Ben Abraham's Permanent Death

You probably already know that Permanent Death is a iron-man (one death and you delete your save) run of Far Cry 2 done by Ben Abraham. I had heard about it a few months ago, but had only recently decided to read it after being reminded about it by today's Rock Paper Shotgun post on it. In a lot of ways, Permanent Death is incredible – it's incredibly well produced, it's very well written, and it has an absolutely fantastic concept. However, to me, it also misses the point of an iron man run in some ways, instead focusing on being (as it says on the cover) a "novelization" of Far Cry 2.

What I liked about Permanent Death

Permanent Death is really good in many ways. On the simplest level, it's always really interesting to see someone take a game and play it a different way than it's intended to be played, especially when the new ruleset dramatically changes the way you play the game, as iron-man rules often do. Also, Permanent Death has very high production values – the strength of the writing and presentation bind the whole thing together into a strong, coherent package.

One of my favorite things about Permanent Death, however, is that it's trying something interesting. Basically, it's saying – what happens if I play this game an entirely different way? How does the way I play it change? What's interesting about the new way I play the game, and how different is it from the way I play the original game, and what does this difference mean?

What I didn't like about Permanent Death

My biggest problem with Permanent Death, however, is that it doesn't really answer any of these questions. Instead of focusing on what's really interesting and different about an iron-man run of Far Cry 2, it focuses on a telling a narrative version of Far Cry 2's story with occasional interjections that remind you that it's an  iron-man run. It foregoes gameplay for characterization.

Let me give some examples. There's a lot of this in Permanent Death:

"Warren Clyde, was my saviour. He charged in, desert eagle and AK-47 blazing. He must have known I was going to pull something stupid, as he was obviously hanging around nearby. I’ll bet he came running as soon as the shooting started. How else can I explain way the almost divine timing that saw him turn up right at that very moment? A second later and it would have been lights out for Qurbani Singh. Talking to him later in the safe house, I barely remembered the rest of the journey. Apparently he picked me up, dragged me out from the middle of Pala by himself and put me back on my feet at the jetty on the north-western side of town. He even covered my retreat as I got in a boat and puttered downstream to collapse on the camp bed of the nearest safe-house. When I asked him about it, he simply gave me a thumbs up and said “Don’t mention it, man”."

And way too little of this:

"I’ve eaten enough lead to make a paperweight by now, but at least the engine’s running so I try and get to the front of the ship to see if I can’t take out the rocketeer. I didn’t even see the next rocket until the last second so I barely had time to duck out of the way. I hurt myself pretty bad in the process.”

As I read, I was hoping he'd explain his gameplay decisions – for example, why permadeath made him want to take an RPG over an IED, or vice-versa, or why he chose the gun he did, or why he approached from the angle he did. Battle descriptions are far too often "I ran into some guys and shot them and didn't die" and far too rarely about the actual moment-to-moment tactics of the battle.  Instead, there's a lot of exposition about how so-and-so made him go on some mission to retrieve such-and-such a thing, and what the guy looked like, and a whole lot of excellent writing about the character of Far Cry 2's protagonist and what he was thinking about.

Now, I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. Permanent Death is an excellent novelization of Far Cry 2, and maybe that's all it's supposed to be. But it doesn't talk about any of the things that make an iron-man run interesting. It doesn't really capture how the game changes from normal to iron-man, and how his decisions changed. It's a good story, but as someone who's played Far Cry 2 there's just not that much there.