Run 47

Run forty-seven died on floor nine to a thing I've killed a hundred times. I got greedy. I always get greedy on floor nine, because floor ten is where the good stuff is and you can smell it. That's the game. You go down. You find things, weapons, upgrades, a little companion sometimes that follows you round. You get stronger. You get attached. And then something kills you and all of it, every bit of it, is gone, and you start on floor one with a stick. I picked it up in March because Dave at work said it was "brutal but fair", which is exactly the sort of thing Dave says, and I was in a place at the time where brutal but fair sounded about right. The first twenty runs I hated it. I'd get a build going, something that felt like mine, a big hammer and a ring that made me faster, and I'd die and I'd sit there staring at the "you died" screen with the anger you'd feel if someone knocked over a sandcastle. My sandcastle. I built that. Then something shifted. Round about run thirty. I stopped thinking of the hammer as mine. Here's the thing the game teaches you, if you let it: nothing you pick up is yours. It's borrowed. The hammer's not yours, it's the floor five hammer, and you get to use it for a bit, and then it goes back. What's yours is what you know. How the thing on floor nine telegraphs its lunge. That the archers always come in threes. That the shop on floor four sells a potion that's better than it looks. You keep that. That comes with you into the next run and the next. Run forty-eight, floor one. Stick. Off we go. I'm not going to pretend this isn't about the divorce. Dave didn't know when he recommended it, he's not that deep, he just thought I'd like the sword combat. But I'd got to thirty-eight with a house and a wife and a dog and a five-year plan and then I hadn't got any of those things and I'd been sitting in a rented flat in Reading with a stick.

The house wasn't mine. The plan wasn't mine. Some of it was, a lot of it wasn't, and it took me twenty runs of a game about a little man going down stairs to see that. What's mine is the knowing. That I can rebuild. That I know where the archers are now. Floor three. Found a decent bow. It's not the hammer but I've started to like the bow. Floor five. The companion this time is a little glowing bird. It follows you round and picks up coins. It's got a name that the game made up. I'm not going to get attached. Floor seven. I've got attached to the bird. Floor nine. The thing. I know its lunge. I know its lunge like I know my own front door. I don't get greedy. I hit it, I back off, I hit it, I back off. The bird flaps about picking up coins like nothing's happening. It goes down. Floor ten. First time. There's a chest and there's a door and there's a whole new kind of light coming in from somewhere, and the bird's still with me, and I've got a bow, and I don't know what's down here and I've stopped minding that.