El Shaddai: A Game about Faith on a Personal Scale

A majority of your time playing El Shaddai is spent pressing forward, literally, on controller. That’s not an accident. 

There’s one moment when you’re asked to make a seemingly mundane choice between two different paths. While you make this choice, the game reminds you of the importance of choosing rightly. The funny thing is it really is a mundane choice. If you choose the wrong direction you will simply loop back around and be faced with the same choice yet again. 

Eventually, you have to choose the right thing. It’s not really an option. 

***

I first played El Shaddai in the midst of a spiritual struggle. I had withdrawn myself slightly from my Christian friends and was spending a lot of time alone in my house playing videogames. I went to church just enough to be able to say I was a churchgoer. 

For the first time in my life, I started drinking. I thought a lot about how nice it would be to just drink myself to sleep every night. Forget everything else. Just put life on pause for a while.  Instead of drinking, I immersed myself in El Shaddai. 

***

In El Shaddai, the camera typically hovers just behind Enoch, and the player is repetitively encouraged to keep walking inward, into the landscape. As enemies arrive, the journey grinds to a halt. Enoch is forced to stall for a while. 

Because of the necessity to “purify” Enoch’s weapon regularly, the battles in El Shaddai feel meditative. In the middle of fighting off a few lost souls, that brief pause as Enoch’s weapon turns from orange to blue is enough for the player to stop and wonder. It’s enough time to consider turning back. It’s enough time to give up the fight, or wait for an enemy to make that decision for you. 

***

I was fighting too--with my wife, from whom I was separated but was still clinging to out of desperation; with my friends who were trying to get me to make smarter decisions; with God, who was responsible for it all. I would go through the motions, do everything it took to keep going forward, but every now and then, I would stop and think – and I would second guess everything. 

I was “called” into the ministry when I was 16, convinced that God was going to use me for something big. I’ll never forget one of the more spiritual members of my youth group handing me a handwritten note, explaining that God had somehow signaled to him that I would one day do something great for him. I was special. 

When my marriage crumbled and my church attendance became more lax, I decided ministry was out of the question, at least for the time being. Immediately, I felt a sense of relief. 

Why was that? 

***

Enoch never articulates his spiritual struggle, but we feel it with every battle. We understand its inevitability every time Enoch demolishes a “lost soul” in an effort to “purify” it. Every time Enoch encounters Lucifel talking on the cell phone with God, the game is saved. It’s the perfect time to quit and walk away from it all. Still, Enoch was progressing. As long as Enoch felt like he was getting somewhere, he was fine. 

This temptation looms especially large when Enoch has spent the last several minutes attempting to jump across chasms onto nefariously placed platforms. These moments feel pointless yet with every death we hear Lucifel’s fingers snap, a signal that Lucifel has reversed time back to before we died – back to the save point. For both the player and Enoch it’s a mundane miracle that has less meaning with every occurrence. 

***

Let’s just say I had grown used to grace. I was used to having my life figured out, used to having a wonderful life, with a future I felt I could predict. Faith was a given. 

My faith was weak.

***

Enoch had grown used to grace. He had spent the majority of his life living side by side with God in Heaven. Sent on a mission to save the earth from its own destruction, Enoch was suddenly forced to come face to face with some of the harsher realities of life on earth. 

Enoch had questions. Enoch had doubts. So God froze him. Enoch stopped moving forward. 

***

I had just graduated with a Master of Arts in Theology, with no plans to use it. I had just gotten divorced. I was lost. I was frozen. 

***

The tragedies washed over Enoch like a bucket of cold water. Suddenly he saw the world as it was: a broken place full of desperate people trying to find meaning. Enoch knew the truth. Enoch knew the solution. 

Once Enoch was able to move forward again, he never looked back.