Nibiru is a game published by Federico Sohns. Game material and content is reproduced here for review purposes and is owned by Araukana Media. Nibiru was the beneficiary of a crowdfunding campaign.
1. Every Individual Component Is The Best
In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we do not find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgement that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical term, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgement. )
Ludo
Nibiru is an outstanding game in its use of different artistic elements as part of the system. Every single choice in layout, art direction, illustration, writing and composition reinforces, communicates and establishes what the game is about. This all works together to make it a truly special example of the artform of roleplaying games; every element is a potential multiplier in its ability to facilitate the cooperative collaboration we all desire so much. None of those elements can be said to be strictly decorative — even the most abstract pieces.
The main priority of Nibiru is conveying a truly different world from our own, making us think about manufactured spaces (link map article here) and what world they dream of making, going for the weirdness of a space habitat while giving enough familiarity and recognition to guide you. It succeeds at this job flawlessly. It even has cross-section illustrations like one might find in one of Stephen Biesty’s children’s books.
While it is a pleasure to read Nibiru, and it is a toolbox of easy ways to keep hitting it off as you work together to craft the familiar strange world, it may not be the easiest book to navigate. The table of contents is not the most comprehensive, and the glossary is in an awkward place; even if the way everything is organized and presented makes sense in a “read through” of the text, quick consultation is bound to be an issue.
A point may be made that Nibiru is overproduced for the weirdness of the market expectations rather than to best serve the artform; while in no way lacking because of that, a less labor intensive version of the game would be just as powerful as an art-piece.
Brad
Nibiru is a gorgeous, full stop, the games design, layout and direction pour forward into a wonderful stream guiding you toward what the game is. Nothing is sacrificed on the altar to beauty or efficiency, instead, Nibiru dares to be both beautiful and efficient.
The layout is clear and distinct without ever being cluttered or over-designed, it also is still eye-catching, not being boring and never evoking the feeling of reading stereo instructions.
The biggest complaint I have is a very weak table of content and glossary, which can be tolerated with a pdf copy and the search function, but is still a negative mark.
2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At
Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly breakdown, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.
Lucrécia
Nibiru is a game that requires you to be willing to be challenged, unsure, and embrace some discomfort. Despite it working off from something eerie familiar to you to act as the building blocks of its weirdness, what it means with “familiar” is unlikely to be what the hegemonic culture first thinks. Rather than genre emulation or the familiarity of art-form, it draws from the basis for the familiar civilized society we breath in every day, as familiar and toxic as oxygen.
The main issue is that you will find your definition of the familiar challenging, and not what you may expect when someone mentions “the familiar”. Playing with global south, diaspora latine, germanic and anglosphere imperials, there are very stark differences in the assumptions they carry and their replies to what the game asks of them. This divide may be no more obvious than the nods of understanding when entering the first city-state, versus the disappointment bafflement of a player going “This is not at all like The Expanse, why is this game saying it draws on The Expanse?”1.
To put it bluntly, the game requires you to get very comfortable with not knowing things, and to accept some things will never get definitive answers. “Play to find out” may be such a truism in the contemporary art-form that it does not even mean anything; it is part of the central dialogue of Nibiru. You will neatly grasp how something works, the vibes of a place, and how it makes sense in a scientific and cultural sense; but you will not find out or known much. Humanity has been through countless generations in the Skyless World and while they have become able to become part of it, they do not really know it; and to put you there, Nibiru carefully crafts the same experience for you. There is no safety in “It works like this on media X”, or “from the mechanics I know these are the limits of imagination”, or the trappings of hegemonic genre emulation. You need to accept you will never know Nibiru, but you will know enough to be part of Nibiru. One can find themselves experiencing artistic vertigo.
Despite that, one needs to get a grasp of the vibes and beats of the world of the Skyless World. The game text may do a lot of the heavy work, but all of you will need to be open to it.
Brad
Nibiru takes you on a journey even just as as gamemaster. I normally dislike when a rulebook has setting information before any sort of mechanical and gameplay explanation. I think Nibiru is one of the few games that it works for, because it begins to give you the strange deja vu that will come to characterize your experience of Nibiru. A dream-like explanation of a place that seems grounded and realistic, where if you are familiar with its inspirations you will immediately grasp them, and if you are only familiar by osmosis you will find yourself confused.
3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About
Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and creates a common space for creation.
Ludo
Nibiru is a game about Vagabonds, memory-less wanderers, exploring a mysterious space stations. They have unique bonds to the space station but lack any sense of belonging to the many city-states and societies within this skyless, contained world.
Brad
Nibiru is about its Vagabonds, people who have awoken without memories, but strange sensations calling them to unusual places, they have secret connections to the massive space station they dwell on, but lack relationships with the other groups on board.
4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About
What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists on a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.
Lucrécia
Nibiru is a game about overcoming social death.
It is a weird quirk of roleplaying games2 that the imaginary of characters is either antisocial/asocial to an existing world of supplements or worldbuilding, or performs socialization that demands a tabula rasa approach to what the world gets to be. Nibiru explores those assumptions about how one relates to the world, and which ways collaborative storytelling with a complex world has to occur. In pop games, or the adventurer-colonizer genre, one is expected to be an outsider — tourist or robber; in even games showcasing social connections, they are a resource to use and/or something that is created character/player facing (your bonds, your ties, your background, plot-relevant).
Nibiru is far from the first game to attempt to create a strange, grand world. However, it stands out by abandoning the usual aspects of doing so — worldbuilding, lore, genre assumptions/emulation, etc. — in lieu of building of supporting types of play mapped to the world and defined by relationships while such things happening independent of the player characters rather than in their service. Vagabonds have no kin, no people, no family.
Vagabonds do not belong.
The immediate reaction to that is that this is undesirable, or at least, the same model. But alas, Nibiru goes from that to speak about social death. The key point is the role of memory for the Vagabonds.
Besides Afterlife: Wandering Souls, no other games work with memory like Nibiru; oddly, both use it to speak about different types of death. The setup of the Vagabond is a form of social death that serves well cooperative storytelling; overcoming social-death is something that requires complete surrender and vulnerability to those socially-alive. Vagabonds are dead, and they cannot plant social life in a “found family” or enclave; they need others to escape the Underworld. The returned and recalled memories offer some form of control, a way to exist in social undeath; together, this creates many paths to escape social-death, by negotiating vulnerability through the game mechanics to other players, the player of the Vagabond and the societies and peoples of the Skyless World3.
This antisocial positioning is mirrored in the foreboding changes to the societies of the Skyless World. The city-states of the core do not know scarcity, and their struggle is of identity, culture and religious. The settlers in outreaches, however, cannot take anything for granted, and their communities are subject to all types of precarity and dangers. However, this lack is manufactured — just like the station itself. Rather than being provided with all they need to thrive, colonies are kept by city-states in a state of artificial scarcity; an emerging merchant class uses debt to turn settlers into an enslaved class that is used to create a new world in their vision. Diametrically opposed, scavengers reject the society of debt and the cruel post-scarcity city-states that force it upon them, making enclaves and their own culture in the deepest recesses of the station.
The people of the city-states, the colonies and the Vagabonds have found themselves undead, no longer belonging to the Skyless World. They cannot save themselves. But perhaps they can leave themselves vulnerable to be resurrected by others.
Brad
Nibiru is about journeys, and about life-changing ones at that. In Nibiru your Vagabond cannot recover memories by remaining static, you cannot ever answer a single question by giving up your vagabonds wander and becoming a farmer or a fisherman. You will never recover your past by just selling your sword as a brutal killer for hire, you have a Beacon provided by your habitat, but it only defines some of the memories you can regain.
Vagabonds cannot rest because of Enki’s Convenant, a group that actively hunts them wherever they go, condemned to live a life apart, and forced to run from place to place discovering more and more about the world as they go. Vagabonds must journey to achieve self actualization, they must rely on each other because without another Vagabond you are alone.
You journey towards an uncertain future, fleeing dangerous enemies, but you have people who understand your condition, and every step, even the painful ones comes to define you more and more.
Because it is Nibiru, Jerry. Not The Expanse.
Once again, “only art-form whose modern version of it only existed under neoliberal hegemony.
Afterlife: Wandering Souls is also an excellent contrast on this. As being about death and the meaning of existence and memory, it is very much focused inwards in the soul, memory, direct connection and a journey of externalized transformation. This creates an interesting contrast, where while you don’t belong to a place, it is because it is not for human souls; getting tangled in the life of the peoples that belong is a trap, to keep you from moving on into another form of existence.