For the past six months, Phoebe Bridgers’ music has been an indispensable balm to me in weathering the emotional toll of this cruel and exhaustingly prolonged year. And to think, I might have gone without that small yet essential comfort had it not been for a videogame.
I want to say it was early May or thereabouts. I was scrolling, or maybe doomscrolling, through my twitter feed from the comfort of my couch, lying on my back like a turtle, searching for something to momentarily distract myself from the bitter reality of living through a pandemic exacerbated by the antics of a racist steak salesman, when I came across a Warp Door tweet promoting a “skeletal walking sim” made for a video contest called Garden Song.
It was the screenshot that sold me: a skeleton avatar standing in the middle of what looked like a turquoise and fuchsia-colored desert rendered by an Atari 2600, in front of a Giant Zardoz-esque head of a young woman and a dilapidated shack on fire in the distance. “Say no more,” I probably thought at the time. The world’s on fire—or at least, that’s what it felt like—and this was the kind of thing I needed to soothe myself and distract from that fact. I certainly couldn’t have predicted that the game would end up living in my head rent-free for all these months after I first played, nor could I have imagined it would introduce me to one of my now-favorite musicians. David Su’s game and Phoebe Bridgers’ music are forever bound in my mind.
Garden Song runs for three and a half minutes, spanning the length of the song itself and promptly kicking the player back to their desktop the moment it concludes. Su’s tweet announcing the game, which was originally conceived as an interactive entry in a video contest created to promote Bridgers’ then-forthcoming album Punisher, was retweeted less than ten times before it was picked up by Warp Door. It was released on April 26th, just six days following the announcement of the contest via Twitter. There are only four comments on the game’s itch.io page, each emphatic in their appreciation of it. “Incredible… just the right size for the track with some really moving imagery through the aesthetics and framing,” one says, while another compares the flaming shack to the burning cabin in David Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway.
The world of Garden Song is both small and vast, barren of action but visually rich. The space where your character manifests is bordered by a small mountain range with a single break in the middle. You can try to run out, chasing the horizon line to some unseen (and wholly non-existent) destination, but you’ll never make it. Where a big budget open-world game would point to a mountain and insist on the player climbing it, Garden Song by contrast is a game as ephemeral, finite, and melancholic as its namesake. As hard as you might try to test the game’s boundaries, such an effort can only be made in vain. You are but a guest in this world; not its master.
From darkness, I watched as the world around me unfolded from a pinprick of light into a widening halo of color and dimension. I pushed forward, wading through what felt like a waist-high sea of molasses as I ambled up the staircase connected to that burning house. I heard the voice of a woman singing:
Someday, I’m gonna live
In your house up on the hill
And when your skinhead neighbor goes missing
I’ll plant a garden in the yard, then
It was mesmerizing. If the opening notes of the song were like a synthesized maelstrom, drawing me under the raw weight and force of its emotional appeal, then Phoebe’s lyrics were like a cool breeze grazing my face the moment I came up to breathe. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to that song since; probably hundreds. Nor can I tell you how many times I’ve played Garden Song since my first playthrough; probably dozens. What I can tell you for certain is this: I know every word of that song by heart.
I don’t know how but I’m taller
It must be something in the water
Everything’s growing in our garden
You don’t have to know that it’s haunted
Behind the giant edifice of Phoebe’s face, looming over the desert expanse like some alien sentinel, there’s a garden—ingrown and unkempt. An oasis of calm and respite in a harsh and unfamiliar world. Sometimes, I’ll boot up the game just to meander inside that big ol’ skull, marvelling as the song draws me under its spell.
Playing Garden Song was like rediscovering a skeleton key that unlocked the knowledge of something that I once intimately understood and yet had forgotten in the rush and fear of those early days of the pandemic. There’s something wild, stubborn, and beautiful inside each and every one of us. Even during a pandemic. There is so much still to be thankful for in this world. There is so much left to be done. I’m still alive, and I’m going to make the most of where I am and what I can do in what amount of time I can only have faith I still have on this Earth.
I’m not where I thought I would be a year ago. Not even close. There’s a lot of hard work between here and where I want to be, and so much left to endure before anyone is in a place where we can feel safe. The song, and the game, end with a declaration: “No, I’m not afraid of hard work / I get everything I want / I have everything I wanted”. It’s a statement of intent, of working through the hard time with the faith that things will work out in the end. I can’t quite claim that same measure of certainty, and I certainly don’t have everything I’ve ever wanted at the moment. Not even close. But I’d rather persevere, attempt, and fail in the face of opposition than to have never tried at all. I either win or I learn, and I’ve never been afraid of hard work.
Toussaint Egan (twitter) is a culturally omnivorous writer whose work focuses on games, comics, animation, film, and more.