Vermis

2 June 2024

vermis: about secondhand books and ludonarrative

vermis is an official game guide consisting of two lushly illustrated volumes. it details the environments, residents, and creatures of some New World born in the ruins of the Old World.

written and illustrated by plastiboo, published by hollow press, translated by E.R.

vermis was first brought to my attention by the last hour or so of supereyepatchwolf's video on fictional video games, buuut I've been a passing fan of plastiboo's illustration work for a couple years now.

ludonarrative (?) applied to books

I have very basic taste; it pleases me when the physical construction of a book echoes the structure of the story within. the most famous example of this is probably house of leaves by mark z. danielewski: the winding nested haunted house narrative reflected in the strange formatting, extensive footnotes, and lengthy appendices of the physical object. which... is a book I need to get back to, eventually.

but I think you can find this in comics often, too. joe sparrow's homunculus tells the story of an intelligent computer and its scientist creator, exploring themes of intense helplessness from the stationary viewpoint of the computer. similarly, in the oneshot goodbye eri, tatsuki fujimoto of chainsaw man fame told a story about an aspiring film maker and the shaping of narrative through the selective gaze of his camera. the very shape of the story and how we must read it says something about its themes.

interestingly, these two works have almost identical panel structures! in actuality, the narrative itself strongly influences how we understand these panel structures; there is a mutual relationship between narrative and physical structure, with each informing the other.

really, this simple taste of mine extends to any medium though. video games are the place to consider the question of ludonarrative: the interaction between a piece's gameplay and its narrative.

is there an established term that means the opposite of ludonarrative dissonance by the way? anyways, many words have been spilled about whether certain games stick to their thematic guns in their controls. as each game is free to define its own rules of engagement, either in or out of line with its narratives, the cohesion between mechanics and narrative is an obvious slider that most games can dial up or down.

it's a lot more apparent that there even exists such a slider in video games than in other mediums, such as books or movies. perhaps its that the longer histories and established structures of those mediums result in more strict rules of engagement. so, maybe ludonarrative isn't the word I should be using.

that being said, I love when a book does play around with something similar to it.

secondhand books

vermis as a physical book has many signifiers of a secondhand book.

• a half-torn sticker on the front of the second volume, indicating that this guide does NOT include the game disc for vermis.
• stain texture along the edges of all the pages, as well as little marks in the pigment that indicate scratching, scuffing, etc... while the book itself is obviously new, these illustrated marks of wear are all over! it's lovely!!
• the use of screentone in all of its illustrations - other cute little touches like these printer palettes? that can be seen in certain full page splashes also stand out to me as indicators of older printing technology.

it's meant to be engaged with as a remnant of a piece of lost media - we cannot play vermis, but we can learn about it nonetheless.

vermis is unmoored in time. obviously, it was actually printed in 2024, but its visual style honestly harkens back to the posters of the 1990s? beginning of the era of home pc gaming maybe? a period of time where video game posters might not reflect the actual visual style of the game itself, where games would be split across multiple CDs due to size limitations.

yet, the closest touchpoint I'd have for the story contained within vermis is dark souls, frankly. disclaimer, I can't delve too much further in this due to an utter lack of personal experience with dark souls, but the bleak world long past its days of glory depicted in vermis makes for an easy comparison. however... where does that leave vermis's publication date?!

this is the same temporal relationship I have with most actual books I take home from the secondhand bookstore. who owned them? when were they first published? bought? some of them are even fresh books, never owned, sold at full price. it's rarely immediately apparent until I dig in.

many of the gods of vermis are long-dead -- the only royalty to be seen is a shriveled corpse interred in a crumbling castle. it is a world already abandoned, and the main characters of each volume's somewhat stand-alone narrative are invariably lost - in dreams and illusion, either bereft of purpose or devoted to one cause to death. it feels appropriate that vermis as a game is lost as well, and that its official guide carries so many indicators of something abandoned.

a fictional game's guide

honestly, these kinds of unfiction appeal to me as somebody who grew up on the horror game let's play; even now, I still have only played maybe two or three horror games myself. the few times I've played horror games, my lack of skill with certain games has made the experience frustrating, rather than tense or scary - I'm paralyzed, but more because I'm still learning to walk, shoot, and not die than because I can't bring myself to look into the dark.

the removal of engaging with a video game through a secondary medium allows me to dial back into the horror, but it also filters my experience through something else. the largest thing that is lost is the controls of a game, how difficult things are, something of the intense concentration that playing certain games well requires; but I do often gain the screaming of silly internet men in return.

vermis offers a very particular kind of secondary filter by being framed as a game guide; it promises a comprehensive overview, all the secrets of the game flayed open. this makes it all the more frustrating (positive! I swear!) when I find that the contents of one chest remain unknown after the player is sent down a pit, when the significance of certain cryptic encounters in the fog go unexplained.

compared to the consonance between vermis's secondhand nature and its themes of loss and abandonment, this is actually a point of intense dissonance. vermis is an official guide that leaves one questioning, as though the act of fully explaining its source material (conveniently missing) should be treated as an impossible one. to me, that makes a compelling case for the ways that dissonance between narrative and physical structure be leveraged to reveal interesting complications in any given work.

reviewer's note :3

wow! a post! we love to see it. I've actually been wanting to do this for about a year now... so it's exciting to get something down.

I actually struggled quite a bit with discussing the contents of vermis, which are sometimes quite clear despite the points of mystery I mentioned above. I'm actually not sure why!

I actually don't really give a shit about spoilers, so I'd be open to writing more directly about story narrative at some point... but not if I don't feel satisfied with how I'm writing about it. I'll see how this goes with future posts.

I considered using a rating scale in the way that I've been rating books in my personal reading log, but I think that spoils some of the fun of just writing about whatever is interesting to me about a book. please know that I have a mental 5 star rating scale that means absolutely nothing <3