Breaking the Surface: Learning to Live with Death and Depression in Iris and the Giant

Breaking the Surface: Learning to Live with Death and Depression in Iris and the Giant

Tof Eklund, Contributing Editor

I was five years old when I drowned in a neighbor's pool. One of my clearest memories is of reaching for the surface, thinking I must be about to reach it, that if I could stretch a little more, my fingers would break the surface. I was wrong. Iris and the Giant (Goblinz Studio, 2020) opens with Iris, eyes flooded with tears, diving into the deep end of her school's pool. She doesn't come back up.

 
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New "runs" in deckbuilding roguelike Iris and the Giant start with her stepping off Charon's ferry, into a world borne of her imagination and pitted with painful memories. I lack that transition: I have no recollection of being saved, resuscitated, or any "first" memory after drowning. Life restarted, but I couldn't say when or how. For the rest of my childhood, I was haunted by intense deja-vu, a visceral conviction that my life was like a cassette tape: nearing the end of the "B" side and about to start over again. Like Iris, my new world was over-bright and paper-thin.

Iris and the Giant uses Slay the Spire-esque mechanics to explore a young girl's struggles with depression and bullying. The monsters she faces are drawn from and hand-drawn in the shape of her imagination. On the simplest metaphorical level, it looks like Iris is working through her depression, externalizing it so she can beat it, but that's wrong.

Iris isn't "beating" anything. When Iris pulls swords, axes, daggers, fire, lightning, and bombs from her bag and slices, skewers, burns, and blows up her simple, colorful monsters, she isn't overcoming depression, she's escaping from it. She fights and dies again and again, and that's how she gets by in the real world, where she can neither fight nor die.

 
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That sounds like fourth through sixth grade to me: that's around the age when my déjà vu was tempered by the fear that my life would go on, descending ever deeper into the hellmaze of puberty. I was desperate to not be me, to live any other life, die any other death. Fantasy novels, video games, D&D, Magic: The Gathering cards, poetry—anything to get me out of my own head.

Iris is reaching out, but not for help. Her classmates are cruel in that familiar way everyone expects but no-one should accept. Her parents are useless, frustrated by her silence and embarrassed by her nonconformity. And Iris is running out of spoons, or, rather, running out of axes and thunderbolts.

Nearly every deckbuilding game is about permanently acquiring cards, slowly building up a strategy. In Iris and the Giant, everything is ephemeral: every card she plays is gone for good (with exceptions). You have to pay as much attention to what's left in her bag as you do to how much health she has left, in the form of will points.

Other mechanics reinforce the danger of exhaustion: monsters can steal cards from Iris' bag, permanently reduce her willpower, paralyse her, seal her hard-won magical abilities, or even add useless sadness cards into her bag. 

 
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When I lose a game of Slay the Spire, it's usually because I didn't draw the cards I needed, or entered a fight when I didn't have enough health to see it through. When I die playing Iris and the Giant, however, it's often because my hand is full of sadness, or my bag of tricks is empty. Running out of options feels very different from running out of luck. It feels like sleeping all day, like being unable to focus, like conviction that you can't do the thing. It feels like depression.

One of the things that keeps me coming back to Iris's minimalist watercolor-and-papercraft world is her imaginary friends. You find them as you play, and can bring them with you in future runs once you complete their challenge. This adds to the puzzle-like feel of the game and gives one achievable near-term goals when reaching the titular giant of Iris' sadness is unachievable.

Most crucially, Iris' imaginary friends are cut of the same colored paper as her monsters and in variations of the same shapes: they are all her monsters. Just as Iris can't beat depression simply by fighting them, they aren't really her foes. Instead, in their flatness, unlike the expressive watercolors of the vignettes from her life, they are the surface she is trying to reach, the narrative she needs to bring into her waking life.

 
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Never is this more true than with the horrid lips that appear on higher levels: many of Iris' monsters are loosely inspired by Greek myth, but the lips are something else, so direct a metaphor for Iris' life as to be nearly a literal interpolation of it into her escapist fantasy. The lips say horrid things to Iris: things her classmates, teachers, parents say —some with "good" intentions — but  they cut deeper than the swords and arrows of common monsters.

Resilience is an overused word, but it is resilience that Iris is developing in her ever-ending battles. Iris' commentary on the lip monsters is "I have to get rid of those voices which keep me from living." The lip monsters belong to Iris. They present to her the voices she must overcome if she’s to not merely survive, shepherding her resources carefully from trial to trial, but to live.

Maybe Iris' voices will go away. Maybe her Giant will stop crying. Mine haven't, but I have learned to live and not merely to hide my desire to die. It's nice, wanting to go on. Sure, sometimes I'm sucked under and can't breathe, but I know how to break the surface tension between outside and in and come up for air. Sometimes I can do it on my own, sometimes with a little help from friends, real and imaginary alike.

For more in our “Shortest Day, Longest Night” series, read Blake Reno’s essay on time and friendship in Majora’s Mask and Nate Schmidt on loneliness and fatigue in Skyrim.

hunkering in the darkness with my cats

hunkering in the darkness with my cats

Majora’s Mask: A Not So “Terrible” Fate

Majora’s Mask: A Not So “Terrible” Fate