Project: Gorgon has recaptured the old-school MMO magic I thought was dead and gone by letting me ask a pig about its mother so hard it dies

You, reader of Terminally Online, will likely be reading this article during the day. However I think it’s imperative for you to know that when I wrote this very sentence, it was 3 am, unadvisedly out of work hours, because I was too excited to not write something down. In the short five hours I’ve played it, Project: Gorgon has done something magical.

Firstly, it has convinced me, a habitual cynic, that there is a world in which indie MMORPGs can thrive, rather healthily in fact, on concurrent playerbases of less than 3,000 players. Project: Gorgon’s managing it swimmingly. As a matter of fact, it’s done that since 2018, finally ambling out of early access this year.

Secondly, I’d like to point you to an article I wrote lamenting the death of the old-school MMO last year. In it, I wrote the following sentence: “I get wanting to go back, but we simply can’t. Not because we don’t want to, but because everything’s changed—the games, the ways we engage with them, and our own lives.”

This game has proven me completely and utterly wrong. I have, for the first time as a critic, had a full-blown Ratatoullie moment. I’ve been sent back in time to that era of innocence and complete ineptitude, where 11-year old me thought sitting down and simply typing /eat and /drink in World of Warcraft was how you restored health.

How has Project: Gorgon done this to me? By being completely, unrepentantly, and consistently mad—but it’s a controlled sort of madness, carefully maintained by a recursively-collapsing house of dopamine-sparking systems that have kept me up to this obscene hour of the night.

Wonderfully wild

Project: Gorgon, as an MMO, is not interested in a lot of things. It’s not interested in fairness, justice, mercy, or simplicity. It’s not interested in having much of a proper tutorial, beyond telling you how to hit stuff and equip items. It’s not interested in a smooth progression system, quest loop, or race to endgame.

Nothing better shows this off by the “tutorial” island: If you wander into a dungeon you’re not supposed to go into, a big, blaring alarm warns you that you are at risk of being cursed. I asked what this curse did, and it apparently causes zone bosses to spawn out of nowhere and gank the hell out of you. Awesome.

There’s also a helpful wizard who is interested in getting your amnesiac hiney off the island, but you need to find a series of coordinates for him to teleport you with—what happens if you enter a random string of digits? You can just get teleported goddamn anywhere. Project: Gorgon lets you make bad decisions and live with the consequences.

Even doing things the “intended” way like some sort of curse-allergic coward, there have been multiple times where I’ve died entirely unavoidable deaths in my last five hours. I have been mercilessly ganked by suddenly-spawning squads of walking brains. I have run straight into a level 30 skeleton in a dungeon I thought I was being directed to in an early-game zone. I have been violently hunted down by a slime I did not have the right damage type to fight.

There will be more deaths like this, but I’m not that mad, since beyond being told by a debuff that I should roleplay out a phobia of trees, it’s all part of the process. As a matter of fact, dying is a skill you can get better at, and I mean that entirely literally.

The beating heart at the center of Project: Gorgon lies in its skills and abilities system—as you play, you gather skills to train in from NPCs. Some of these are normal, like Swords, Fire Magic, and Unarmed.

Some of these are not normal, like Psychology, which lets me ask a Pig about its relationship with its mother so hard it dies. Speaking of which, Pig is also a skill. I know this not because I have Pig as a skill, but because Mycology gives me Pig points. Dying is also a skill (I was not joking), which gives you points in Necromancy, but also, at level 35, also gives you a point in Holistic Wellness. What does that skill do? I’ve got no idea, I’m still trying to figure out where to get Civic Pride.

Unlocking these skills isn’t straightforward, either. To unlock Fire Magic, I had to speak to a shirtless dancing man in a town square, then purchase a book of spells from him, then go burn a special material in a fireplace three times to unlock some spells. This, as I understand it, is one of the more straightforward skill unlocks.

Is Project: Gorgon balanced at its endgame? Are there cool builds you can theorycraft? The answer, I am rapidly discovering, is “probably, but you aren’t going to be caring about that for potentially hundreds of hours”, and even then I’m not convinced that’s the point.

Simply the quest

Project: Gorgon’s skills are an excuse to get you out there doing strange, baffling nonsense. Here’s an example of some of the things I have done in the past five hours:

• I have solved a math equation from a golem and got a lollypop.
• I have built a spore bomb and hurled it at a training dummy to get a secret key.
• I have tried, and failed, to get two hat-wearing psychic mantises to fall in love.
• I accidentally drank a bottle of ink. Nothing happened, it was just sort of embarrassing.
• I have had to find a bath because I was too stinky for the elf I was talking to.
• I have run a terrifying gauntlet through a dark, rainy forest to complete a cheese delivery.
• I have received directions from two dogs.

On that last bit—it has been years since I have independently asked for directions from a random stranger in an MMO, but while I was struggling to find the aforementioned town for that cheese delivery, I saw two player characters who were dogs. It is unclear if they were shapeshifted into dogs or cursed to become them, I did not pry.

However, I asked if they knew the direction to the nearest town. North, they told me. Thanks, I said, you’re good doggos. Awooo, one of them said.

Another time, I was accosted by a stranger who was looking for a pair of hat-wearing mantises (there are several, they were made by a wizard, it’s a whole thing). I had already killed them, and was able to point out that they were located halfway across the map from where they were standing, tucked in an abandoned warehouse.

Could both me and this person have consulted a wiki? Sure! But Project: Gorgon’s complete lack of insistence on linearity, fairness, or good sensibility engenders a shocking result: You want to talk to people about the nonsense that’s happening to you. Why go online when there’s a living, breathing person right there you can figure it out with? Why indeed, asks Project: Gorgon.

The result is an act of sorcery: Old-school magic reinvented for the modern era. Project: Gorgon tells you it’s all about discovery, and it bloody well means it. It is a chaotic, messy, irreverent, incoherent setting. It is a game filled with hidden portals and secrets and ways, I hear, to get yourself permanently cursed to be a deer unless you find help to defeat a boss. Or drink a “potion of un-deer” I found on a vendor.

It’s a grindy game, sure—but those grinds are designed to collapse into each other. If you want to learn or train a skill, chances are high you’ll get roped into five other tasks along the way. And, in a pleasingly Star Wars Online-y fashion, the investment you need to get these skills up means you’ll get players specialised in all sorts of different things.

It is absolutely wonderful so far. If you’ve ever yearned for the good old days of MMOs again, I advise you to go download the demo, give yourself over to the chaos, and see where Project: Gorgon takes you. It is well worth it.