Since 2014’s Gods Will Be Watching, Spanish studio Deconstructeam has always stuck in my mind as developers who are going to make me feel weirdwhenever I play their games. In my time with the demo for their latest, the upcoming Virtue and a Sledgehammer, this definitely held true, though I’m still trying to unpack what exactly left me so uneasy.
Virtue and a Sledgehammeris made with studio Selkie Harbor, who worked with Deconstructeam on last year’s Many Nights a Whisper.The Steam page describes it as “a game about family, traditions, and being a misfit;” you play as Pratelle, a woman who’s returned to her changed hometown to exact revenge using what she calls “20 pounds of physical media”–a sledgehammer.
What once seemed to be a small, quaint village is now populated by androids, and it quickly becomes clear in the demo that Pratelle’s family has something to do with the situation. While the androids very much look like robots, they act not just like humans, but humans who know Pratelle. Sometimes this is moving, when an android who clearly knew Pratelle since childhood tells her it doesn’t have any treats from its store for her and asks her to send its regards to her mother. At other times, this is infuriating, as when an android bartender insults Pratelle’s race and sexuality.
You can only do two things in the demo: walk around, and smash the shit out of everything. You can knock down buildings or break through walls, and you can turn all these androids into flying debris. Sometimes the androids will flee, but you can easily chase them down; other times they’ll try to fight back, but they aren’t too hard to fend off so you can wind up your sledgehammer for the death blow. The movement and aiming are a little clunky, but this isn’t a bad thing. It gives the game a very particular slow pace that helped me feel both menacing and a little out of control.
Deconstructeam told The Guardian that the game isn’t meant to be a critique of how much of our lives we live through screens, but it was hard for me not to read it that way, in particular through the lens of AI. There’s a visceral conflict between the human and the digital, with server racks crammed into stone houses and androids worrying over their gardens in a gross facsimile of humanity. But the physical isn’t painted as some idyllic past to return to; there’s a lot of pain boiling under the game’s surface, and it’s obvious Pratelle wasn’t any happier before the androids than she is now that they’re here.
Her family is a big part of this. You occasionally smash floating phantoms that unleash cutscenes from Pratelle’s past, where she talks with her sister and her mother. These scenes can be mysterious, and they’re often very moving. In the nature of a Deconstructeam game, you’re sometimes asked to participate via tough questions, like which quality you think is most important in a mother or the one thing Pratelle wants her mother to stop hounding her about. Deconstructeam told The Guardian that “We think of Virtue like a walking simulator: you go through a space and solve the narrative, and the game isn’t designed around combat.”
As someone with a lot of complicated feelings about family, and who lately has been thinking a lot about what it will mean for my parents to one day pass away, I struggled with a lot of the scenes, which felt both intimate and harsh. Everyone keeps telling Pratelle that she’s being ridiculous, more disappointed in her than they are afraid, and that made it hard not to respond like the petulant teen I can sometimes revert to when I spend too much time with my own parents, a tendency that weighs on me as my parents age. It can feel absurd and cruel to stomp around smashing everything, especially when there doesn’t really seem to be anything wrongwith the androids, or when they’re nice to you or seem happy.
There was one moment when the android form of a nun asked me to spare some androids under her care; even with hints in her dialogue that something nefarious was going on, I just couldn’t bring myself to disobey her. I stormed through the village knocking down houses and destroying gaggles of androids, while the ones I’d left chatted and cavorted at the edge of my view. I felt uneasy just leaving them, and it was an actual effort not to drift over as I looked for more things to destroy. Even if you want to read the demo as a metaphor for technology against the developers’ own interpretation, it doesn’t feel goodto unleash hell. Besides the bartender android, whom it felt awesome to wreck because he was a jerk, I felt like an asshole as I ruined things, even as Pratelle urged me on.
I’m curious to see where the narrative I glimpsed in the demo goes, to find out more about how things got this way and why Pratelle is so pissed off about it all. I came away from the demo both intrigued and a little glad it was over, which seems to be the vibe Deconstructeam is often going for. Virtue and a Sledgehammeraims to release in 2026.
