This article contains spoilers for Hi-Fi Rush.
Going intoHi-Fi RushI expected a fun rhythm action game that looked like a lost Dreamcast classic with the aesthetic of a Saturday morning cartoon. I didnotexpect the most pointed skewering of crunch culture I can recall seeing in a triple-A game. But I got that, too.
The game sets up Vandelay Technologies, a massive corporation, as the villain, so a little critique of capitalism isn’t shocking. But, the extent to which the levels involving Zanzo — Vandelay’s head of Research and Development who sports a dread-like mop of green cables for hair — target the kind of creative director who forces their staff to crunch by constantly introducing new ideas without regard for the product’s pipeline or budget, was certainly a surprise. It feels extremely familiar after years spent reading story after story about the debilitating crunch behind the scenes at well-known studios.
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In Hi-Fi Rush, spunky protagonist Chai has to infiltrate Zanzo’s department, a series of labs located deep below the surface of the earth. As you make your way through, you quickly discover that all of Zanzo’s robot employees are ridiculously overworked. At one point, Zanzo even comes over the loudspeaker to announce that he’s added an eighth day to the week, on which his employees will be expected to report for work.
In a smart twist, the level doesn’t end in a boss fight because Zanzo can’t afford it. At one point, Chai and co. figure out that depleting Zanzo’s budget is the surest way to defeat him. The R&D leader loves to show off, so he’ll order his employees to set up expensive simulations for Chai to battle, or to make virtual volcanoes in the middle of the level. He is the idea guy, and everyone else has to work doubletime to implement his ideas. He’s not empathetic to their plight. He won’t feel their pain, even when one robot you meet tells you that it turned its legs off so it could save energy and work longer — a detail that reminded me of recent reports that overworked Twitter employees were sleeping in the office after Elon Musk’s takeover.
No, Zanzo isn’t going to stop grinding his workers into dust because he feels bad. As you play, there’s a bar at the top of the screen keeping track of his budget. When he throws a flashy fight your way, a chunk of the budget will drain away. At the end of the level, Zanzo has a climactic battle against a giant robot planned, touting the “mixture of spectacle and quality” he has been able to produce with “unrestricted creative freedom.” But, as he’s introducing the fight, his budget ticks down to $0, and a graphic appears behind him that reads “Defunded.” And for an idea guy with no apparent skills of his own, defunded means defeated.
It’s a smart twist. And, though I can’t speak to working conditions atTango Gameworks, this kind of satire is easier to swallow in a game like Hi-Fi Rush than it would be inGrand Theft Auto 6. Hi-Fi Rush is one of the more modestly scoped triple-A games I’ve seen in recent years. It isn’t shooting for expensive, time-consuming photorealistic graphics, it doesn’t take place in a big open-world, and though I haven’t finished it yet,HowLongToBeat.comclocks it as taking between 11 and 13 hours to beat.
For the past few years, atweetfrom podcast producer Jordan Mallory has often done the rounds on Twitter whenever there are reports of crunch at various studios. It reads: “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.” I can’t speak to whether Hi-Fi Rush fulfills all those criteria — again, I don’t work at Tango Gameworks — but its short length, modest scope, and stylized aesthetic point to another way for triple-A games. One that has no budget for the industry’s Zanzos.
