Ramen in the Rain with Friends: The Greatness of Quadrilateral Cowboy

(NOTE: This post contains spoilers for Quadrilateral Cowboy)


“Scenes of unimportance, photos in a frame. Things that go to make up a life.”

-Genesis, “Home By the Sea”

”True friends. You only get a few.”

-Masha Tupitsyn



Quadrilateral Cowboy from Blendo Games begins with a train in the past that is hurtling into the future.

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Listening to “Clair de Lune” on your state-of-the-art Vinylman portable record player, you hop from your hoverbike onto the train, make your way to a not-so-secure vault, bust it open, snatch the goods inside, and return to your bike, speeding off to freedom with your two companions, a successful piece of work by the three women of Impala Solutions.

And that train just keeps on going.

In a piece about Blendo Games’ previous release Thirty Flights of Loving, I wrote,

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just linger forever in that one perfect moment, that moment when you held love in your arms and freedom seemed to stretch before you endlessly?

Alas, time waits for no one.

In Quadrilateral Cowboy, it still doesn’t, but the character of time’s passage is very different. Thirty Flights featured a trio of criminal specialists violently splintered by jealousy and betrayal, and time in that game leapt back and forth in jarring smash cuts to communicate the emotional and psychological connections between the moments before and after everything came crashing down. Quadrilateral Cowboy, in a delicious contrast, features a trio of criminal specialists whose bonds endure as the decades pass.

You don’t explicitly know that their friendship lasts until the game’s final moments, but I sensed the strength of their connection, despite the fact that the characters never speak a clear word to each other. Or perhaps in a way I sensed it because they don’t. Quadrilateral Cowboy gives us hints of the history these women share in photos…

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 but the lack of dialogue interactions puts the emphasis on presence. Shared spaces and shared moments. You see your friends just lounging…

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and reading.

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Just working…

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…and working out.

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Thich Nhat Hanh has said,

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(Images taken from Masha’s blog)

And where most games are plot-driven affairs that focus on moments of heightened drama, Quadrilateral Cowboy is very clearly interested in these three women and the work that they do.

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The game’s more traditional levels, the jobs–

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–have us doing the labor, the work of Impala Solutions.

But between the jobs are the mundane aspects of having a job, even if that job is anything but mundane.

Waking up and getting ready.

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The morning carpools. Changing the oil in the flying machine. That sort of thing.

As with many jobs, there are stolen moments of fun, too, like a game of badminton on the roof during sunset. 

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By having us play these ordinary moments, moments that just wouldn’t happen in most games because they don’t serve to advance plot in a meaningful way, Quadrilateral Cowboy grounds us in the actual lived experiences of its characters in a way that most games just have no interest in doing.

I knew from the moment I heard “Auld Langsyne” playing when I first settled in to the headquarters of Impala Solutions that Quadrilateral Cowboy was concerned with the passage of time. But I was unprepared for just how powerful its concerns with time would ultimately be. 

After one last, spectacular job that sees you infiltrating a satellite, you and your friends enjoy some ramen in the rain together, a celebration of a job well done.

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Then a new scene begins and we see ourselves in a mirror, and we know that the game has leapt forward a few decades and that we are old. 

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And “Clair de Lune” is playing, just like it was on that first job, so many years ago.

And we see the gadgets that we used, now covered in cobwebs. And I felt a connection to them because of how they served me in the gameplay, but that gameplay had me doing the labor of Impala Solutions, which was the creation of these three brilliant women who bonded at Klamath Crick Adult Night School and went into business together. So these gadgets also meant something because these women had created and used them together, back in the glory days of their business.

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And we see photos, and we know that, whatever may have become of Impala Solutions and whatever may have become of the other connections in their lives, the friendship between these women endured.

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I looked something up on Quadrilateral Cowboy’s Steam forum page and saw people expressing frustration that the gadgets the game introduces don’t get more use, and suggesting that procedurally generated content could extend the life of the game. This made me think of Austin Walker’s very good piece about No Man’s Sky, out this week, a game that it seems some players hope to lose themselves in forever. “The last game they’ll ever need.”

But god, I don’t want a last game, any more than I want a last book or film. How sad to even want that. No one creator or team can possibly tell every story worth telling, or give us every world worth exploring, no matter how great its procedural generation algorithms might be. I’m very much looking forward to No Man’s Sky, but I doubt there will be any detail in it that suggests a larger culture as effectively as the handcrafted little glimpses we get of Quadrilateral Cowboy’s world suggest a rich and fascinating whole. 

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I’m less concerned with games that I keep coming back to hour after hour after hour, session after session, and more interested in games that keep coming back to me. Whether I spend 4, 40 or 400 hours in a game, I want worlds that give me something real that I can take back with me when I jack out. Quadrilateral Cowboy took up exactly as much of my time as it needed to. 

Austin writes of No Man’s Sky,

I hope that its mathematic geometries woo me, and that its endless beaches and skies seduce me. But I do not need transcendence. NMS doesn’t need to be groundbreaking—we broke this ground a long time ago. Instead, I want it to be another solid brick in the wall of culture and expression that we’ve been building for a long time.

As for myself, I do want transcendence of a sort. I do want groundbreaking of a sort. Specifically, I want games to be the axe for the frozen sea within us. And I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m turning 40 soon and I realize now, in a way that I once didn’t, that one day I will blink…

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…and find myself at 70 and all I will have if I am lucky are connections and memories, and that most of the journey will have fallen away.

Quadrilateral Cowboy, it seems to me, is about what we’re left with in the end. The moments we remember. The freedom of badminton on the roof during the magic hour. The pleasure of ramen with friends on a rainy night after a job well done. Sharing space with someone. Giving them our presence. Doing things together. 

What really matters and why.

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