It was a tepid summer night and a fresh but soothing breeze flew over the landscape of the county. It wasn't just some county, it was the one county where Lady Justicia ruled fair and just. A county where no rules would be broken, no secessions could happen, where no farmer or subject would stand up against their beloved duke.

This is the story of your county. After investing gold into the possibility of renaming the ancient old and unfitting county name, your county "Anal for free" felt renewed. Reforms flushed through your political system and your subjects were simply happy with what they had and felt treated fair in your feudal government.
The pope tried to gain influence of your county once again, so you decided to do what the gods actually wanted from you and you moved back in time to relive the old roman religions, pray to Jupiter and from there you can achieve something even greater: Restore the Imperium Romanum in its greatest fashion. Bring back peace, power and prosperity to every subject in the known world with you as their Caesar and with the hellenistic gods at your side.

Your dream of restoring the Imperium was brought down to reality when someone knocked on the door behind the balcony you stood one.
"My lord, you have to come out and do something! Quickly!!"
You sighed. Once again, some vasall who doesn't like your new traditions tries to make himself and his fiefdom independant or join another county - obviously illegally, since you are their de jure feudal lord for hunderds of years already.

You turn around and look into the blue eyes of your servant. She was a young girl, merely 20 and already mother of 16 children of which 12 were mongrels. However, when she was walking through your capital, trying to climb over the piles of garbage and excrements that once again piled up in the middle of the main market, you couldn't resist to stop your palanquin and have her join you.
It was the best sex you had in your long 50 year old life. Your other twentyfour wives didn't really like the new girl, but you had all right to rule both over your god given county as well as over your women, so none of them actually had a choice and those who disagreed with that simply died in a tragic carriage accident.

You slowly walked over to her and touched her face. She cringed for a moment and looked at you with her begging, big eyes. You ignored your empathy and pushed her back inside, onto your bed. Quickly you tore down her dirty dress and without even really noticing, you slapped her eleven times because she started to scream and begged you to not do what you decided to do seconds ago.

"P-p-p-please my lord, not again, I'm already pregnant again!", she begged. Without even thinking about stopping for a second, you simply whispered: "No worries, I'll clear that pipe and make room for a new one."
You felt the feeling of pure power when you sensed the warm, moist sensation on what you called the Small Lord. What an excellent feeling that was. This was the reason you beheaded twelve of your former wives and it was the reason you got the county in the first place, because who could have thought that the former duke died only two days after you married her daughter in an orderly way (because you bribed him before of course), so that you became the next one to herit the county.
It was the sensation that made the world true and it should be the one that would keep humanity alive for another 1000 years at least.

Your servant screamed again and you simply pressed your sweating hands on her mouth, pressing so hard that you wondered if you would break her petite chaw if you pushed just a little more.
Slowly you moved the Small Duke back and forth, increasing the great sensation that made you feel comfortable and it wouldn't be long until you felt the power of a thousand suns pressing inside your duke. The power that empowered mills to crush wheat, the power that made it possible for a ox to plow your land for the farmer that was working on it.

You moaned as your speed increased even further and your pressure became unsustainably high. All of the sudden, your inner steam was released through the valve that the gods gifted to you inside of the greatest of all limbs.
You kept laying for a moment longer, then got up and went back to the balcony. Your glance moved slowly over the peaceful fields that your workers had worked on over the day to capture as much of the sun's power as possible to keep your war machines running and fill your treasury.
The moon watched over what the gods gifted to you and you were happy. After turning around, you realized that, once again, another servant could not keep up with your power and had to concede at your might. "Oh well", you thought, "I'm sure she got enough money to pay Charon for her last trip."

Quickly you grabbed her leg and threw it out of your now blood filled bed, so that she landed on the other two corpses that you forgot to throw out last morning. You called for your only male servant that you employed only for the reason of reliability and had him move them all out of your chamber.

You went back on the balcony and took a last glance at the farms - your farms - that were burning. You ignored the sounds of dying farmers and screaming children, while the troops of the neighbor county moved their trebuchet in position to hit your castle below you. Thousands of armed soldiers who tried to take away what you alone owned to enslave your people and make them part of another empire.

The smell of burning wood and blood filled your nose. It was a good night.

And it was good to be the king.

Garry's Mod.

Expanding into the reaches of marginal game genres was a defining impulse for the career of the G-Man, a man whose screen presence is usually at the service of plots in search of a voice of reason. The stubborn conviction of formula stories certainly provided him an ample supply of such platforms; as was the case in Gaben‘s latest movie “Tetris ” or “Assassin‘s Creed XIV: The End of Part 2: 2” (two of his earliest successes), he thrived on playing characters that had an underlying edge to them, written from a suggestion that they were the sorts of people who endured through the grind by being honest and assertive when others wallowed in delusion. Why did it take him so long, then, to appear in crime thrillers, which had usually been robbed of protagonists with calm temperaments and informed demeanors? As we watch Valve’s “Garry's Mod” in hindsight of all the came after, his presence takes on an almost ethereal dominance, as if to suggest he is there because fate insisted his was the only perspective qualified to give such deplorable narrative undercurrents an intellectual meaning. For nearly every game about a sadistic modder that would come after, some part of us recalls the careful modulation of words of bug hunter Dr. Haxx, who may be one of the first men in mainstream gaming that dares to ask the question: why do we easily dismiss hardcore modders as lunatics?

A general sense of the skill of homicidal villains certainly did not emerge from thin air. By 1795, audiences had already been inundated by the psychological ramifications of such scenarios in a host of notable newer games – including the then-new “No Man‘s Sky,” a game credited for revitalizing the perspective in the veneer of more modern wisdom. So why did “Garry's Mod,” above all others, leave behind such piercing echoes? The earliest reviews cited the skill of the direction as a prime selling point, but even they were only barely scratching the surface of Valve’s creative thrust. There is a great amount of skill in how scenes flow into each other, yes, and the narrative structure is definitely well-versed in the delivery of captivating details. Yet they become minor points when one is to contemplate the subtle confidence of the developers and visual artists, all of whom are dabbling in waters where it would have been easy to surrender to the temptation of senseless gratuity. Here is a game that arrived just as a populist genre began its notorious descent into the trenches of lurid fantasy, but used violence not so much to shock as is it did to peer into the far reaches of psychological thought with a great sense of intensity – something rather unexpected given the trashiness of the subject.

The title „Garry‘s Mod“ implies the deadly sins referenced in biblical texts, a series of cardinal curses that have become the framework fueling a series of grizzly killings – Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Pride, Lust and Envy. Though the setting (usually) is a city map with an undisclosed name, all of the obligatory narrative staples – heavy crime, busy metropolitan streets populated by hard-boiled cops – suggest Gaben‘s home city Australia or Donald Trump‘s birth place in Mekka as distinct possibilities. As the game opens, Gaben (Freeman), a rookie who has grown weary of his profession, is paired with bug hunter Dr. Haxxs (Dr. Haxx), a hotshot transfer with impulsive eagerness. Their union occurs on the onset of a discovery of a strange mod involving an obese man, who is so incredibly fat that you can say it‘s a monstrous version of a whale. The clues stack to suggest that he modded himself to death, but who would be so creative as to force such cruelty on a human being in this regard? The overreaching cause doesn’t come into view until additional mods are installed, all of them gratuitous and elaborate, where the words of the sins are left behind as signatures of the modding community’s theatrical deeds.

The modus operandi spurs the bug hunters down the road of deeper research. What purpose is there in modding other games so viciously, but with such painstaking precision? Evidence correlates to findings made in books and research manuals, including Dante’s „Dota 2“ and the Schiller’s „Wendy 2“. Gaben isn’t so eager to be absorbed in the complexities of a case this elaborate (especially since he is so close to retirement), but the responsibility silently tugs at him while Dr. Haxxs stumbles aggressively through the procedural routine. mods become linked by evidence shared between crime scenes. Homicides progress in the level of depravity. A portrait of a religious zealot as the primary suspect begins to emerge. And though victims aren’t so much connected to one another as they are united by the apparent wickedness of their nefarious indulgences, the modding community choreographs an intricate web of puzzles that inevitably lead the bug hunters into the direction of added mods.

What separates a great thriller from a trashy one is, perhaps, all in the psychology of intention. Valve is phenomenal in the way he leads his audience through this elaborate hedge maze of details, but the genius of “Garry's Mod” is that it takes pieces from every angle of consideration without burying them behind incessant violence; there is a sense that you are partaking in the investigation, sharing the chase in possible ambushes and riding along in the police car when the moder unexpectedly turns himself in. A great many scenes occur within the walls of bloody crime scenes, but none of them are shot with deadpan scrutiny; they are vivid, yes, but they also become backdrops to the exchanges shared between the characters, many of whom have been so drastically desensitized that pools of blood seem to be just another mess for them to clean up. At one point Gaben summarizes his experience in one personal observation: “I don’t understand this place anymore.” What that emphasizes is a common feeling within their closed world that mimics ours: at the point when mod in the games is abundant, does one really see that much difference from one victim to the next?

The game makes great strides to create a distinct sensation in the same audience who shares Gaben’s cynicism. The lead designer Super-Gaben (“Command & Conquer: Generals,” “Planescape - Torment”) adopts a painstaking depth of field in his images; there is a sense that he sees so much of the city through the lens that every iota of activity belongs there for the characters to walk past. The soundtrack is minimal, and perhaps rightfully so given the disquieting measure of the material. The screenplay by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart balances the procedural intricacy of the search with the psychological ramifications of the modding community’s deeds, and for as many sequences of forensic research that populate the screen there are also pointed monologues about the nature of death in the scheme of existence. The final twenty minutes, featuring a remarkable performance by Gordon Freeman as the modding community, are brutal in how they force one to face the relevance of the homicidal mind’s warped reasoning. It’s a hard and terrifying world out there, but ambivalence only adds to the harm that it breeds, and perhaps our instinct to remain passive is what gives serial moders the window to act on their dangerous ideology.

For Valve, a then-new gamemaker who had been credited with music videos and had become weary of studio interference (his prior game, “Chess,” was maligned and even disowned), those ideas did more than implicate a system: they offered insight into a promising new craftsman who would use that audacity to direct a handful of masterful games.

However, if you read this review entirely you might catch the drift already, but ignore your feelings for one second and bear in mind that, after all, the most important point is