Sometimes I find myself retreading the steps of a past journey. When exactly this will happen or how exactly it will play out — these things are difficult to say in advance. Perhaps these days I am even more susceptible to rumination as I spend much of my time thinking about the slippery slopes of nostalgia. In the case of World’s End Club, I knew from the beginning that the narrative would (somehow) be centered around a trip through Japan. And so, expectedly, I became a rather contemplative companion to the Go-Getters Club as its members tried to make their way back to Tokyo.
World’s End Club tells a tale full of unlikely events and emotional upheavals that seem far removed from my own real-world encounters then or now, but its recognizable locations unearth mental images that go beyond the immediately unfolding story. They remind me of a liminal time, when things had not yet changed so thoroughly, even before the pandemic. And while their in-game equivalents bear only a fairly superficial resemblance to their real-world counterparts, they still manage to awaken memories of a point when opportunities had already been lost and when this realization became impossible to ignore.
This is a very personal journey for the cast, but also for me. Seemingly innocuous scenes stand out, like the one depicted in the screenshot above. What is meant to be a purely descriptive line is followed by the recollection of an island-spanning day of cycling — exhausting in all the good ways. Autobiography buries geographical explanation and suddenly there is a canvass on which little moments and strange anecdotes enrich the narrative in a distinct manner: With bits and pieces from a time that was oh so different or maybe, actually, not so different at all. It is confusing of course, which is probably the reason why it stands out so clearly.
Maybe there is also an idiosyncratic juncture here at which, amicably, my travelling past and my videogaming present meet. It may be the most plausible way for the two to come together. Today life, as it focuses on a PhD and a stream, is sedentary by necessity. And too often, I feel as if I am simply going through the motions. But this does not change the fact that a past version of myself, an earlier version of who I am now, is still lingering somewhere in the forests of Shikoku or on a train between Osaka and Himeji. These reminders are as impactful as they are inevitable. With the help of an eccentric group of outcasts I am able to remind myself of this past version and bring it a little closer to the present, at least temporarily.
In addition to all their inherent aspects — diegesis, gameplay, graphics, music — , the evocation of my own past can quickly become a vital piece in any videogame experience. In World’s End Club, peculiarly, I found a little bit of myself among the surrealism of everything else surrounding the names of familiar places. And as I played and read through the story of the Go-Getters Club, I ended up doing the same with a fragment of my own story. A story of lost opportunities, relinquished hopes, and unspoken goodbyes. Now I get to hum the club’s adorable anthem to myself as I try to find a way out of my own little peri-apocalypse…
