While I’m trapped indoors by one of the UK’s worst storms, I’m enjoying one of my favourite pastimes: trudging through gnarly weather in videogames
Yesterday afternoon, my local medical centre sent me a text warning me that going outside the next day might prove to be fatal. A couple of hours later, my phone started going nuts, scaring the heck out of my dog and, frankly, me, as an alert prepared the country for Storm Eowyn. This morning, as my lights flickered, some debris slammed into the wall right next to my window. And then I got a phone call from my mum telling me her car had been murdered by a tree.
This is not normal for Scotland. Foul weather is very much par for the course—grey skies and perpetual rain, most of the year round—but potentially fatal winds? Not so much. So this has all been pretty unpleasant. I made the mistake of helping people chase bins earlier, to stop them smashing into cars, but that proved to be a terrible idea. I have since remained inside, much to the dismay of my dog, who’d very much like to go for a run.
Videogame storms, though, I am absolutely into. Indeed, pushing through a lethal storm, risking life and limb for a few metres of progress, is one of my favourite digital experiences. The Sisyphean fight against nature, a frail human body striving to survive against a biblical onslaught, is just supremely satisfying. Weather is the ultimate foe. It cannot be defeated or reasoned with. The best you can hope for is maybe not dying.
Dust up
I’ve been replaying Mad Max on my Steam Deck and it features some all-time great storms—though these are not of the soggy variety like the one that I am currently cowering from. No, these bad boys are sandstorms. I do have some real-life experience here, though, from living in the Middle East as a teen, and they absolutely suck. Horrible, suffocating and downright terrifying. But contained within my little handheld PC, they are just extremely cool.
They arrive as a great beige wall, slowly consuming the flawless blue sky of sun-baked, post-apocalyptic Australia. Then, like a furious tsunami, they engulf you, turning the desert into a dark red and orange Martian-like realm. It’s only possible to see your immediate surroundings, and even then only through the sandy gloom, which can make it tricky to avoid the often-large pieces of metal and debris that will inevitably collide with your car, or just you. Sometimes you’ll encounter more human threats within the storms, too, with the desert’s daredevil inhabitants becoming similarly trapped in the tumult. Will they just leave you alone? Like hell they will: you might have some gasoline. Thus, some of my most desperate fights have taken place inside these dusty Thunderdomes.
Storms at sea are even more spectacularly terrifying, especially since you’re even more vulnerable. On dry land you can maybe seek shelter. Out in the water, you’ve just gotta ride through it. That’s when Assassin’s Creed Black Flag is at its most thrilling. My favourite Assassin’s Creed made great use out of its ocean setting, but it peaked with its stormy ship battles. Ship-shattering waves, deadly waterspouts, lightning cracking the sky, and here you are, trying to avoid being turned into splinters by cannons and bracing for broadside attacks.
Nobody could accuse Black Flag of being a challenging game—it’s too much of a crowd-pleaser—but bloody hell did it feel dangerous in those moments. Like you were going toe-to-toe with grumpy Poseidon himself.
The reality isn’t quite a barrel of laughs. I was sailing around the Cyclades years ago when our trip was thwarted by hurricane-force winds, and I mostly just felt sick, especially when our yacht was cutting through the water and ended up on its side—I was sure we were about to capsize. Somehow we managed to get through it all with only a tiny bit of damage (and that only happened due to an unrelated collision) and a minor head wound for myself (also unrelated, mostly due to booze). Not recommended.
Danger zone
It’s Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, though, where it feels like the storms are really out for blood. The radioactive clouds transform the Zone into Hell itself. On my first day, I was looting a large facility when I got chased by some bandits. I was low on ammo and bandages, so I bravely hid in a small nook as they searched for me. Luckily for me, a storm was also kicking off. Outside, the world was transformed by the ominous green light of the unnatural weather, while forks of lightning desperately sought out new victims. My attackers were among them. When I finally felt courageous enough to leave the facility, there were corpses everywhere, leaving a bounty of loot for yours truly. Sometimes, I guess, storms can be your friend.
Sometimes, I guess, storms can be your friend
The red emission storms are even more murderous, killing anything that isn’t a mutant, giving you only a short time to reach appropriate shelter—four walls and a roof won’t always cut it. They are potentially game-ending events that serve as potent reminders that, for all the dangers prowling the Zone, it is the Zone itself—its unholy storms and reality-defying anomalies—that’s the real threat.
The real Chronobyl Exclusion Zone is neither battered by killer storms or full of prowling mutants, but in exploring the world through games like Stalker, I find myself almost getting why people visit such dangerous and deeply tragic places. Chornobyl has become a tourist destination—at least before the Russian invasion—with companies guiding visitors through the derelict towns and villages, complete with mandatory radiation and security checks. But its proximity can make it seem a bit unsavoury—the nuclear disaster was less than 40 years ago. It claimed more than 30 lives directly, and caused thousands of cases of thyroid cancer. Then there’s the huge environmental toll, which continues to be studied today.
Despite this, our fascination with this preventable, man-made disaster continues unabated. When it comes down to the reasons why it attracts people, though, it’s not a million miles away from the allure of things like storm chasing. There is undeniably something compelling about being confronted by our mortality, whether it’s witnessing a tornado cutting a detritus-strewn swathe through the landscape, or exploring ghost towns and traipsing through places once mundane, now haunted and dangerous. I guess it’s at least more interesting than another beach holiday, and while I have a compulsion to rant about how, through dark tourism, capitalism repackages and sells tragedy and danger, I don’t want to lose the thread completely. Not when I’ve just managed to tie this tangent back into the topic of weather.
Anyway! It’s probably a lot safer to just brave some storms in a videogame. To run through timefalls, trying to preserve your cargo and make back it to safety in Death Stranding; to frantically rush towards your ship as an alien paradise turns into a scolding nightmare, boiling rain splashing you with murderous intent in No Man’s Sky; to arrogantly build a new civilization in the face of an unrelenting global ice age, and navigate a frosty political situation while you’re at it in Frostpunk. Games so often teach us how to overcome threats and obstacles by shooting or puzzling our way out of danger, but when faced with a hostile environment most solutions are fleeting. You just have to hunker down, run away, or grit your teeth and get through it—accepting your impotence in the face of the unassailable power of, well, nature.
Judging by the fact that my window has stopped shaking (for the most part), I think my pal Eowyn has stopped trying to demolish my building, so I might just venture outside again. If I’m never heard from again, know that I died bravely, sacrificing myself so that my dog would not drop a giant deuce in my flat.
