Fairy Tale Spotlight: Receiver (Game Series)

The Receiver games are a lot of things to me. They mean different things to different people. Some people only partially like them. Others hate them outright. Many are offended. But there is no denying that something very important is happening when these two games are played.

The Receiver series are a collection of two PC-Only games. They are classified as First Person Shooters. However they are extremely nonstandard FPSs. Most FPS games give you a gun that occasionally needs to be reloaded, usually by pressing the "R" key. In the Receiver games, every conceivable action you would be able to take in real life, pertaining to the gun, is bound to a separate key on the keyboard.

What this means is that the act of reloading a gun involves pressing a large number of keys. Things often ignored in more mainstream FPSs are necessary to understand and enact in Receiver. For example, you have to manually push bullets into the magazine, but you have to holster the actual gun first so you have the free hand to do so. Guns holstered while the hammer is back and the safety is off could cause the gun to discharge into your foot if you don't take the proper precautions.

The game simulates these guns so flawlessly that, when a jam happens, it isn't because of a random programming script. It happens entirely because of the simulation. And you have to know what keys to press to fix those jams. There is even a key used to tap the magazine to get the bullet into the chamber in the case of a bad magazine spring.

The point of Receiver is so that you don't just hold and fire a gun. You have to form a relationship with that weapon inside and out. You have to respect it for the weapon that it is so that it will serve you best. It trains you, not only how to use a gun properly within a dangerous situation, but also how important calmness is when handing a firearm. And here we get into the story.

One of the reasons so many people hate the story of this game is because it boldly goes into how the main stream media hypnotizes people en mass. The game's story attempts to explain how people tend to get caught up in the forced narrative of the media and end up turning into pointless people with meaningless existences. Because the plot of the game tends to be thrown away as a right-winged conspiracy narrative, people tend to hate on it. But ironically, the story itself explains exactly why people feel they should hate on it. These people are perpetually asleep to reality, and any deviation from the narrative that they have been force fed should and will make them angry and ultimately turn away from it. The plot of this game is actually based on fact, and I admire the creator of the game for being bold enough to just say it outright.

In the game, you play as someone called a Receiver. You are trapped in a sort of limbo of repeating rooms and hallways while various mechanical devices such as gun turrets try and track you and kill you. You are tasked to find these cassette tapes strewn about that will assist you in "waking up." Once you have fully woken up, you will regain your independence as a human being and see the lies of the media for what they are.

But there are little "trap" tapes hidden about that you need to watch out for. These tapes unleash something simply called "the threat." Instead of explaining something that the Receiver needs to know, it will often break into some depressing or cynical narrative that is more likely to put you back to sleep. If this threat gains a foothold, you will be compelled to draw your weapon, turn it to your face, and pull the trigger.

If you think that the tape has a threat in it, you need to unload your weapon extremely fast. Which means you need to stay calm while you do it. And believe me, it can be very hard to do it quickly with some guns. Take the Single Action Army for example. The chamber doesn't even pop out for that gun. You have to carefully spin the chamber and pop every bullet out separately in a timely manner. Miss even one, and it might end up in your skull. This is why calmness is so important in the game. Moments like those demand it.

I entirely recommend this series, but I warn you that it is very hard at first. I was able to get the game working on a controller after painstakingly binding every necessary key to a button. It wasn't easy, but I did it. If you had to choose between the two games, go with Receiver 2. It is the killer app of the series. It's narrative is far clearer than the first which tended to lean towards extreme subtlety. The name of the game is stay calm and know your weapon. If you cannot do these two simultaneously, then this game will kill you over, and over, and over again... and you'll never wake up. You'll just be one of the masses of people... all going through an endless and meaningless loop. I'd hardly call that life really.

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