#simon stalenhag

[spacenoirdetective]

Swedish people get in the way of perfectly innocent dinosaurs, from artist Simon Stalenhag.

[vintagerpg]

There are two Free Leagues, the one that makes games I love, and the one that makes games I don’t care about in the least. There is not a whole lot of middle ground (the middle ground is Coriolis, which I love as a system and an idea but am a pass on the campaign materials). Mutant: Year Zero, Symbaroum, Twilight: 2000, The One Ring and The Walking Dead lay abandoned in the Shrug pile; Alien, Dragonbane, Vaesen, Blade Runner, Forbidden Lands and Tales from the Loop live in the Hug pile. I think there is an inner logic there, and I also think you will now have a pretty good idea about where I fall with The Electric State (2024).

Based on the narrative art book of the same name (no, there is no movie with that name, why do you ask?) and its overall action, players take the role of characters on a road trip through a strange version of 1997, in the aftermath of a war fought primarily through the use of gigantic drones and further polluted with obsession-inducing virtual reality derived from the drone piloting tech. Some of the drones look like terrifying machines of war, others look like brand mascots. Sometimes masses of people in the VR network and enter into symbiosis with drones, creating a new kind of hybrid life? It’s a lot. All the while, something similar to everyday life continues apace. There are plenty of stories to tell on the road. 

A love a road trip game. One car, a bizarre landscape, stops along the way. It’s a Simon Stalenhag jam, so you know that the journey is internal as much as it’s on the asphalt. Much of that, I think, is expressed through the variable Tension mechanic that develops between the players. You can’t stay in a car together that long without nerves getting raw. The game also provides a solid methodology for designing the events that transpire at the Stops along the way. Best of all, every journey comes to an end eventually. I like an open-ended game, but one with a natural ending built in is a rare treat.

Lovely Stalenhag art throughout. I don’t believe all of it is recycled from the narrative art book. Reine Rosenberg did the additional art, which is bold where Stalenhag is fuzzy and wistful.

[racsow]

after seeing the godawful trailer, I did a reread of the Electric State and i cannot physically understand how the russo brothers did not "see potential" in the story

i'll admit, i underappreciated the writing on my first read! going over it again there is so much richness to the character building and the dread of the atmosphere. There's a vibe that I can only describe as desiccated americana and i love it. The world is rotten and dying, and there is really nothing left to do but go on for going on's sake.

anyway i'm doing a very large essay on Stålenhag's whole body of work, but the Electric State holds a special place in my heart as the first of his books I discovered and the most resonant to me, so i just had to share my thoughts right after the reread.

This is less about the artwork, which i could talk about for ages, and more just a general overview of the story themes specifically!

(Moderate general spoilers? i don't go into much detail, and it's not a story overly reliant on its plot twists anyway)

The hopelessness of The Electric State is rather unique among Simon Stålenhag's works - his other books, set in Sweden, are much more fondly nostalgic, though they of course offer strange horrors of their own - but of a much more physical, immediate level.

The Electric State is different. It takes place in an alternate 90s US even more drowned in consumerism and blind greed than our own. A civilization that is crumbling, not from nuclear war or global crises or meteors, but by its own hand, by capitalism driving itself into the ground. The perfect pleasure machine, the neurocaster headset, leaves people twitching, comatose creatures whose minds lie in vast Silicon Valley servers as their bodies are left to starve.

Michelle does not have the privilege of escapism. She is one of the few left to wander a silent world, an apocalypse without people to see it. She is privy to the horror of watching the inevitable trajectory of a world falling to its death, and feels only recognition that it's probably better this way.

Michelle is never sad about the end of America. She doesn't ever reminisce about how good things used to be, or how we should have "appreciated it while we had it." But she certainly does reminisce.

She has the memory of her foster parents, who derided the government "coddling neurine addicts" like Michelle's mother. She has the memory of her grandfather coughing himself to death in their tiny apartment, irradiated from his lifetime of underpaid work assembling gigantic war drones. She has the memory of her mother overdosing on a drug the government hooked her on during her service in the military. She has the memory of her first and only love, a love which the world hated, how it kept her alive in her foster home of Soest City, and how it was ripped from her by the pastor.

Unlike Stalenhag's other stories, there is no element of nostalgia or quiet undertone of hope. Only disgust for what came before, and quiet fear for what comes next.

The horror of the Convergence, the eldritch machine god hivemind, is not even very relevant to the story - if anything, it's a side plot. When Michelle faces actual danger, it's never from giant robot gods in the mist; it's from cops and hotel clerks, from doomsdayers hoarding guns and a FBI agent hunting her down. She lives in fear of other people, of people who say they want to protect her.

But when she sees the gigantic silent machines wandering through the mists of Oregon, she isn't afraid. It's almost peaceful. The Convergence is beyond understanding. It grew out of the servers where millions of minds seeking oblivion from the world went to escape, and they converged into something unknowably vast who wanders the world in a hundred million thoughtless bodies. It's otherworldly. It does not fear, it does not dream, it does not hope, it does not hate. Maybe that's better.

I was scared. But I also felt something else when that thing stepped out of the mist in front of our car. I can't think of a better word than awe. Like when you suddenly become aware that you've walked into the wrong part of the woods and come face-to-face with a gigantic wild animal. Beyond the grotesque, there was also something else - something majestic.

And in its wake, the citizens of Point Linden, hundreds of people linked together, their neurocasters connected to the oily god in the mist, floated across the ground in front of the car, and they looked almost happy. Calm and peaceful, they moved past the car and formed a single group again behind us, and soon disappeared into the mist again.

[curatorofthisdigitalmorass]

Simon Stalenhag

[pedroam-bang]

Simon Stalenhag - The Electric State (2017)

[olvaheiner]

The Electric State (2025)

[collectivelyacoward]

Oh yeah, I finally read The Electric State BOOK so yeah..

And it was awesome sauce <33

[bbl1te]

Electric state (netflix) and Electric state art book comparisons

Cat

VR addicts

Canoe

Big omnipresent structures

Ducks

Heart Billboard

what do you think?