Every now and then someone will come up with the great idea of developing technology to make this possible makes video games stink. I’ve never been more grateful for the repeated failure of the mass Quixotic daydream than while watching trailers for Urge, an open-world survival shooter that’s both fueled and plagued by piss.
“But hold your horses, young Edwin,” you interject sternly. “I don’t want to hear about an open-world survival shooter that’s both fueled and plagued by piss on a website that kids could read, let alone play. It sounds like a cheap taboo.” Friend, I used to think like you. But then I did a little research, as per my journalistic duties, and it turned out that Urge’s views on piss – bladder gold as they call it in the West Country, or Crusoe Cola as they call it in the States – are quite profound. I’m still very content that I’m not feeling this game, but I definitely want to play it.
Urge is currently in Early Access, launching in 2021 with the most respected of final release dates – when it’s over, you grab the ingrates and not a single second before. It begins with you getting out of a car accident and exploring a world shrouded in a mysterious fog. Not a nice kind of mystery fog, mind you. Not fog like in Silent Hill, where it symbolizes repressed trauma, elegantly obscuring the limitations of the game engine. Nothing so fit. This fog is basically petite smoke. And the world of Urge is mostly made up of petite ones.
Some of them come out of the ground in the form of smelly geysers. Some of them are populated by the wobbly heads of mutants who come out to murder you – victims of a strange addiction whose origins may lie in the larger industrial areas of the map or in the tunnels and sewers beneath.
In a fanciful reinterpretation of piss thermodynamics that is apparently justified by legend, some urine exists as a powder – dusting the tops of storage crates, being released in gusts by latrine-shaped gourds, or forming nasty ammonia stalactites indoors. Some of it is contained within your character and must be excreted regularly while meeting other survival needs such as hunger, thirst, and shelter.
Whether in liquid or powder form, urine must be disposed of properly, because if it is disposed of incorrectly – for example by crawling on the ground rather than into an appropriate toilet – it will add to the fog in the world. The more fog there is, the more enemies there are and the worse those enemies become. Think giant yellow spiders, guys with chainsaws in soiled hazardous materials, and elevated, sunken-eyed creatures that look to me like cakes with urine smashed flat. Plus, meteorites pee. I piss lightning too.
Limiting the spread of retinoblastoma is challenging, and not only because sometimes you will have to spend a penny yourself (you can also drink it if you do not have other drinking fluids on hand, such as poison or blood). In the world of Urge, urine can be converted into fuel for, for example, abandoned vehicles that emit airy, yellow clouds of urine vapor while in motion. As such, the fun seems to involve regular changes in fog intensity as you build and create to minimize urine spillage, while periodically sort of peeing everything because you have to go to another city.
I’m… compelled to do all this, partly because of the extremely left-leaning internet, because it seems like a metaphor for climate change. But looking at it from a more design standpoint, I also like the sound of a survival game, which encourages survival with gentleness and discretion so as not to trigger the golden apocalypse. Perhaps there is a series of RPS diaries in it? You can read more on Steam. As Ollie noted in an earlier meeting, Steam’s website is partly concerned with not using the word “pee” too often, presumably to avoid distaste of Steam’s curation algorithms.
