Ingredients: Stranger Things
We’re inaugurating a new column, inspired by a TV series that’s hurtling toward its final season.
Welcome back to Artcade, the forest where new columns pop up like mushrooms. Today we’re launching Ingredients and the excuse is the arrival of the final season of Stranger Things. Calling Stranger Things a work of art might be a bit much, but you cannot deny the show has had a huge impact. Personally, I can’t wait to see the last episodes.
For the occasion we are doing a tour of games divided into different sections. We’ll start from the licensed games, the ones set directly in the world of Stranger Things (which is a bit like taking a recipe, say mac and cheese, and serving it again as deep-fried balls), then we’ll move over to the more typical Artcade territory: cross-contamination. Here are the ingredients in the recipe, in case you feel like jumping straight to…
• Official licensed games
• Upside Down
• Kids in the lead
• Lab experiments
• Dungeons & Dragons
• VHS aesthetic
• Powers
One last note before we begin: as you already know, the screenshots that appear in the episodes are usually made by me. This time that was not possible. Enjoy the read!
The 80s are a wonderful place to live in as long as you are not part of the “secret research division under the mall”. In Stranger Things on one side you get all the sweetness of nostalgia: bikes, Dungeons & Dragons, VHS tapes, ice cream and adventures in the woods. On the other side there is the Upside Down: monsters with more teeth than neurons, shady government experiments and parents who understand everything way too late. The show is basically a remastered version of The Goonies where a bunch of kids take care of school bullies and end up arguing with extradimensional entities. Classic. With a premise like that it was easy to squeeze some videogames out of it. So let’s start from…
Official licensed games
Stranger Things: The Game / Stranger Things 3: The Game
Netflix does not have a clear naming strategy. Stranger Things: The Game is set between season one and season two and was the only videogame based on the series when they named it that way. Then its name was changed to Stranger Things: 1984 because Stranger Things 3: The Game came out, with that 3 in the title and again “The Game”. Right, let’s just move on.
Both games are cute, and they are free if you have a Netflix subscription. Strictly for hardcore fans of the show and for anyone who misses some good old chunky pixels.
Next up, two more games: a pair of interesting virtual reality experiments.
VR Stranger Things / Stranger Things: Catalyst
The first one puts you in Vecna’s shoes (and if you know Vecna, you know seeing the world from his point of view could be quite something), while the other is an indescribable full-body VR experience to play in co-op. To understand what I’m talking about it is easier to read Ready Player One watch a reel, but if you ever get the chance to try it live, I would not let that opportunity slip.
Once upon a time there were lots of collaborations as well. Then the honeymoon ended.
The Vanishing: Far Cry 6 DLC / Stranger Things Puzzle Tales
Stranger Things Games by Telltale / Fortnite e Stranger Things
All the Stranger Things collaborations vanished into thin air as soon as the marketing needs stopped existing. The Fortnite event came and went, a narrative game (or maybe several games, who even knows) from Telltale never saw the light of day, and support for Puzzle Tales has also been discontinued.
Among all these mash-ups, the one that seems to have been done best is the Far Cry 6 mission The Vanishing, which is (or maybe I should say was) also integrated into the main game. At least this one you can still catch in video form; the rest is lost in the digital Upside Down.
Will there ever be other official games? While we wait to see where Netflix’s urge to squeeze the franchise dry will lead, let’s focus on what Artcade does best: hunting for cross-contamination. Let’s see which videogames share with Stranger Things the idea that there is an…
Upside Down
Alan Wake
The Alan Wake series takes us into the Dark Place, an alternate dimension where the protagonist’s day job is writing. That alone should tip you off we’re in a parallel universe: in ours, writers don’t actually make a living out of writing. Alan can also change reality with his writing: he spends half his time typing things that later come true and the other half chasing pages of his own manuscript. It might be the first documented case where a bit of good old writer’s block would actually be better for everyone.
The Otherworld is the alternate dimension in the Silent Hill series, and I am convinced its main feature is humidity. How else are you supposed to explain all that fog? I think the real problem is not the monsters that populate the protagonist’s nightmares, but the wooden furniture and the arthritis.
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes / The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Nintendo has had its fair share of Upside Downs too. Two of the most famous ones are Light Aether and Dark Aether from the second Metroid Prime, and the Light World and Dark World in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Let’s put aside how lazy those names are and just admit it: if a dimension is called Dark Something, we already know it will be gloomy and extremely dangerous, and that we will still throw ourselves into it with the same enthusiasm of someone who clicks “Continue” in the middle of the night even though the alarm clock is already getting ready to tell them to go to work.
The success of Stranger Things is not built on the Upside Down alone. There are many ingredients that turned the show into a global phenomenon. Let’s continue with…
Kids in the lead
Costume Quest 2
We talked about this one a while ago: Costume Quest 2 has a group of kids heading out on an adventure during Halloween to defeat the threat of an evil dentist. Do not let the premise fool you; as always, it is ultimately a battle to save the world.
Knights and Bikes
Here the stars of the adventure are Nessa and Demelza (great names, by the way), and they come equipped with bikes. The game is inspired by The Goonies (the official website says so, not me) and you can play it in co-op. Could it get any better than that? Apparently not, since the studio behind Knights and Bikes has not published anything else yet.
Oxenfree
A bunch of teenagers go to an island for the classic party with friends and end up tuning their radios to frequencies that let them talk to ghosts. Or something along those lines. You don’t expect me to kick things off with spoilers, do you?
Oxenfree has a lot in common with Stranger Things: protagonists who get tangled up in something way bigger than they are, missing people and, above all, radios that do not behave the way Guglielmo Marconi had in mind.
Young protagonists, spontaneous and a bit naive, give all these stories a tender tone, but the tension in Stranger Things comes from the terrible habit of running…
Lab experiments
Half-Life
One of the most famous lab experiments in videogames (together with Another World) is staged by Valve inside the Black Mesa facility in the first Half-Life. In the first half hour, poor Gordon Freeman goes to work by tram and goes back home dealing with an alien invasion using a crowbar. Half-Life is a beautiful interdimensional mess. A milestone of videogames
Resident Evil
The entire main Resident Evil series (and a few spin-offs, too) would not exist if the Umbrella Corporation realized that mixing biotech, viruses and military tech is not a great idea. But then again, nobody seems to have figured that out in the real world, so why should a fictional company with a gorgeous logo be the first to get there? Keep it up, Umbrella Corporation.
Among the great achievements of the Resident Evil saga we definitely cannot list the spread of ethical business practices, but at least it has taught the world that keeping ammo in a porcelain vase makes perfect sense.
BioShock
A city built on the ocean floor to be a paradise for exceptional individuals, which ended up filled with people who have powers and unresolved issues. In BioShock the laboratory becomes an entire metropolis and, as a point of contact with Stranger Things, we could also mention the “Little Sisters.” We will not, though, because we already talked about them on Artcade in a piece that somehow dragged in Aldous Huxley and Radiohead.
Mother Russia Bleeds
We are skipping one important element here: Russia. Russians have been the bad guys in every movie since the Cold War, they are experts at building secret labs and unfortunately still experts at producing dictators.
In Mother Russia Bleeds there is an underground lab beneath a prison where the four kidnapped protagonists are used as guinea pigs to test a new drug called Nekro. Textbook stuff.
We still need to sprinkle three more ingredients into the Stranger Things recipe. One crucial spice is called…
Dungeons & Dragons
Baldur’s Gate
You cannot talk about videogames and Dungeons & Dragons without mentioning Baldur’s Gate 1, 2 and especially 3. Game of the Year 2023, and probably the best game among all the ones I still have not played. Once it is finally installed on my hard drive, we will definitely come back to it on these pages.
If Baldur’s Gate is the cherry on top, we should not forget to add another ingredient, something subtler and visual that gives everything its special flavor. I am talking about the beautiful…
VHS aesthetic
Stories Untold
Stories Untold is a mix of text adventure, 80s horror, CRT screens and synthesizers. It is the revenge of the old monitor you abandoned in the basement. A little gem with an incredible atmosphere that almost no one has played. And that is a shame.
Let’s wrap up the recipe with a crucial ingredient. There is no point in wondering whether Stranger Things would still exist if Eleven didn’t have her…
Powers
Control
In Control you play Jesse Faden, the brand-new director of a government agency that studies paranormal phenomena and cursed objects. Basically a very normal office job, only with a generous amount of levitation and weird powers. For her it is like getting hired at the Italian Social Security office and discovering that the backlog of paperwork not only still exists, it actively wants you dead. It would be funny if it were not basically a true story.
Back in fiction land, Eleven and Jesse Faden would make a fantastic duo. If I didn’t know how utterly pointless that would be, I’d start an online petition to get them to team up.
And with this last ingredient, the Stranger Things recipe is ready. Would you add any other spices? Are you ready for the final season?
My last two coins
Maybe Stranger Things works so well because it is the TV version of what videogames have been doing for years, just with more hairspray. Small towns full of secrets, negative-space worlds, labs that have never seen an ethics committee, groups of kids who have a bike and a character sheet instead of a driver’s license.
We like it because it feels like a Dungeons & Dragons campaign where, every now and then, someone you did not expect gets to be the hero. It does not really matter if the monster comes from the Dungeon Master’s Guide, from the Upside Down or from a PS5 disc. What matters is that there is a small, badly assorted party that decides not to back down in front of the Demogorgon of the week.
Until the next episode, ciao!