Image: Deconstructeam, Selkie Harbor & Devolver Digital

There's a lot of speculative sci-fi out there tackling the subject of 'what if we could digitize our brains into artificial bodies' - a subject all the more relevant these days. Virtue and a Sledgehammer, the latest from Deconstructeam (Gods Will Be Watching, The Red Strings Club, etc.) and Selkie Harbor, wrestles with the ethics, philosophy, and realities of this messy subject, while always giving you the option to end the debate with a twenty-pound hammer-blow to a robot face. It's out today, and three hours of powerful, emotional writing wrapped in deeply cathartic violence.

Virtue and a Sledgehammer is the story of Pratelle, a tattooed, burly Spanish engineer. She's come back to her old hometown to set things right, with two things in her car's trunk - her mother's corpse and a massive sledgehammer. There's a family debate that needs to be worked out, possibly violently, and a lot of messy feelings to work out. There's still love here, but hate too, and deep resentments. See, Pratelle's sister has gone a bit Mad Scientist, seemingly devising a way to distil human consciousness down into a predictive model that can live on in mass-produced robot bodies.

The whole town has been converted. Apparently consensually, but even that is left a little ambiguous. The former people are shambling around like cheap plastic ghosts with CRT monitors for faces, their ordinary conversations occasionally interrupted by strange segues and non-sequiturs. The facade of humanity slipping, revealing them to be chatbots on legs; hollow facsimiles haunting a dead town. Some of them want to talk. Some of them want to bargain. Some want to tell Pratelle how life is good now, free of pain and anxiety.

And when Pratelle comes rolling in, swinging that sledgehammer and demolishing entire buildings, few hesitate to murderously turn on her, chiding her as if she's just ignorant of the damage being done, while others bark echoed misogynistic and racist resentment, while the forest in the town's shadow teems with robots that crave nothing more than to hunt or kill the living. Because it's a man's desire to hunt and destroy, or so the machine echoes of these men say.

It's the stuff of nightmares (and the dream of so many billionaires, seemingly), and scouring each map for fragmented memories further bombards Pratelle with images, coalescing eventually into full flashback scenes where you get to see how she got to this point. Revealing the complex, messy relationship between her, her mother, and her sister, giving you dialogue options to dial in what kind of person Pratelle is. But the largest decision is whether you swing that hammer down on everything in your path.

I chose to. Every time. Even as some of the robots pleaded for their life, or told their stories of being in constant pain in life, now free to exist unburdened. One gardener robot in the forest speaks of having come to appreciate life in all of its forms all the more, even as just outside, murderous, hateful machines promise to tear 'that bitch' limb from limb, as if that's their only driving impulse.

This being a Deconstructeam joint, there's more to it than just raging against the machine, of course. Over the course of its three-hour playtime, it delves into some gut-wrenching stories on generational trauma, inherited evils, and a desire to carve your existence into a world that seems hell-bent on rejecting you. Pratelle is a misfit. A vivid character that sleepy rural Spanish life rejects wholesale, and yet her family kept her there, until that very family came unraveled.

The game holds up a mirror to a lot of things, and asks you to think about who both you are, and the character that you're puppeteering through her chaotic, violent rampage. As a game, mechanically, Virtue and a Sledgehammer is a bit thin, with only a couple of ways to swing the hammer and only three enemy types to clobber, however satisfyingly. While emergency lights tend to lead you towards the next objective, it's still quite possible to get lost and turned around. And the powerful script absolutely screams for voice acting that is never heard.

As a game, Virtue and a Sledgehammer is flawed and raw and perhaps a bit thin. As an extended movie-length narrative experience, I still find myself thinking about it regularly a couple of weeks later. Perhaps one of these days I'll go back to replay it and see what happens if I don't take out all my frustrations at the world (and Pratelle's world, one which - as a straight white guy who has lived a mostly-comfortable life - I can't claim to have experienced), but that won't be for a while. I need to sit on this one for some time.

Virtue and a Sledgehammer is out now for £14/$15, with both a demo and a standalone prologue (highly recommended) available. It's also available in a whole raft of discount bundles with some similarly uncompromising games with Things To Say, like Penguin Colony, Mouthwashing and Threshold.