How I Learned To Kill Everybody And Hate The Bomb:
Prepare To Meet Thy God

A chemical bomb is quarantined behind yellow ticker tape. “CRIME SCENE, DO NOT CROSS,” it reads. The illusion is only slightly marred by the large “WC” sign on the door the tape encloses.

A group of people stand to observe, with an excited glow from the nearby monitors illuminating their faces. While they are disallowed from going beyond the tape, a supposed bombs removal expert is the exception, and everyone is currently watching him struggle into a white overall, feet first.

It’s me.

I tried my best to role-play, but what the public normally doesn’t see during a live bomb removal is how many times their savior trips up while falling carefully into that protective suit; it’s not the most encouraging sight. In this case, it had become pure comedy. I was a clown.

Um, that glove is upside down…

After hoisting the suit’s hood over my head and around my hoodie, snapping the elastic of the gas mask onto the back of my neck and adjusting the safety goggles into clear view, I was nearly ready to duck under the yellow tape and enter the dreaded WC.

Slipping on delicate, white gloves to finish the look, the developer stares at me through the goggles, which were already beginning to cloud up with my hot breath.

“If you succeed, you’ll know,” he says to me. “If you fail, we’ll all know.”

I have a quick glance at the people eagerly awaiting my lonesome departure towards the bomb.

“Start your bidding,” I think to myself.

Then, “Prepare to meet thy god!” is boomed at my face as I turn back to the developer, who then passes me the wire cutters.

“Fuck,” I think in private.

The purpose of Art Game Weekend 4 was to create a game in 48 hours that experimented with and explored controllers and performance. The bomb removal game, named “Prepare To Meet Thy God,” was an intense and lonely experience for the player, terrifying for me. For the crowd watching through the fuzzy webcam feed of the bomb and the nervous hands cutting the wires attached to it, this was all just entertainment.

Apparently, I stepped rather meekly into the WC, whereas others were much more gallant in their approach. Once that door had closed behind me, I was alone. Tunnel vision took over so much that the first laptop I saw inside was the one I headed for, but when getting nearer, it seemed to show no signs of being a bomb, fake or not. Turning my head to look around the corner, I saw it – the unmistakeable red glow of a laughing, demonic skull. That was the bomb, and I had just over seven minutes to defuse it or kill us all.

I had no choice but to listen to the sounds of my breathing bouncing back at me in the gas mask as I crept up the narrow corridor. Upon reaching my ill-fated destination, I knelt down and stared at the screen for a while.

“Seven minutes is a long time,” I thought to myself.

In one box on the screen, there were five columns of numbers and letters scrambled, which, apparently, spelled out the solution to save us all. Tracing the line of these columns down and following the distinctive colors that highlighted them, there were the five wires. I had to cut four of these, and in the right order. Otherwise…

The timer dropped from six minutes to four minutes, and a low rumble descended on to the scene as I gulped with dread.

Also on the screen were a couple more boxes. One was the haunting timer ticking down; another was a series of images that felt like signatures the terrorist left behind at the sites of doom they left in their wake. The last box contained messages such as “Satan was here” and other daunting suggestions, among more light-hearted in-jokes, such as “McPixel would know what to do.”

There was a lot of information, and trying to assess how it all came together while eerie sounds played underneath my breathing, and my tunnel vision increasingly shrank as my goggles clouded up, resulted in my not being able to think straight at all.

After what seemed like ten minutes, but was closer to sixty seconds, I decided to risk cutting a wire randomly. I went with the red one, just a single “snip.”

A maniacal laugh sounded as my wire cutters clamped together. The timer dropped from six minutes to four minutes, and a low rumble descended on to the scene as I gulped with dread. I’d like to say that I recovered from this initial mistake, but I ended up just fading away behind a cloud in front of my eyes and snipping two more wires randomly. It was my demise.

After the third and final snip, I looked up at the screen to see the haunting red skull cackling at me. The terrorist had won, and the chemical bomb had been unleashed into the atmosphere. I got back up and prepared to meet the audience outside, who had watched my fumblings, much to their amusement, I imagined. Upon opening the door back into the real world and outside of this role-playing scenario, I discovered bodies strewn across the floor, motionless.

A single giggle was heard from someone in the back.

“Oh, you fuckers!” I shouted out to the apparently dead bodies, triggering a roar of laughter and scuffles.

Prepare To Meet Thy God is a role-playing game in which a single person has to attempt to defuse a bomb, solving a simple puzzle to do so. The preparation that involves clambering into a suit and goggles, the physical dark play space, and the method of actually cutting wires makes the whole experience very intense, should you play your role convincingly. But it’s a great spectator sport, too. When you’re among the crowd, watching through the webcam as the player snips the wires, there’s a shared smile of amusement, and discussions around psychological readings of their actions are common.

Unlike the real life equivalent, Prepare To Meet Thy God is much better when the player loses, and the bomb goes off, leaving just a hauntingly victorious laugh from the terrorist burning into their senses. I can still hear it, see it and feel it.