Through Quietness: The Unexpected Depths of Dead Cells

Aggressive nostalgia

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Too few people have read the poet Norman MacCaig. I first ran into him on the shelves of the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, on a snow-clogged afternoon so cold and wet it felt like even the buildings were coming down with the flu. His poems are always compact (when an interviewer asked him how long it usually took him to write a poem, he famously replied “one cigarette”), but each contains a world in miniature. One of my favorites begins like this:

It comes through quietness, softly crumbling in
Till it becomes the quietness; and we know
The wind to be will reach us from Loch Roe.
From the receeding south it will begin
To stir, to whisper…

What’s “coming” in this poem ends up not exactly being the wind, but what MacCaig calls a “prophecy.” By this he means that sense of vivid, conscious experience that all lyric poets try, in their own ways, to distill. We’ve all had moments like those, usually outdoors, when the light is just so and the reality of being settles on us like a jacket or runs through us like whisky. We feel alive, a sense of the ongoing present, as if time were rolling against and past us like water. For MacCaig, that feeling “comes through quietness” because we have to be still in order to catch it: a stir, a whisper, a half-heard prophecy about what everything means.

If you were to make a short list of works of art that evoked this sort of feeling for you, video games probably wouldn’t figure very highly on it. And it’s certainly valid to think of paintings or novels as more likely to quiet the soul than first-person shooters. But there are exceptions, and Motion Twin’s 2017 roguelike Dead Cells could be one of them. A runaway success since it was first released on Xbox, Dead Cells has since made its way like a virus across almost every platform, and is even available now as part of a Netflix subscription. I’m not actually sure when I first heard about the game or started playing it; I only know that I have dabbled in it on and off for several years, never getting tired, never ceasing to be surprised by its aggressive nostalgia and bracing depths. It’s a true gem, a thinking man’s dalliance, a diamond in the pixilated rough.