Post Script

Is it time to revisit Kratos at his worst?

For all the implications of the title, Ragnarök’s story puts the emphasis on rebuilding. As in Mass Effect, you’ll spend a lot of time in sidequests salvaging regions trashed by your Asgardian antagonists at the world-tree’s summit. In Svartalfheim, realm of the dwarves, you can take time out to shut down huge Aesir smelters at the behest of Mimir, Odin’s old fixer, nowadays reduced to a head bobbing around on your belt. In Alfheim, you’ll free huge jellyfish creatures trapped in dark elf nests, and probe the origins of the latter’s enmity with the light elves. In Vanaheim, you’ll help Freya dispel Odin’s curses and come to terms with her memories of their marriage, while cleansing toxic gardens and exorcising corrupted spirits.

This theme of gradual repair and reparation carries over to the main story, albeit with the usual caveats about self-aware action games that can’t quite forswear their violence. Antagonists are just as often befriended as felled, and the theme of parental responsibility towards the younger generation is ceaselessly drummed into your ears. “We must be better,” Kratos intones, again and again, even as the game settles into a familiar rhythm of killing and looting that extends past Ragnarök itself to a postgame defined by valkyrie hunts, rare crafting resources, and regional clear-out operations.

At their most compelling, this and the previous

God Of War do a fair job of advocating for change without pretending that there are any easy solutions to an intrinsically violent world. This is change earned not through clean, crushing victories but incremental negotiations that may still involve yesteryear’s destructive methods, but tempered by self-mastery and empathy even for your abusers.

All of which may sound perilously like a political manifesto. Ragnarök doesn’t push its topicality, but there are obvious parallels between, say, its portrayal of preapocalyptic fimbulwinter and the climate crisis (just as in the real world, it’s about intensifying climate extremes rather than simply warming or cooling). The enormous wall separating Asgard from mortal refugees speaks to Trump-era border politics, while the subjugation of the dwarves as Asgard’s manufacturing base points to the western outsourcing of manual labour to people in former colonies with fewer workplace rights. Ragnarök makes the case that such systemic abuses need to be carefully undone using any methods available, even as it struggles to square this takeaway with its own age-old imperial campaign formula of clearing regions of rewards and enemies.

It’s far from the only blockbuster taking such a stance. Attempts at transcending (while preserving) your capacity for bloodshed have become the top-drawer action game’s stock in trade. And given the escalation of the real-world problems these hyper-expensive productions often allude to, it’s beginning to ring rather hollow. There are times when Ragnarök’s ethos of difficult fresh starts and slow healing seems only to romanticise futility. One sidequest sees you freeing a vast sea creature from its chains, only to discover the beast has grown used to its captivity. Atreus takes consolation in the thought that it enjoys feeling the wind on its face. He knows it’s a platitude, but with the experience of COVID lockdowns in mind, it’s hard not to sneer.

You may find it more cathartic to play God Of War at its most nihilistic. There is no rebuilding, for example, in God Of War 3. It’s a work of pure loathing and devastation, in which a Kratos utterly consumed by vengeance launches an all-out assault on the irredeemable gods of Olympus. In the process, he also lays waste to the mortal realm beneath. Killing Poseidon – a performance of voyeuristic hatred towards the player, in which you see through the eyes of your victim – causes the seas to rise. Killing Hades breaks the cycle of life and death, filling the sinking Earth with screaming spectres.

Play the 2018 game and Ragnarök first, and God Of War 3 will probably seem like a vicious parody, twisting familiar scenes and mechanics into nightmares. The god’s head tied to your belt is no chatty ally but a grotesque auxiliary weapon, blinding foes with its agonised grimace. The QTEs that elegantly link Ragnarök’s setpiece fights have become exercises in mindless frenzy; there’s a PSN Trophy for punching Zeus so relentlessly that gore obscures the screen. The tasteful shows of affection you see in flashbacks to Kratos’s life with his partner Faye are replaced by clownish, offscreen sex scenes with suggestive button prompts. The only thing this God Of War shares with its successors is the conviction that gods are, to say the least, flawed and harmful people in sore need of correction.

It may be an unpleasant game, but it’s also one that is totally self-consistent, with no gulf between its story objectives and your methods as player, though it ends rather farcically with an appeal to hope. And its pursuit of utterly undiluted revenge on the powers that be may feel more relatable, right now, than any yarn about picking up the pieces. The pandemic era has shown the inadequacy of appeals for careful, negotiated change – the biggest exploiters and emitters continue to enrich themselves, governments around the world still put the wealthiest first, democratic institutions remain sclerotic and unserviceable. Unlike Ragnarök, God Of War 3 offers neither a leisurely post-game experience nor any transferable practical wisdom about real-world devastation and injustice. But it’s perhaps more honest, and timely, in its desire to tear everything down.

“We must be better,” Kratos intones, again and again, even as it settles into a familiar rhythm of killing and looting