Upon booting up Deadlock, Valve's latest MOBA/hero-shooter hybrid, players are treated to a hell of a visual: the New York City skyline plunged in shadows, illuminated only by the windows of its skyscrapers and a series of occult sigils. One in particular sits above the tallest building in the shot, and above it, a dark swirl builds in the clouds; ghastly pigeons perch on a nearby roof, emitting an eerie, green glow. There's clearly magic at work here, and it keeps sucking me back into the orbit of Deadlock's "Cursed Apple."
If you were to ask me, I'd tell you that New York City has always been a touch magical. At least, I was frequently led to believe it is. As a boy, I read books like Suzanne Collins' Gregor the Overlander, which imagined a vast Underland just beneath New York City's surface filled with humans, giant talking rats, and bats named after figures from Greek mythology and history. I also came up on Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series, which always supposed that Manhattan's skyline was merely a facade for the new home of Mt. Olympus, and that the larger-than-life figures and monsters of Greek mythology were not only real, but around every corner, disguised by a supernatural mist.
Plenty of other fiction has played with the trope of there being a magical society underneath the city as well. Look no further than Remedy Games' Control and its upcoming sequel, Resonant. In that world, the Federal Bureau of Control operates out of an imposing and impossible brutalist structure called The Oldest House that, despite being in the middle of Manhattan, magically conceals itself and all the supernatural goings-on occurring inside its shifting halls. Even Dimension 20's two seasons of The Unsleeping City deals with the thin veil between the mundane and the magical in New York City, and films like Night at the Museum have posited that when the city that never sleeps does in fact grab a wink, our most precious touchstones and pieces of history come to life and play behind our backs.
As far as I can tell, the trope I'm referring to is largely known as "hidden magic," and if I'm to believe all this media that has permeated my entire life, New York City has always hidden quite a lot of it: magic that extends beyond the city and extends to its people. It is no surprise then that, especially in the midst of hard times, I've fallen for Deadlock's magical take on the city I've always called home. That in the midst of constant attacks on sanctuary cities like it--havens for the marginalized who make such places worthy of mythologizing--I'm choosing to spend my evenings fighting (even if it is just virtually) to preserve its essence.
Deadlock's vision of New York is many things at once: It's a dash historical, partly in conversation with the myths about the city, and entirely magical. Look at the copper-tone Mansard roofs featured in Deadlock's skyline, an actual result of a zoning resolution from 1916 that can still be seen in spots throughout the city. Look at the density of alleys in Deadlock (and a lot of New York-adjacent media) versus the reality where Manhattan actually features very few of them. And yet it wouldn't feel like New York without these alleyways, which connect the lanes and subway systems of Deadlock's Cursed Apple. And then there are the patrons at either end of Deadlock's map, like the virtuous Archmother (who bears a striking resemblance to the Statue of Liberty) and the Hidden King, who vie for control and command their forces--Deadlock's rich cast of characters from every possible walk of life--to do battle for the soul of New York City.
Writing for PC Gamer, Lincoln Carpenter called this amalgamation of design choices, "a little bit steampunk, a little bit pulp horror, and a lot Fallen London; the wardrobes might be from the 1930s, but the black magic bodega still has an ATM sticker on the front door." Carpenter waffles between nomenclature like "Occultpunk" and "Neo Wiccanoir," but to me it's just a marvelous tapestry of all the influences, movements, and attitudes that have shaped the city over the decades.
Deadlock's setting is a throwback to New York City of yesteryear, donning a stylish early-to-mid 1900s influence that is evident in the Cursed Apple's architecture and layout. Glitzy signs advertising shows and clubs for the city's elite and highballers recall the Roaring Twenties, while the streets and dilapidated train stations themselves resemble the decay of the later decades. The signage and advertisements of businesses--everything from "Twin Omen Cigars" to an actual talisman shop and a meatpacking business called "Five Eyes"--pay homage to the city's timeless working class. All the while, floating railways cut through the skies and robotic sentries stand guard in the city streets. The Cursed Apple is a bit of everything: New York's past, present, and future, its rich and its poor, its average and its magical all thrown in a blender and served up. It's a surprise that it goes down so smoothly.
But there is more to Deadlock's Cursed Apple than a richly textured and varied sense of place. After all, this is a MOBA, and it's no fun playing one if the cast isn't as vibrant as its setting. Fortunately, Deadlock's combatants are quintessential New Yorkers, maintaining the city's reputation as a melting pot while having fun with zany fantasy and urban tropes. When working in tandem, the Cursed Apple and its denizens embrace and proudly show off the city’s innate capacity for magic.
Deadlock most recently caught my eye when it added six new characters to its already outsized retinue early this year. Among the additions to Deadlock's roster were a sleep-inducing and pajama-wearing little critter called Rem, the quintessential emo kid (and necromancer) Graves, and Celeste, a dazzling baton-wielding performer from Coney Island who runs enemies through with her unicorn horn.
This crew makes up just a fragment of the game's already expansive cast, which is intimidatingly large despite the fact that Deadlock is still a work-in-progress with no firm 1.0 release date in sight. The remainder of its cast--made up of robots, rocker billy goats, viscous blobs, magicians, and more--is just as molded by magic. Wraith is a mobster who wields a tommy gun and throws psychic playing cards at opponents; Ivy is an SMG-wielding gargoyle who's dressed like a newsie. They're each charming plays on fictional and fantastical characters one might see in a setting like New York.
As it turns out though, some part of Deadlock's magic has always been part of the city. Gargoyles have long been a fixture of New York architecture, explaining Ivy's presence among the roster. You know what else has long been a part of New York's immense tapestry? Hispanic and Latin-Americans, a community that Ivy also belongs to per the fully voiced Spanish lines I've heard her repeat in my time playing Deadlock. Imagine my surprise when the fantasy elements of the game didn't completely strip her of her ethnic identity and instead leaned into it, painting her as Spanish Harlem's very own Batman.
Ivy isn't alone in this mission of representing New York's varied peoples. The presence of Calico, Wraith, and Infernus right out the gate suggests that Valve knows better than to exclude Black people from its diverse roster. Yamato, for now, appears to be the sole representative of the city's Asian population, while Grey Talon seems to be alone in honoring Manhattan's indigenous roots. But at least these folks are here, rather than forgotten or hidden away.
Unlike most of the aforementioned examples of magical worlds within worlds, Deadlock's Cursed Apple diverges in a key way: its medium. As a game, the player has the doors thrown wide open to them to be woven into the fabric of these illustrious settings; to be part of the story rather than to simply have it relayed to them. And don't we all long to be part of something bigger and greater than just ourselves, even if it's just pretend? You can understand the appeal then, to queue up and return to the Cursed Apple or even just idle in its lobby or free-roam mode and admire what it is that we spend our matches fighting for.
Every time I take to Deadlock's streets, I feel I'm doing my part to keep the tradition alive. I bring it home with me. The magic city is no longer hidden, nor is it simply the thing of my imagination anymore. It is in Ivy's hands, Wraith's hands, in my hands, and in yours. At a time of abundant cruelty, where those characters--folks like myself, even--feel under attack by a political machine hellbent on demonizing them and their place in this society, it's refreshing to see a setting like Deadlock's Cursed Apple recognize us as part of the magic. The kind of hope that a vision of a city like the Cursed Apple presents feels a lot like magic, and it feels incredibly worth cradling.
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If you were to ask me, I'd tell you that New York City has always been a touch magical. At least, I was frequently led to believe it is. As a boy, I read books like Suzanne Collins' Gregor the Overlander, which imagined a vast Underland just beneath New York City's surface filled with humans, giant talking rats, and bats named after figures from Greek mythology and history. I also came up on Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series, which always supposed that Manhattan's skyline was merely a facade for the new home of Mt. Olympus, and that the larger-than-life figures and monsters of Greek mythology were not only real, but around every corner, disguised by a supernatural mist.
Plenty of other fiction has played with the trope of there being a magical society underneath the city as well. Look no further than Remedy Games' Control and its upcoming sequel, Resonant. In that world, the Federal Bureau of Control operates out of an imposing and impossible brutalist structure called The Oldest House that, despite being in the middle of Manhattan, magically conceals itself and all the supernatural goings-on occurring inside its shifting halls. Even Dimension 20's two seasons of The Unsleeping City deals with the thin veil between the mundane and the magical in New York City, and films like Night at the Museum have posited that when the city that never sleeps does in fact grab a wink, our most precious touchstones and pieces of history come to life and play behind our backs.
As far as I can tell, the trope I'm referring to is largely known as "hidden magic," and if I'm to believe all this media that has permeated my entire life, New York City has always hidden quite a lot of it: magic that extends beyond the city and extends to its people. It is no surprise then that, especially in the midst of hard times, I've fallen for Deadlock's magical take on the city I've always called home. That in the midst of constant attacks on sanctuary cities like it--havens for the marginalized who make such places worthy of mythologizing--I'm choosing to spend my evenings fighting (even if it is just virtually) to preserve its essence.
Deadlock's vision of New York is many things at once: It's a dash historical, partly in conversation with the myths about the city, and entirely magical. Look at the copper-tone Mansard roofs featured in Deadlock's skyline, an actual result of a zoning resolution from 1916 that can still be seen in spots throughout the city. Look at the density of alleys in Deadlock (and a lot of New York-adjacent media) versus the reality where Manhattan actually features very few of them. And yet it wouldn't feel like New York without these alleyways, which connect the lanes and subway systems of Deadlock's Cursed Apple. And then there are the patrons at either end of Deadlock's map, like the virtuous Archmother (who bears a striking resemblance to the Statue of Liberty) and the Hidden King, who vie for control and command their forces--Deadlock's rich cast of characters from every possible walk of life--to do battle for the soul of New York City.
Writing for PC Gamer, Lincoln Carpenter called this amalgamation of design choices, "a little bit steampunk, a little bit pulp horror, and a lot Fallen London; the wardrobes might be from the 1930s, but the black magic bodega still has an ATM sticker on the front door." Carpenter waffles between nomenclature like "Occultpunk" and "Neo Wiccanoir," but to me it's just a marvelous tapestry of all the influences, movements, and attitudes that have shaped the city over the decades.
Deadlock's setting is a throwback to New York City of yesteryear, donning a stylish early-to-mid 1900s influence that is evident in the Cursed Apple's architecture and layout. Glitzy signs advertising shows and clubs for the city's elite and highballers recall the Roaring Twenties, while the streets and dilapidated train stations themselves resemble the decay of the later decades. The signage and advertisements of businesses--everything from "Twin Omen Cigars" to an actual talisman shop and a meatpacking business called "Five Eyes"--pay homage to the city's timeless working class. All the while, floating railways cut through the skies and robotic sentries stand guard in the city streets. The Cursed Apple is a bit of everything: New York's past, present, and future, its rich and its poor, its average and its magical all thrown in a blender and served up. It's a surprise that it goes down so smoothly.
But there is more to Deadlock's Cursed Apple than a richly textured and varied sense of place. After all, this is a MOBA, and it's no fun playing one if the cast isn't as vibrant as its setting. Fortunately, Deadlock's combatants are quintessential New Yorkers, maintaining the city's reputation as a melting pot while having fun with zany fantasy and urban tropes. When working in tandem, the Cursed Apple and its denizens embrace and proudly show off the city’s innate capacity for magic.
Deadlock most recently caught my eye when it added six new characters to its already outsized retinue early this year. Among the additions to Deadlock's roster were a sleep-inducing and pajama-wearing little critter called Rem, the quintessential emo kid (and necromancer) Graves, and Celeste, a dazzling baton-wielding performer from Coney Island who runs enemies through with her unicorn horn.
This crew makes up just a fragment of the game's already expansive cast, which is intimidatingly large despite the fact that Deadlock is still a work-in-progress with no firm 1.0 release date in sight. The remainder of its cast--made up of robots, rocker billy goats, viscous blobs, magicians, and more--is just as molded by magic. Wraith is a mobster who wields a tommy gun and throws psychic playing cards at opponents; Ivy is an SMG-wielding gargoyle who's dressed like a newsie. They're each charming plays on fictional and fantastical characters one might see in a setting like New York.
As it turns out though, some part of Deadlock's magic has always been part of the city. Gargoyles have long been a fixture of New York architecture, explaining Ivy's presence among the roster. You know what else has long been a part of New York's immense tapestry? Hispanic and Latin-Americans, a community that Ivy also belongs to per the fully voiced Spanish lines I've heard her repeat in my time playing Deadlock. Imagine my surprise when the fantasy elements of the game didn't completely strip her of her ethnic identity and instead leaned into it, painting her as Spanish Harlem's very own Batman.
Ivy isn't alone in this mission of representing New York's varied peoples. The presence of Calico, Wraith, and Infernus right out the gate suggests that Valve knows better than to exclude Black people from its diverse roster. Yamato, for now, appears to be the sole representative of the city's Asian population, while Grey Talon seems to be alone in honoring Manhattan's indigenous roots. But at least these folks are here, rather than forgotten or hidden away.
Unlike most of the aforementioned examples of magical worlds within worlds, Deadlock's Cursed Apple diverges in a key way: its medium. As a game, the player has the doors thrown wide open to them to be woven into the fabric of these illustrious settings; to be part of the story rather than to simply have it relayed to them. And don't we all long to be part of something bigger and greater than just ourselves, even if it's just pretend? You can understand the appeal then, to queue up and return to the Cursed Apple or even just idle in its lobby or free-roam mode and admire what it is that we spend our matches fighting for.
Every time I take to Deadlock's streets, I feel I'm doing my part to keep the tradition alive. I bring it home with me. The magic city is no longer hidden, nor is it simply the thing of my imagination anymore. It is in Ivy's hands, Wraith's hands, in my hands, and in yours. At a time of abundant cruelty, where those characters--folks like myself, even--feel under attack by a political machine hellbent on demonizing them and their place in this society, it's refreshing to see a setting like Deadlock's Cursed Apple recognize us as part of the magic. The kind of hope that a vision of a city like the Cursed Apple presents feels a lot like magic, and it feels incredibly worth cradling.
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