A water that steals all

“Search and rescue, and recovery efforts are ongoing in the Appalachian mountains. Rebuilding will take years. Entire towns are destroyed. Roads and interstates have been washed away, mountain sides have been resurfaced, and rivers have changed course forever.”

Helene of the Blue Ridge was written in asylum, a game created as Pandion Games’ sole designer sheltered with family and friends well north of Hurricane Helene’s legacy. Sparse in its layout and blunt in design, the solo journaling RPG charts the player’s immediate experience in the aftermath of the eponymous hurricane. The prompts are stripped of artifice and metaphor in favor of a matter-of-fact accounting of survival’s material cost—and why individual effort withers in comparison to class privilege’s ability to tip the scales.

One week after Helene collided with Florida’s coast and bellowed rain, winds, and flooding north into southern Appalachia, the residents of several states still reckon with its life-altering destruction. Storm surges obliterated homes, businesses, and entire towns before accreting their debris into increasingly deadly floes. The sheer volume of displaced water broke dams and washed out bridges. Those who could not evacuate in time were literally trapped by mudslides and rivers dislodged from their banks to lunge over the countryside and, if unlucky, directly into houses where people sheltered. More than 200 people have been confirmed dead, so far.