Full transcript:

I know that my best run at Caves of Qud, and indeed any traditional roguelike, happened between the first and fifth of March in 2023. I know this because of the dates attached to the Steam achievements I earned during that run, which today read to me as an inventory of keepsakes found on the body of Kiyuwumar, the Star-Eyed Esper, when their body was recovered from the ruins of Bethesda Susa. Among them, the one that breaks my heart is an achievement earned for befriending the science-genius NPC known as Q-Girl. It depicts her in portrait—a sort of anthropomorphic bear with a punk hairstyle and goggles. My character died so suddenly that I know they weren’t found with Q-Girl’s photograph clutched to their breast. But I think it’s not impossible that, in the split-second of awareness that their end had come, her face was the last thing they thought of.

This heartbreak represents my high-water mark in the roguelike dungeon-crawler genre, and it is likely I’ll never surpass it. I couldn’t bear to even try Caves of Qud again for the rest of that year. When I timidly started to play around with the game again ahead of its long-awaited official one-point-oh release, it didn’t dispel the psychic hurt from my previous run, which I realize I now wear on my memory like a scar, no less real nor more ridiculous than the mark by my right thumb from where the family cat scratched me once in the 1990s. This game injured me. And I can’t recommend it highly enough.

This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck by Halstrick.

It was the legendary troll named Jotun, Who Parts Limbs, who killed my Caves of Qud character with a single axe-throw, mere moments after I first encountered him, and while I was just beginning to size up the situation. When it happened, I sat in silence for a long moment, my blood turning to ice. With nerveless fingers, I took one last screenshot, and I knew here I beheld the whole of my practical response. There would be no coming back from this error, no confessor I could call who could tell me how to undo my mistake through meditative toil, or through manipulating data files. For me, the game was over.

As designed! Caves of Qud—that’s spelled Q-U-D and it is pronounced like the cow’s chew-toy—is a traditional roguelike, one that hews close to the mechanics of the primordial computer game literally titled Rogue, a single-player, tactical turn-based dungeons-and-dragons simulator. Qud has several play modes, but the one it nudges you to think of as the true way to play—by making it the default choice on its New Game menu—is the so-called “Classic” mode, where character death is immediately permanent. This game isn’t the sort of roguelike that becomes iteratively easier as you replay it, allowing you to retain or upgrade certain aspects of your character between “runs”. Anything that you carry between Caves of Qud runs is encoded entirely in the experiences and memories of you, the player. The level-one scrub that you roll up at the start of your hundredth Qud run is no more intrinsically powerful than the one you meet the very first time you play.

I’ve been a fan of traditional roguelikes for a long time, starting with twentieth-century classics like Nethack and Angband, though I never made particularly deep progress at any. I’ve been aware of Caves of Qud for some years, but I finally got the nerve to try it after I saw that Steam had marked the game as fully compatible with Steam Deck. Which immediately enthralled me, because seeing that little green checkmark seemed a patent absurdity. Every trad-rogue that I’d ever enjoyed required so many keys in order to issue its umpty-hundred possible commands that it even resisted play on a laptop, which lacks the requisite number pad. But the Caves of Qud developers, beginning their work on the near side of the millenial divide, managed to actually make a dungeon crawler of the ancient mode completely playable with only a game controller. They created a clever scheme which arranges all the commands you need into chords involving the trigger and shoulder buttons. So, to move around, you tilt the left stick in one of eight directions, then squeeze the right trigger. This frees up the right stick for highlighting and learning more about other objects in the world, and the D-pad-plus-trigger for paging through the visual quick-access bar of unusual commands specific to your character’s skills, something informed by MMOs and other, much newer role-playing games.

In addition, Qud mixes in a lot more automation than the ancient games had. For example, the left shoulder button will automatically have your character try to move towards and attack the nearest enemy, regardless of direction, and pressing the Y button while holding the left trigger puts your character into an auto-explore mode that stops as soon as they see a threat.

This sounds like a lot. It is a lot! And yet, if you’re willing to give it enough attention to learn the ropes, it clicks. It’s a good game, developed with care and attention to player feedback over the course of many years. After a couple of sessions, it even starts to get comfortable, and you may begin to feel confident with it! You’ll probably start keying in commands rapidly, learning to read the screen, a sense of mastery starting to creep in.

And that, of course, is how you lose.

Well, I knew the risks, which is to say, no matter how high I flew, I knew the only way that this could possibly end.

When I had that amazing Qud run which ended so abruptly, I had been studying Stoicism for about one year. The philosophy was brought to my attention from a colleague at the very large technology company I worked for at the time. A chief hangup of the ancient Stoics was death, and specifically the purpose of living when death, the erasure of everything, was inevitable. And one way to square that terrible circle is this: Your life is a gift, and it is your duty to respect that gift by making of yourself the best you that you can, given the time and resources available. And because of these studies, I could not help but see that a traditional roguelike as a simulation of this, precisely.

Stoicism counsels its students to locate their own path to developing personal virtue, and to walk that path as far as they can. In a roguelike, the nearest you have to virtue is experience level, and hit points, and ability scores. So be it: it’s an abstraction, but an effective one. Just as in reality, you have essentially no control over the game-world external to your character, but you can do your best to extract experience points from it, and then you do have full control over spending those points to improve your character in some way. Also, you have from the outset an ideal that you can strive for—winning the game. But whether you get there or not—and very probably not—the game will end. It will probably end suddenly, and much sooner than you’d like it to.

So I wore this attitude as best I could, for that one week when I found myself possessing a Qud character that had somehow survived for more than ten hours of play and was well into the midgame, against all odds, gathering up power and potential. I began every session reminding myself that I was ready to die. I would post summaries of my achievements each day to Mastodon, and always conclude with a reiteration of how I already felt peace with the increasingly precious character’s inevitable loss.

So when it happened, I wasn’t sad, or mad. I was devastated, I felt real shock.

It was the furthest I’d ever gotten in a game genre I’ve been fascinated with since I was a kid, and even when you fully expect it all to get ripped away in an eyeblink, the sense of separation from this long focus of your time and attention is horribly painful. But I remember it. I remember it! Hundreds of thousands of in-game experience points might have spun away into the darkness with a single flash of the axe, but they all translated to one point of experience in my real life, earned by the challenge of how I choose to face this chilling breath of loss and mortality, delivered more profoundly and more directly than a video game had ever gifted to me before.

And it’s up to me how I spend that gift, on myself.

This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show, and find links to the things that I mentioned in this episode, at Venthuffer dot com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.

Full transcript:

Before I launched this audio zine, I wanted to prove to myself that I could keep up the regular production pace demanded by a periodical. And so I produced three episodes that tackled the topic essentially in medias res, launching right into discussions of highly specific ways that I find the Steam Deck interesting and personally relevant. I promised myself that if I could pull that off, then and only then would I allow myself the indulgence of a first-person-soaked introductory episode. And, I am afraid to say, we have now come to it.

This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick.

If you’ve followed my audio work prior to this, then you might be familiar with Jmac’s Arcade, a series of video-accompanied monologues that I recorded during the first years of the twenty-first century, looking back at the coin-operated video games that were central to my very young life decades prior. I had originally meant that to be a much longer series, but it felt complete after a half-dozen episodes, in part due to my own self-consciousness about mining my own childhood memories for stories. Beyond that being a finite resource, I also felt a hesitancy about dedicating so much attention to my personal past while a culture of independently produced video games was only just beginning to flourish all around me.

I didn’t realize that Venthuffer is the successor project to Jmac’s Arcade until I had recorded its first episodes, and recognized the voice that I heard. So here is the realization of my long-dormant desire to apply that voice to games and game technology of the present era. Credit also goes to other technology-adjacent monologue series that I’ve enjoyed in the years since, including the work of Jason Scott, Jay Springett, and—if you’ll pardon the hyperspecificity—the increasingly long and always interesting introductions to the Third Strongest Podcast by Ryan Veeder, Sarah Willson, and Zach.

But why the Steam Deck? Why plunge into a multi-part, soul-searching study that centers around this particular piece of heavy, noisy, honestly a bit janky consumer technology, one that isn’t even particularly new?

The single trigger for the idea that became Venthuffer was a Mastodon post by Liam Dawe, who runs the blog Gaming on Linux. He had analyzed the public sales data about the then-new video game Black Myth: Wukong. By triangulating it with changes to the top-sellers lists that Valve regularly publishes, Liam found evidence that ongoing sales of the Steam Deck console were, more than two years after its launch, very strong. And this made me happy! And I immediately questioned this feeling! It felt very much at odds with my sense of stoic self-definition, to find my own happiness bound to the sales figures of an expensive toy, with whom my own relationship was limited to being just another paying consumer.

But this again was a voice from my past that I recognized, and the voice was my own. Like a lot of gaming and technology enthusiasts, I burned with platform partisanship in my youth. As a child I pledged myself to the furtherance of Atari, and in my late teens and twenties would go to the mat for all things Apple, especially the Macintosh. I certainly still admire and use Apple technology, but it’s been a long time since I’ve identified with it, since I’d feel a rush of shared victory at hearing news of strong quarterly earnings. But here it was happening again, from a direction I did not at all expect, this homely little handheld computer, twice the weight of a Nintendo Switch and infinitely louder, with a roaring and infamously fragrant outflow vent.

And talking with friends some two weeks after this realization, the domain name for this audio zine struck me like a thunderbolt. And you know that’s all it took.

So Venthuffer exists as a personal exploration of what intrigues me about the Steam Deck, hoping that in my investigation I’ll uncover a small but glowing cloud of tangents worth writing out, and reciting aloud.

If I had to choose a single thread to pull, it would concern the unusually wide band of history that the Steam Deck straddles, both in terms of the games that it makes accessible, and in the legacy inherent in its surprisingly unhidden Linux-based operating system. In subtle ways, the Steam Deck acknowledges video games as an art form with a long, living history behind the ever-hyped leading edge that most game media focus all of their attention on. And, as my own past projects might suggest, that really speaks to me.

All that said, I do intend to proceed with caution. I’m not that young man with a Performa 6100 and a chip on his shoulder any more, and I have no desire to publicly defend any consumer technology, let alone venerate it. I look forward to examining the flaws of Steam Deck and, maybe, what these flaws have to tell us about the larger culture.

Steam Deck is not gonna be around forever, and I doubt it will be remembered as the most influential gaming console. Still… I think it might be the best one. And I wanna give that a closer look.

This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show, and find links to the things that I mentioned in this episode, at Venthuffer dot com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.

Full transcript:

The last time I ran a mod was to replace the sound effects in my Macintosh copy of Ultimate Doom with voice clips from Beavis and Butthead. You could also make the Doom guy wear sunglasses, both during gameplay and on the loading screen, which I always thought a mark of caring follow-through. But after that, I would think of modding my games no more, across many generations of consoles, until some friends wanted to show me a game they liked—and the only way they could do it was if we all broke its rules together.

This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick.

Lethal Company is the masterpiece of the young auteur known only as Zeekerss, who took several big swings at indie game publishing during his teenage years before landing a worldwide hit in 2023. Lethal Company is a wonderfully minimal four-player co-op that again rings the anticapitalism thematic bell for a simple and satirical game where you control anonymous and extremely fragile hazmat-suited flunkies hired by a cynical megacorporation to recover scrap metal from abandoned bases crawling with monsters and death-traps.

And it’s so fun to play with friends, and because this game exists solely in the tumultuous world of publicly developed Windows-only games, by the time I heard about Lethal Company, it had already grown a modding community around it. And I approached the game mod-first, because I was invited to play with a friend group that preferred to crowd six or more players into a session at a time, a rules-bend possible only if one installs a mod such as “More Company”, an add-on by someone with the joyfully echolaliac GitHub handle not not not swipe zee, which doubles the number of simultaneous players that Lethal Company normally allows.

More recently, I’ve been really into Deep Rock Galactic, a truly great work by the dozens of Danes at Ghost Ship Games. Well staffed and with the maturity of years behind it, Deep Rock has a modding control panel right in the game’s own user interface, making the acquisition and management of developer-approved third-party rules-tweaks relatively seamless. Lethal Company, made by a solitary, scrappy indie is not a game in the same league, and the modding experience reflects this. Now the game is a hit, and you can find a lot of very enthusiastic advice about how to get Lethal Company mods to work on Steam Deck, specifically. Even so it was the project of an afternoon, and did require the acquisition of some additional kit. Friends: this is the game that drove me to buy my first bluetooth mouse, and I bought it for my Steam Deck. I regret nothing.

So, yes, this did mean dropping into Desktop Mode, where you voluntarily unclip the Steam Deck’s cheerfully chunky game-selection interface to fall into the cold and austere plains of an Arch Linux desktop, your footsteps clacking and echoing down corridors studded with dimly-glowing terminal windows, whose limitless possibility is outstripped only by their obscurity. Happily, my professional background allows me to feel perfectly at home in environments like this, and so I was able to download and install the app called r2modman, and use it in turn to download and install the More Company mod. I wound up with a long list of Linux command-line flags that I needed to enter into a certain text field back in Steam Deck’s gaming mode.

Now, Gaming Mode is meant to emulate a traditional game console, and so its text-entry capabilities are… present, but not its forte. Maybe there is a way to copy text from the Desktop and paste it into Gaming mode. You know, now that I write this I am thinking of clever things I could have done involving private web servers I run, but I didn’t do any of that then. Instead, I typed out the whole string into the MacBook I had open with the mod-installation instructions, and then after flipping the Deck back into Gaming Mode I typed it all in a second time.

There is a slogan of the indieweb movement: Manual till it hurts. Friends, I had a game-date at 5 PM sharp, and I did not overengineer this solution.

This exercise bubbled up memories from even further back in the past than messing around with Doom dot-WAD files in the 90s. It reminded me of nothing so much as carefully typing in long, long source-code listings from the back of various early computing magazines, lured—very much then as now—by the promise of a cool game bursting to life on my screen at the end. Back then, though, the code was not just long but utterly inscrutable; my eight year old self had no idea what each line of BASIC meant, or what what purpose I transcribed line after line of purely numerical data blocks. Here, at least I had an inkling about the meaning behind the gobbledeygook. I might not know what “BepInEx dot preloader dot dll” is, exactly, but I know the general shape and pattern of command-line flags and file paths when I see them.

The advice from the internet was slightly out of date, it turns out, and I had to bring my own field-modifications to that serpentine text-string, swapping in references to file paths that I saw r2modman install. And, listener, I still got it. It worked on the first try, and I made that pre-dinner gaming date with an overlarge friend group.

I have never been especially attracted to PC gaming because I don’t usually enjoy this kind of meta-gaming, fussing over settings and bits and pieces, just to make a game work. But it’s so nice to have a system that, when I do want to spice up a game’s ruleset with something off-menu, it trusts me enough to let me get my hands a little dirty.

This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show at Venthuffer.com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.

Full transcript:

I found Skeleton Rebellion through a bot on Mastodon called Steam Trailers in Six Seconds. The bot performs exactly as promised, posting silent, automatically edited, six-second highlight reels from games’ promotional trailer videos, shortly after they’re published on Steam.

The bot’s creator, Ichiro Lambe, ported it from the former Twitter at the end of 2023, almost exactly one year after I first purchased my Steam Deck. I quickly saw it not just as a great channel for discovering interesting new work, but specifically a spotlight on how the Steam Deck itself provided me an access-pass to magnificently bizarre worlds otherwise invisible.

This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick.

After following Steam Trailers in Six Seconds for a while, you might start to become aware of a certain self-similarity among all the trailers for most new games. This came as no surprise to me, as one who has always had Sturgeon’s Law close at hand: “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” The majority of the bot’s posts almost seem like clips from the same two games: either the prematurely released work of a precocious student, or a competently photogenic game about guys running around doing ordinary video-game stuff. Little pixel-folks bouncing around platforms collecting gems, a paranoid first-person view of a flashlight bobbing down a dark corridor, sharpshooters jogging around a gloomy battlefield. It all looks extremely familiar. Titles and blurbs and the occasional review score burst in and fly about, energetically listing game features as if you don’t already have a dozen or more entries in your Steam library with precisely the same qualities.

But all this is necessary, it turns out. All this gruel, all this chopped-up trailer mash of undifferentiated game-stuff, serves as the bed of bland grain on which the most extraordinary colors and flavors might be set. One that writhed and glittered for me within the first few days that I followed Steam Trailers in Six Seconds was Skeleton Rebellion by Joe Renwick.

This game is a very short JRPG that chooses anticapitalism off the menu of de rigueur indie-game themes, and implements it through a story of undead minions who are sick and tired of necromancers ordering them around under lousy conditions and worse pay. A typical trailer would probably tell you exactly this, in so many words, over some gameplay footage. Skeleton Rebellion’s trailer does not do this. Instead, it opens with a wonderfully bespoke fifteen-second-long animation where a wizard mumbles his claymation lips and wiggles his greenscreen-composited fingers, causing a stop-motion pile of bones to spontaneously form into the game’s protagonist. After the wizard points expectantly to a pile of trash, the skeleton slaps him upside the head, and only then to we segue into the montage of gameplay clips. But none of these have explanatory titles. And yet, all of them show, clearly, that this is a gonzo single-developer Final Fantasy clone fueled entirely by the same sort of joyfully kitchen-table animation that the opening cartoon showcased.

The trailer combines taste and restraint with the wisdom to waste no time before establishing the game’s tone using that brilliant animation, laying down context and mood before getting to the unavoidable business of showing gameplay examples. It’s perfect, and remains perfect when ground down to six seconds.

According to its store page on Steam, Skeleton Rebellion runs on Windows only. I don’t expect that to ever change; this is the default state for strange little indie games created with a shoestring budget. But, thanks to the emulation layer that powers it, the Steam Deck runs the game superbly. I began playing Skeleton Rebellion while reclining on my couch within minutes of seeing it blip by on Ichiro’s Mastodon bot. And as someone with no interest in building or maintaining a gaming PC, this is simply not an experience I’ve ever quite had before, this freedom to see a beautifully bizarre little Windows game for sale, and having it run in my hands moments later.

I’m happy to say I’ve applied this freedom time and again since then, buying or at least wishlisting obscurities that sparkle and glint from the vast and otherwise grey terrain that is the Windows gaming world. Another game I found through the six-second bot at around the same time is Sunflower Pie, a short visual novel by ThePenSword. Not a genre I normally go out of my way for, but again, the game’s trailer looked so arrestingly strange and stylish against the majority of the bot’s content that I couldn’t resist exploring it further.

So, while the Steam Deck can act as a hand-held pass to a whole and ever-growing world of strange and unique work, it leaves to you the challenge of finding the good parts. Eventually I did start to discover that tools for this purpose exist outside of what Valve itself provides, rewarding patience and curiosity with the joy of completely unexpected discovery.

This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show at Venthuffer.com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.

Full transcript:

In the text file known as Merlin’s Wisdom Project, we find the following: If you have cool stickers, use them. Put them on things. Be carelessly joyful about using your stickers. If you die with a collection of dozens of cool stickers that you never used, you did it wrong.

This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick.

The Steam Deck offers an admittedly limited canvas for decorating with stickers. On mine, there are three, which I have affixed in a left-to-right pattern at the rate of about one per year.

First is the logo of the podcast The Short Game, in the shape of a stylized game controller. It fits smartly above the air intake grille on the left side of the console’s back. The back, I should say, is the only surface of the Deck I’ve considered decorating in this way, as it offers the most contiguous real estate. The sweet fumes ground out from the vents on the top edge of the console, for which is this show is named, could not exist in their fullness with any tampering done to the intake grille, so I leave it wholly uncovered without complaint. Anyway, the podcast’s logo in this position looks a bit like a domino mask that transforms the grille into an accidental toothy rictus grinning out beneath it. I like that.

Moving to the right is a small sticker for Fogknife, my personal blog, on which we needn’t dwell on today, and is the least visually interesting of the set anyway. It’s just the letters of the blog’s title in a typeface whose name I no longer recall, tumbled into a pile and resting below the Valve logo that is carved into the center of the console’s back panel. I definitely feel a resistance to covering that logo, not dissimilar to the reluctance I still have against obscuring the Apple logo on my laptop lids, decades after the first time I slapped a sticker on a chunky white iBook. I don’t have the holy fear for the Valve logo’s untouchable sanctity that I once held for that bitten apple silhouette, it’s more that I’m cautious the doubtful adhesion implied by that unevenly raised surface.

Recently I visited the Pacific Northwest for the first time, and you know I fell it love with it, and I bought… so many stickers, from all of the cities and towns that we stopped at. But it’s a tall, black-on-white representation of a douglas fir, purchased from a Seattle coffee shop, that alone found its way behind my Steam Deck. It stretches from the bottom of the back panel to the top, filling out the whole right third.

For the sake of its majesty, I did allow this tree cover up one other piece of the Deck’s pre-existing decor, the blob of faint gray FCC statements and license numbers and QR codes and such found on the lower right of the back panel. Where the Valve logo seems to demand a modicum of respect, the square of gray ink has no such veneer of core identity. Rather, it commands all the authority of a legally required mattress tag. I did consider other ways to fit the tree onto the surface that would have dodged the question. Arguably, it might have looked better, from a raw page-layout perspective, to lay the tree horizontally along the top edge, above the Valve logo. But its representation of a living thing—a massive living thing, a reminder of the unique and wild-green nature that I got to experience first-hand—called for more respect than that. I pushed past the resistance put up by that smudge of legalese. I let the tree’s roots grasp and bury it, and I knew immediately that I had made the right choice.

I can’t see the tree when I’m playing games on the Deck, but I know it’s there. When I watch my spouse play—we share the Deck, you see—I do get a chance to admire the way I’ve arranged these three smartly monochromatic stickers, offset against the black plastic, and I do especially admire that Doug fir. It’s a strong image. When I hold the Deck in my own hands, I can feel the power of the Cascadian overgrowth entangling the pixels, pushing the images outward at me. The microscopic LEDs vibrate with resonance, remembering the earth from which they were drawn. And that feels so wild and blessed.

This has been: Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show at Venthuffer.com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.