Its forest is equally bizarre, a thoroughly alien landscape where plant-life continually jitters and writhes with vitality, like coral reefs when hit with powerful currents. Always with an anxious possibility for corruption, and so never settling into any mould of wholesomeness. While Kena’s vegetal depiction cleaves a little too closely to simplistic memes around Earth’s healing, and its Kodama-like companions are more twee than spookily indifferent (as they are in Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke) weird horror game Dap offers a much more frightening rendition of strange forest spirits and their natural ecologies.ĭap’s Pikmin-like entities are profoundly odd.
Recent games like Kena: Bridge Of Spirits lean into tropes of corrupted nature, filling its forest glades with pulsating, purple pollutants that must be defeated in order to cleanse the area. Forests are ancient, prehistoric, and have long been the go-to game environment for mysterious and mystical explorations Gaia, for example, makes much of the fact that we first evolved out from Earth’s dense jungles. While mycorrhizal networks throw up questions around where individual entities begin and end, and therefore throw into question our own individuality (living symbiotically with various bacteria etc.), there’s also an innate alieness to vegetation. Forests are ancient, prehistoric, and have long been the go-to game environment for mysterious and mystical explorations." "There’s an innate alieness to vegetation. How can we ever hope to understand such chaotic systems? They are so big that they could very well be considered hyperobjects – things too large in temporal and spatial dimension to ever be accurately abstracted or understood by us. What makes all of these underground superorganisms so horrifying is their vastness.
While it’s more of a gnarled, woody thing than a mushroom, it seems to grow, infect and work symbiotically just like fungi, turning a planet inside out like it was the doomed body of one of Annihilation’s expeditionists, as well as connecting multiple spaces through a mesmerising fourth dimension. Whimsical time-loop game Outer Wilds is intermittently horrific, introducing us to the mysterious system-wide entity known as the Dark Bramble. Of course, video games are just as obsessed with these flavours of vegetal horror. What if something as malicious as it is intelligent was silently evolving in our forgotten forests, biding its time in the shadows of the undergrowth and plotting revenge for all the terrible things we’ve done to our – their – planet? Gaia plays with the same concept of a massive mycorrhizal, or fungus-root, network. Even more visually spectacular is this year’s South African horror film Gaia – all close-ups of fluttering shroom gills and reproductive spores wafting oppressively in the jungle atmosphere. In Ben Wheatley’s recent sci-fi horror film In The Earth there exists a giant Wood Wide Web – a connected ecosystem based on a real thing, which in In The Earth's specific, fictional case is a web of psychoactive mushrooms that have been slowly evolving into a peculiar kind of alien intelligence. Mushrooms – those are the ones you really can’t trust. Pinned to the wall is a corpse of a previous expedition member, their body turned inside out and extended by some sort of monstrous fungal growth. One of the most powerful images from the film is found in the basin of an emptied concrete swimming pool. In Alex Garland’s Annihilation (an adaptation of the first novel in Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy), four women enter a strange, shimmery forest and come face to face with various weird plants. In film, killer greenery has been going through a bit of a renaissance. From the carnivorous Venus flytrap to the bleeding tooth fungus, from plants that smell like rotting corpses to one's that trap prey and dissolve them with digestive fluids, it’s an unknown, often dangerous world, and one that overlaps closely with our own. The vegetal realm is entirely inaccessible to us, its behaviour strange and habitats dark. We ourselves aren’t vegetable, and differences so often motivate our deepest fears. I see my suspicion of all things green and floral as a natural, even instinctual thing. Ever since I witnessed a little red-and-blue plumber-man tumble into the gnashing jaws of a Piranha Plant, I knew vegetables weren’t to be trusted.