All of This for a Cup of Coffee

A review of Felvídek (2024)

by Alžbeta Szabová

You see a castle outside your window catching aflame, screaming in the distance. You run to the local lord and he would love to help but… how about a game of cards first? You haven’t had a bath in weeks, the Hussites are pillaging the lands, and the guards seem to have extra mouths on their bodies. Or maybe it’s just the alcohol talking. It is 15th-century Slovakia.  You are a traumatised knight returned from the Balkan crusade. Your wife just left you. Worst of all, there’s a well-meaning priest who is checking up on you, and he wants you to be sober.

Over the past few years, I have been increasingly drawn to art sustained by small and loyal communities and created by a handful of people; if not by a single dedicated individual. It is probably the coldest take possible that small indie productions are where the best and most creative and interesting art emerges. Whether it's webcomics, podcasts, pixel art games or movies, you get met with things which revolutionise mediums, put to shame big studios and resonate with people to a degree which cannot be countered by mainstream productions. As a child, I was blown away by the graphics in my video games getting more and more realistic, happy to be sucked into a world for thousands of hours, never able to see all of it. Now I have less time on my hands but I also appreciate different things. A reasonable price and small file size for one—I don't have 80 euros to spare or 300 GB free on my computer! Mostly, however, I prefer smaller games because they can surprise me. It is a strange medium, in which stories are told through various forms, a lot of them incomparable with each other. They don’t need to appeal to everyone, they can get weird, mess with genres and explore topics you are not used to seeing.

Felvidek is a pixel JRPG-style game which takes only a couple of hours to complete. Its plot revolves around an alcoholic knight, traumatised by participating in a crusade, and his priest companion, as the two of them try to solve a mystery of a strange new cult. As qawah (which we would now call coffee, a fact my wife missed and thought people are drinking strange demonic potions instead of the regular boring bean juice we all know and love) trade comes to Felvidek, its beans are being used to transform people into monsters for an unknown purpose. As the detective duo investigates, the small weird occurrences slowly unravel into eldritch cosmic horror and a battle in which angels and demons fight through the people involved. However, the core motivation of the protagonist has nothing to do with this. He wants his wife back, and he wants the ennui infecting his life after the war to go away. The story ends melancholically and unceremoniously, and life goes on as usual. It is an epic great tale at the end of which nothing has really changed. It also has an amazing soundtrack.

It has been described as “alternative history” and “fantasy”, but I would disagree with both labels. First, alternative history is something along the lines of “What if the Dutch colonized all of America instead of the British” not “What if people turned into big bouncing eyeball monsters and you’re also Slovak when this happens”. Second, unlike in fantasy, the setting and world are grounded in realism, which the magical invades to accentuate the ongoing conflicts. Sure, it still can be classified as fantasy since it has supernatural beings in it, but the world in the game is profoundly unmagical. If all of the monstrous was to be written out, it could simply be replaced by a different ‘Other’. Because of this, despite the contentiousness of the label, I would call this game Lovecraftian in its themes and depictions.

That is also because xenophobia is an underlying theme through most conflicts, and the effects of violence as well as its normalisation and mundanity can be felt in most of the driving motivations of its characters. The game is thoroughly uninterested in exploring the supernatural side of its central enemies because it seemingly doesn’t matter much to the protagonist knight nor to the villagers and common folk of the game whether the thing out to get you is a proto-Protestant group or the teeth monster. There is no moment of passing through the looking glass, of encountering the fantastical and having your world completely shifted. There is no distinction between a foreign invader or an actual monster to the inhabitants of this world because, in their perceptions, it makes no difference to the loss, hopelessness and fear that they go through. The protagonist enters the story numb and destroyed by war and violence, and some extra teeth or tentacles do not make much difference. And yet the story manages to avoid the usual pitfalls of most Lovecraftian stories—it distinguishes between the people’s prejudices and reality, and allows humour and humanity even amongst all the viscera. We see different marginalised characters take advantage of people’s racist expectations or actively go against their stereotypes. It can be hard to portray an antisemitic world without writing an antisemitic story, and Felvidek manages to do that and includes the bad of the world without legitimising or excusing it. Every time I braced myself for an uncomfortable situation, the game did better than I expected it to do. 

              I chose to write about Felvidek for a simple personal reason: it is the only Slovak game I know about. And unlike something like “The Witcher”, which gets less Polish with every release, the games’ origin and setting are strongly tied together. There are dozens of indie games I could recommend to people and feel confident in my endorsement; Felvidek is not one of them. Nevertheless, I can’t stop talking about it. It feels like it’s the first thing in forever coming from my country which doesn’t make me embarrassed. And it makes me incredibly homesick. I imagine there’s a handful of joke mechanics which do not land with a foreign audience, such as why you spend the game gathering bottles of Alpa. The main issue why I don’t know if I can recommend this game to non-Slovaks is because it is hard for me to imagine how this game gets translated. Every character speaks with heavy regional accents, sometimes switching completely to Hungarian, German or Czech based on their background, and you can tell a person’s education and role in society based on it. Very few people speak “proper” Slovak (nor had they at the time the game takes place—the language wouldn’t be codified for another 300 years), making the game at times hard to understand as characters communicate in archaic or region-specific dialects.

Behind the issue of language, however, is a more indescribable specific feeling the game invokes in me. After a couple of years of living away from home, I have gotten used to having to pull up Google Maps and point at where I come from every time I meet someone new. People ask you where you’re from and when you answer they half-smile awkwardly and mumble something like “That’s nice”, “Is that in Europe?”, “Sorry, I don’t know anything about it”. The lady officiating my wedding called me Russian and friends I’ve had for years still call me Slovenian half the time. I don’t really get offended—it's unfair to expect people to memorise every small nation in the world. But it does sometimes feel like it isn’t real. It’s not that I wish to feel some sort of national pride, it just feels strange when no one knows that your home even exists. I miss the familiarity.

This is why I am excited about the game: it might not put Slovakia on the map for a lot of people, but those who do interact with it will get a small insight into a messy and complicated history. The plot of the game interrogates a part of history people are uncomfortable with. We can see the Hussite raids, the lords speaking Hungarian, and the Germans moving in to practically create the mining industry. We can see the country as a crossroads of many groups of people, influenced from all sides in different ways. Slovakia has been a part of the Hungarian empire for almost a thousand years, but that’s not really how my history was taught to me. As Benedict Anderson describes in Imagined Communities, nationalism is a recent phenomenon. To legitimise nations, history gets re-examined and reframed, a grand narrative is woven in which the state must exist and should exist because it’s always been there. Cultural icons are claimed by states which did not exist at the time, and in the case of Slovakia, I can’t think of almost any historical figures we are not fighting over with Czechia or Hungary. The Frankish king Samo was Slovak at the beginning of Slovak history and so were the Moravian kings Svetopluk and Mojmir, the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa and countless painters, artists, and the like. There was no Slovakia in the 15th century, but it’s insulting to people that a videogame set in that time is called by a Hungarian name because we want to have always been Slovak. It's fiction, but it feels dangerous to let go of it. After all, opposing these legitimacy claims is used to justify invasions and occupations.

Its name is a contested term- “Felvidek” is today’s Slovakia but back then it wasn’t. The term translates to “Upper Hungary”. While we haven’t been part of the Hungarian empire since 1919, the history is still sharp; we are by no means about to get invaded tomorrow, but there’s not an insignificant number of Hungarians bitter about losing their territory. If you google the game’s name you will probably get a lot of links to weird fascist Facebook groups. Slovak politicians are also insane about this: you can find videos of Jan Slota in 1999 yelling about marching with tanks upon Budapest and proudly proclaiming that he is a “Hungarian racist”. The creator of this game took some heat for this, especially since the term “Felvidek” is also anachronistic—no one in the 15th century would refer to the Slovak region that way. But on an artistic level, I like the name and the controversy. I like the historicity despite the inaccuracy because it would be ridiculous to call the game “Slovakia”. It would be even more ridiculous to call the game “Hungary”.  This way the title is tied to a specific geography while remaining historical and unfamiliar. I like the controversy because I don’t know where I stand. Is it okay to call your game after a term weird nationalists use when they dream of bringing back the days of the empire? What about if it's quite silly and most people don’t care? When does it get dangerous?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I like that this game decides to embrace its messiness instead of hiding from it. I like that it’s made with love and that it’s new and different and exciting, and that it is funny and grounded and unpretentious. I love that it’s full of weird guys and cool monsters and that you can stop in the middle of combat to quickly eat some porridge so you can survive a fight against a god. It’s silly, it’s cute. I have changed my mind— go play it; I’m recommending it.

4/5 stars

Image: Alžbeta Szabová