Let the World Burn

Written by Peter Fallesen and translated into English by Rasmus Husted Legêne, Lizzie Stark and Peter Fallesen and pitched at London Indiemeet by Karolina Soltys

It has taken me a while to write up this game. To be honest it has taken me a while to make sense of it.

Let the World Burn is a beautiful story game (which can apparently also be run as a LARP) about a search for a lost love in a decaying world.

From the start the David Lynchesque nature of the game is very apparent. There are 5 characters in the game. The 3 ‘humans’ are male. They are P.E, the romantic, searching for his true love amid the ruins; C, a ghost represented in the form of a set of his teeth that P.E carries in his pocket, O.D, a self destructive wannabe nihilist who is searching for the one woman who he believed truly understood him. In addition to these characters are the spirits of Love and Destruction, influencing events around them but not being physical presences in the story.  

Over all this hovers the spectre Q, a woman about whom we learn very little.

During the game the 3 ‘human’ characters, influenced by love and destruction frame scenes around their relationships with Q in the past. Significantly Q is not in any of these scenes having just left or yet to arrive. All those scenes are framed in flashback and scenes with C are framed from when he was alive. Ultimately, at least in the game that we played, C was dull but stable, P.E. accepting, and O. D. destructive but lost.

In between these scenes the search for Q continues in various locations, in her apartment; at a wake; at a motel and throughout the city which is slowly degrading as characters begin destroying their parts of the city as a mechanic to win arguments.

We learnt that O.D had regular sex with Q in the alley behind the porn theatre, that P.E and Q had a dull sex life and a life devoid of adventure and O.D. certainly believed that she wasn’t the settling down type, although again Q only appeared through the character interpretations of her and wasn’t present at any time. We also learnt that C spent 3 weeks with her when she had temporarily split up from P.E and it had been the most meaningful 3 weeks of his life until she had just left. (‘No wonder you jumped in front of a bus’ Destruction said)

At the end of the game the characters have to decide whether their search for Q is driven by love or destruction. The answer then affects how the game ends.

The interesting thing about this game is that although it’s focussed around the search the ultimate mystery is not around what has happened to Q. It’s quite clear, following the wake scene, possibly even following the scene in P.E and Q’s apartment what has happened. The real mystery is around who Q is and how 3 people (influenced by Love and Destruction) see her as someone so different that they might as well be searching for 3 different women. Maybe this has something to say about the nature of love, that we can only understand aspects of others through our own view of the world. Thus Q is equally a devoted housewife, an impulsive exhibitionist lover and someone who is soft and tender enough to change someone’s world in 3 weeks.

Or perhaps Q is none of those things and has become a cipher for what the characters really want - someone like them. Perhaps Destruction could argue that love is always destructive because you’re taking a person with their own hopes and desires and moulding them into the image that you want them to fit. But Love could answer that maybe, even if you never know a whole person you can love the part that you do know with all your heart. And maybe the question of who Q really was is now unanswerable. Maybe it was always unanswerable. Maybe that was the point.

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