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Off-Peak City feels so big because it’s built from tiny places and unknown spaceA fragmentary world more alive than any Bethesda RPG
A fragmentary world more alive than any Bethesda RPG
Most video games are too big. Their lands are too expansive, their histories over-explained, their playtimes too long. Most of everything is too long (songs, books, movies, everything) but it’s especially felt in games, where the magical “What’s next?” feeling of discovering a world often fades to leave the “What task must I complete now?” drudgery of playing a video game. So I hugely admire Cosmo D’s Off-Peak series, which has built the feeling of a huge and fascinating city through only four tiny locations visited across four games with a combined playtime of under eight hours.
Betrayal At Club Low - Official TrailerWatch on YouTube
Betrayal At Club Low - Official Trailer
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Cosmo D Studios
It’s a city which lives in the back of my head, alive and magnificent and vibrant and dreadful, even though I’ve only seen tiny corners of it. Across four games, we’ve stepped inside barely as many buildings as a mutant could count on their fingers. We’ve escaped a train station inOff-Peak, explored a hotel in what was once a legendary musician’s mansion withThe Norwood Suite, delivered pizza to residents on one intersection in a half-flooded neighbourhood forTales From Off-Peak City Vol. 1, and infiltrated a nightclub in a former coffin factory inBetrayal At Club Low. If you joined these spaces together, you could walk across the series in five minutes. But a large part of why Off-Peak City feels so vast and vibrant and unknowable is because we only see these tiny, unconnected pieces.
Each game fills out only one tiny dot of land in this vast unknown city, and each of these tiny dots is delightful. The surreal style already encourages you to experience Off-Peak City with your imagination as much as your eyes and ears, and the vast gaps in its landscape give your brain room to dream. Even if you never see any more, you can feel it out there just one block over because the series has built a strong identity right from the start. You know you would find: a bold and maximalist aesthetic big on digital bricolage; weird and dangerous conspiracy; little human stories; and banging beats from Cosmo D himself. And pizza.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Cosmo D Studios
I adore that the lurid décor, talking buildings, giant sculptures, oversized heads, exaggerated emotive animations, hidden dioramas, massive roulette wheels in city streets, skulls, musical voices, giant turtles, technorganic devices, eccentric collections, esoteric books, secret passages, tiny alive cows sat on a miniature mountain on a pizza parlour wall, energy drinks brewed with actual moose skulls, and all other surreal elements never feel weird. These games are neither wacky nor zany. They are so wholly themselves that they drag you in and don’t offer any opportunity for doubt.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Cosmo D Studios
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Cosmo D Studios
This woman and her dad have come to this wild hotel in his dying days because this was once where he made music. These employees are sick of a crappy manager exploiting them. This crappy manager wants you to dob in dissenting employees. This woman in a nightclub is wearing an intimidating skull mask (which you can get for powerful stat bonuses) but it’s only so the DJ, her son, doesn’t spot her and bottle it. This teenager is desperate to get a job or join a band or anything to escape her dad’s plans for her life. And sure, this woman will turn into a wargame miniature after eating the mozzarella & synthetic brain tissue pizza I’ve baked, but right now she’s concerned with her pals judging her for pawning her trombone and getting a steady corporate job while they kept on playing—though one has to live in a van, and the other relies on money his parents made through dangerously (murderously?) unethical jobs. One common concern is music, and the personal and financial difficulties of its creation, its role in society, and its exploitation and perversion, which isn’t much surprise considering Cosmo D is both a game developer and a musician.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Cosmo D Studios
Music is more than a subject of interest, it’s a huge part of Off-Peak City’s identity. Cosmo D provides the tunes himself, everything from pulsating club music to moody noir piano, with a lovely bit of cello as the backbone. It’s quite good, quite striking, and very ununusual for adventure games and RPGs. It demands attention, refusing to fade into the background like oh so many orchestral scores. Hell, the music is even visible, playing from boomboxes and speakers whose cones pump and throb exaggeratedly along with songs. Like mozzarella on a pizza, Cosmo D’s music is both delicious topping and vital binding agent, offering joy in each bite while making the pizza more than a hot open-face sandwich.
All these aspects come together to build a world which feels so large and alive even though most of the city is a mystery and its residents stand rooted to the ground as they dramatically emote. It draws me in more than any game which encourages you to trudge across every simulated inch of a vast virtualand filled primarily with boring people, boring sights, and boring quests. These Bethesda and Ubisoft games have an initial sense of exploration, discovery, and wonder which quickly fades when it becomes clear that the answer to “What’s over the next hill?” is “Busywork.” I cannot see those worlds as living spaces because they’re so insistent that I treat it as a collage of video game systems to engage with, a landscape formed of side-quests to tick off, bases to loot, and crafting resources to collect.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Off-Peak City couldn’t work the same if were one giant intricate city arriving as a single seamless lump, like Los Santos inGrand Theft Auto V. Its surrealness could too easily become wackiness or, worse, unremarkable. A visit to Off-Peak City needs to feel fleeting, magical, a treat that ends before either you settle down or someone vanishes you.
It also helps that for me, at least, my visits have been spread across four games and eight years. It’s had time for me to start missing it, to exist in a world where people don’t chug energy drinks filtered through moose skulls, and to start really craving a weird slice of pizza.
Wherever Cosmo D chooses to continue the conspiracy of Off-Peak City, I want to see it. Imagine how exciting a bodega must be in Off-Peak City! A park! A bus station! A bus! An office! The DMV! A greengrocer! I note with great interest that Cosmo D has started posting screenshotsofasubwaystationon his blog. But I don’t even need to see these places to know they’re out there, somewhere, lurid and lively and thrilling and menacing. Next time you hold a hot slice of pizza, close your eyes and listen for distant cello. It’s calling to you.
