addiction, family, and loss. In “Vana’diel,” the speaker experiences temporary solace exerting control over a character in the online world of Final Fantasy XI, before a cocktail of Nyquil and caffeine causes flashbacks to dealing with a mother’s addiction to pills; in “The Konami Code,” a suicidal woman saved by the speaker’s father in the distant past returns through the speaker’s closet, dripping wet, to tap out the Konami code on his sternum, imparting the possibility of something better.
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Henderson has a talent for the strong image, a sharp setup. In “In Midgar,” the title recalling the “In paradisum” (into paradise) of the Western requiem mass, he uses a plotline from Final Fantasy VII as a device to mourn a lost love, what might have been done differently, and what might have been: how a simple happiness, an earthly paradise, might have been found in the moments before destruction and ruin. Instead of leaving the doomed city and pushing on to the point where Sephiroth finds Jenova and eventually kills the flower-girl Aeris, the speaker envisions getting a group of people together to beat up Sephiroth out behind the gym, “like guys / would have done back in the day,” golf clubbing his kneecaps, settling things down to a violent and socially acceptable equilibrium. He concludes:

… No elixir for it.
No old-clock secrets. You should never
have journeyed to the caves, never escaped
the city, but held the flower girl in sector
seven, hid your eyes, let Midgar burn.

In Henderson’s hands, the world is both glitchy and infallibly real. In “A Magic,” Henderson invokes a many-headed spell, one to “make the liver work like / it’s Adderalled for the very first time,” to “forget how small you are”; “a magic for undoing. / A glyph to stop the carousel and one to spin forever.” “I want to fall through the world,” he writes in Liminal, with “the flat cardboard of our bones visible,” but in Diablo II, we see the speaker’s mother, driving through rural Saskatchewan, “waiting for the pixels to part, the sky / to spill,” the speaker realizing that, “you can fuck or drive, / punch and win forever. You still won’t find a glitch.”

Throughout the work, games provide a way to cope, a way to center shifting narratives of shelter and escape. In “After the Arctic, April, 1993,” the speaker plays Donkey Kong Country from the top bunk in their sisters’ bedroom, and their mother, recently returned from the Arctic, falls asleep willing the two girls to breathe together, to slowly meld into one, to become, as the speaker says, proof that, “there is only one child for each of us, / that an ocean poured into glasses remains a single thing.” As the mother wills this, the speaker becomes a foreign entity, a distant land, no longer her child, the game’s vivid backgrounds and looping, echoing music providing the smallest shelter as the mother, her mind on the tundra, prepares to leave again.

But as well as being an escape, Roguelike’s games and their ecosystems also anchor understanding of particular moments in time. In “Frog’s Theme,” the speaker leaves Chrono Trigger on in the background while their mother deep cleans to Annie Lennox, the two musics mingling and merging, so that whenever the speaker hears Lennox again, they recall Glenn, Frog’s true form, and the mother appears, the speaker wondering how, “even at nine, I failed to see your grace, to study you.” And in “Ghost Car,” the speaker’s father and mother walk about the house like the ghostly pace cars from previous races in Super Mario Kart, letting him know where they’ve been, what they’ve done, what’s expected, what could be.

But although the speaker’s father, sisters, and others feature throughout the collection, it is the mother, a dark and shadowy figure, who has the most prominence of all: grappling with addiction, object of grief and loss, she lurks in the background, quiet and unspeaking; her actions force the speaker to examine their own dependence, to struggle toward a coherent and rational explanation for her absence. In “Leaving Woolfe’s Corner,” the speaker sees her protecting the children by leaving downriver, “dragging her scent / and broken wing” like a killdeer; or, in “When They Would Hunt,” as an unseen presence that, “stalks my early years, hunts my life,” her spirit erupting as a hawk from her dashed skull.
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This is a collection about loss and mourning, storytelling and mythmaking; about how we cope, and how the externalities we use to do so bleed together to form accepted but ultimately shaky notions of the truth. The hope that a magic controller sequence, repeated endlessly, might let us “wake to find a life unlocked” (“The Konami Code”); that we can follow the departed’s lore and markers through the wastes of Qud, down to the Eater’s Glade (“Roguelike”); that someone we love can “R.I.P. all this shit. RIP the drugs, / RIP the kids,” and we can ourselves, “Rip this run. Reset” (“RIP”). But ultimately, in life as in roguelikes, there are no repeatable runs. Death is permanent; we get just one chance and exist at the head of an unalterable chain of events. “I wish I’d known that protecting is not the same as making / safe” (“Knowing”), Henderson writes, “that hating yourself is not the same as changing.” We can make our own myths, tell ourselves it happened a certain way, maybe project it onto the world. But after the poison kicks in, after the dungeon collapses inward, we lose what’s gone forever. And despite our efforts, we can never hold it again.

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Julian Day is a software developer and poet. He is the author of Shadow of the Wyrm, a traditional roguelike game.