Has there ever been a time that you’ve found yourself asking, “Why is this even here?”, while you were playing a video game? To clarify, I don’t mean to ask if you were frustrated by something to the point where you began to decry its inclusion within a game. Rather, I’m curious if you’ve ever happened upon an otherwise pointless mechanic, and questioned what led to its inclusion.

I bring all of this up, in part, because of a video titled Pointless Mechanics That Make Games Better by Youtuber Razbuten. In it, Raz discusses the merits of some mechanics that appear pointless at first brush, but which ultimately provide players with an additional avenue to express themselves. For example, the salute from Hades 2 doesn’t do anything from a gameplay standpoint, but it does add texture to the game world. It reinforces the idea that Melinoë has a history that started well before you (the player) took over control of her day-to-day life at the Crossroads.

Though, it wasn’t Hades 2 that originally got me thinking about Raz’s video again. It was Mewgenics. Specifically, it was the radio in Mewgenics because its inclusion has continued to both surprise, and confound me in equal measure.

As a bit of a primer, the radio is exactly what it sounds like. It acts as a diegetic way to explain all of the tunes playing in the background while players are managing their menagerie of cats between runs. In a lot of ways, it mirrors the jukebox from VA-11 Hall-A, which provides a similar tangible, in-universe explanation for why the player is constantly hearing music.

However, being diegetic isn’t what makes the radio so interesting – it’s the commitment to the bit that does. What I mean is that the radio actually sounds like daytime radio. It doesn’t just play songs back-to-back as if they were on a Spotify playlist, which is what happens in the aforementioned VA-11 Hall-A. Instead, there are breaks where a DJ yammers between songs. There are also ads for whole businesses that we never see or interact with throughout the entire game. Hell, there’s even a news reporter. If you didn’t know any better, it’d be entirely possible to assume that you were listening to a real radio station.

And I think that’s wild.

Just think about that for a second. There’s an entire faux radio station that’s been included as a background element in Mewgenics. It’s so unintrusive that I didn’t even really notice it until I’d spent over 40 hours playing the game. Until then, I erroneously assumed the radio was cycling through the game’s OST on repeat. No. No, there’s a whole radio show here with several different characters, and over a thousand lines of recorded dialogue, which feels and sounds like a believable live radio broadcast.

The truly bewildering thing is that the radio show isn’t even entirely pre-recorded either. The songs will play in a different order, and a new starting song is selected every single time the player enters their house. Ergo, this isn’t like the radio in Fallout: New Vegas which plays a static 3 hour recording on loop whenever the player tunes in. Instead, Mewgenics is dynamically crafting a radio broadcast with a varied playlist, and unique interludes each time the player returns home.

Hence, my question in the opening paragraph: why is this even here? You don’t accidentally include something this well-crafted into your game. Even a static 3 hour sound loop isn’t a trivial inclusion. Yet here, there’s a dynamic broadcast that grows to include new tracks, and dialogue as the player completes Mewgenics’ story. That takes a lot of work, but it doesn’t really add to Mewgenics’ gameplay. In fact, as I already mentioned, it’s something that players could totally miss like I did.

Yet, I love that the radio is this involved, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. While it doesn’t give players an additional avenue for expression, like all of the cited examples in Raz’s video, it does help to give texture to the game world of Mewgenics. Hearing the radio broadcast, especially the news reports from Jimmy “The Hammer” Valentine, really help to flesh out Boon County (where the game takes place) in a way that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. It’s the kind of world building that’ll claw its way into your thoughts, and follow you around even when you’re not playing the game.

Though, more broadly speaking, I wish that every game could include features like Mewgenics’ radio. Making a game is already some kind of forbidden magic requiring skills from several disciplines. Either you need intimate knowledge of programming, music, art, marketing, writing, and design, or you need to work with people who do. As such, not every game can afford to indulge in these “pointless” features. After all, if you’re already struggling to get your core features implemented then you’re not going to spend time (and money) on bonus features, right?

Regardless, that’s still my hope. 

I wish that every game, and every developer could afford to implement every idea that they think will add to their game. Regardless of how oddly specific, or niche, it’d be nice if artistic expression could take centre stage instead of solid business sense.

Here’s hoping that changes in the future because I, for one, would love to see more games get their Mewgenics radio, or Hades 2 salutes.

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