Today, Mediatonic bragged one of the levels for Autumn guys‘upcoming fourth season. The new stage, ‘Skyline Stumble,’ looks pretty fun with its gravity-based jokes and bean-sized bumpers, but it instilled an invasive, unshakable thought in me: man, we’ve been real. doing this for a while, huh?
Last August Autumn guys took the world by stormThanks to a streamer-based marketing campaign and a month as one of the ‘free’ PS Plus titles – where it got later the most downloaded PS Plus game ever by the way. It seemed like everyone was talking about it Autumn guysand for good reason. Autumn guys served as a buzzing distraction at a time when it felt pretty good to be enraptured by buzzing distractions.
Autumn guys is still there, and I’m less sold about its power now as a bustling distraction.
As bad as it is now, the scenery from Covid-19 was very different last summer back then Autumn guys came out. On August 4, 2020, the game’s official release date, New York’s moving average fluctuated at less than one-tenth of what it is today. It stayed that way for the rest of August and much of September, before hitting above 1,000 again on October 1, 2020. The pandemic never abated, of course, but for a solid two months the other side could be seen.
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It’s not that easy to feel like this today.
In New York City, where I live and where Kotaku based, we are in the throes of a massive second wave of the pandemic. By most measures, despite one steady revival in vaccinations it is worse than the first wave that initially hit our city last spring. According to the New York Times covid-19 tracker, New York state currently has an average of more than 7,000 reported cases of covid-19 per day, many of which are reported from the five boroughs. Six weeks ago, in mid-January, that number was over 16,000, higher than ever in the spring. You can write the number down to all sorts of variables – including a larger test device and fewer restrictions – but you can’t dismiss how stunningly devastating it is. (Much of the rest of the country is facing similar devastating situations. You have no doubt read the statistic that more than half a million Americans have died as a result of the coronavirus, a figure we live the leaders during this time.)
There has also been the less discussed, but no less significant toll of mental health on the general public. In August I knew a number of people who, against all odds, did well in the new homeworking. They appreciated the loneliness, the lack of daily pressures like commuting, and weren’t exactly social butterflies anyway. Additionally, here in New York – and in other parts of the country – it was considered relatively safe to gather outdoors in small groups, in parks, cafes, and restaurants that followed social distance guidelines. Compared to the oppressive, freezing temperatures of recent months, in August, one could sit at a picnic table for hours. It wasn’t a replacement for the “Before Times,” but it certainly helped.
Today, I don’t know of any person who can reasonably say that he is in a better place in terms of mental health than where he was at the beginning of this case. You wake up. You go to the bank. You go to the dinner table. Every day is the same, and it’s getting to a breaking point. I’ve felt it. I bet you did too. We are all more irritable, more anxious, more depressed – just done.
It’s not just in your head. For a recent position The Atlantic Ocean, Special Projects editor Ellen Cushing spoke to a range of mental health professionals, all of whom performed on the ways extensive lockdown legitimately changes the way our brains work. Prolonged grief, stress, boredom and depression can have an erosive, damaging effect on the psyche.
I certainly didn’t wake up thinking today Autumn guys, of all the damn things, would be the thing to get this train of thought going. I have not thought Autumn guys to be the ruler I would measure how long we have been trapped in a criminally mismanaged pandemic. Maybe it was a result of that hearing irresistibly catchy theme music, which functioned as a de facto theme song for my downtime last summer. But man, we’ve really been doing this for a while. March 20, 2020, New York implemented the first statewide shelter-in-place order – due out in a year.
We will get at least seven new ones Autumn guys levels coming soon.