Curios Vol.1

You inherited a dream. It came to you in parts—the Robbie Burns Day concerts, your small fingers tracing the notes and guiding the bow through old airs and reels, strathspeys and jigs, as the stink of town hall haggis fills your nose; the curse of finding the insectile buzz of a piper’s performance emotional, a Pavlovian response from weddings and funerals; the prejudices of medieval history played out in distant lands and the hangdog mope of past generations’ self-exile from a place your ancestors called home.

You know it’s a dream, but you sleepwalk into it just the same. The cloud of culture clings at the margins of your brain, complicated by distance and time for you and everyone else born and raised in a place separate from its origin. You can’t really own land, but land can own you, in its way. Geography and language pull at the edges of its grasp, though it holds on anyway. The irrationality of it is besides the point. How do you apply logic to a dream?

Judero is a game that feels borne from a sleeping mind. It’s named for its protagonist—a red-haired and mightily bearded action figure, elbow and knee joints visible as plastic nubs, thick black seams connecting torso to chest. Judero moves across a dream of bygone Scotland like a toy manoeuvred by invisible hands. Hold a button and he sprints across the landscape in a cartoonish stop-motion blur. Press another and he floats free from his body as a ghost until finding and inhabiting one of the many creatures tottering around in dark woods, grassy plains, or along stony mountain paths. He is the game’s focal point, but we know very little of him other than that he’s something solid to hold onto—a Virgil to guide our way through the disorienting collision of hazy Scottish folklore and sharply modern references, the sturdy clay models and painted props of Judero’s hand-crafted world.

There’s a childish effect to the game’s aesthetic. Some of this involves overly cute jokes: there are mosquito-like fire sprites that announce themselves by repeating the word “fire,” like insectile Beavises, and the shops where Judero buys new combat moves are lined with signs, one of which reads “Yum Yum Pig’s Bum.” The more important impression comes from the game world’s appearance: The rolling hills and pine forests look as if they’ve been painted quickly, propped up, like the clumps of nettles and thistles poking out from green fields, as cardboard props in a children’s school play. Maybe assembled as a staging ground for modelled miniature armies or landscapes for toy trains to travel through.

Past and present blend freely together. Border reivers are represented as belligerent hooligans, repeating the name of their home, Carlisle, as they swarm around their giant leader in his mountaintop keep. Nearby, a woman is interviewed in front of a video camera just beyond the doorway of a thatched house from another century, part of the population of a tiny seaside village from the pre-industrial past. Judero sits down to regain health and magic at marvellously preserved Pictish standing stones before getting up, a bare-chested mystic warrior, to walk into a house where a man in modern clothes waits to strike up a conversation. There’s folk music performed with guitar and naked voices, but also buzzing melodica melodies and heavier, chugging boss battle themes with modern distortion.

Judero presents culture as something disorienting, that happens on the fringes of symbols and archetypes. It can't be rendered properly, or fully enough, with a list of facts or the replication of existing images. Culture exists as the wispy accumulation of thoughts, sights, and sounds, forming in the ways shared icons and personal memories of the past stick to individual and group identities. Judero's action figure hero wanders from village to village, leaving the land of mortals behind as he takes to the wide open sea on a raft whose sail is emblazoned with the blue and white saltire—the St. Andrew’s Cross, a recognizable touchstone amidst the confusion. The shape of an epic begins to cohere about his travels as he ventures into islands filled with the dead, to a faerie realm, and toward the summit of a great glass mountain. There’s a plot in Judero, but it’s indistinct, delivered in snatches of dialogue from the strange population, human and otherwise, spread across its landscape. A hand-drawn creature that looks to have wandered loose from a Bosch canvas might speak of the friend it lost too quickly from cancer. A lump of clay shaped like an ape can recite a love poem. A sketched figure, their text box titling them “Person on their deathbed,” tells Judero that life “was a dream! A dream from a deep, beautiful abyss.” Stepping outside of their house, returning to the strange world beyond their door, underlines this truth.

When Judero reaches the end of his journey, he becomes a mountain. The disparate elements of the universal consciousness belonging to the world he encountered—a land of intermingled myth and reality, of past and present, within the Scottish Borders—finds harmony. The people of his land are able to allow their apparently contradictory meanings to cohere together with the illogical logic of surreal art, perhaps because Judero witnessed them all. The country and its people’s understanding of it make sense not in spite of but because of their diffusion.

Maybe it’s flattening the game, ignoring the density of its construction and the greater purpose of its narrative collage, to reduce it to a dream. But it feels that way—like something inherited from the past, something best understood through the stories of others, spoken by real tongues and throats, drafted by real hands and fingers, and imparted in a gauzier, vaguer shape. That feeling is what lingers after the game is done, hanging around the edges of your conscious thoughts as the day fills and the time passes: culture as a dream, revisited and replayed across time and space, inherited across landscapes and generations.

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Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and tweets @reidmccarter and on Bluesky.

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