This story is part of Deorbital’s God of War feature series, part of an effort to raise funds for a new year of publication. Get the details here.
Atreus is going hunting, tasked to kill something for the first time. He’s young and headstrong, but can barely pull back a bow much less kill something with it. His father, Kratos, lays the scarred mitt of a giant on his tiny son’s shoulder. Tells him to relax. Tells him that he can absolutely do this. Atreus takes a deep breath. Steadies himself. This is a big moment for him. All the woods are quiet as we focus into this moment. The game asks you to press the Son Action button. Because after all this, Atreus does not have this. You do.
Son Action is a context-sensitive button. Because God of War is a game driven by combat, when you press it, it usually commands Kratos’ son Atreus to shoot an arrow. You also use it to direct Atreus to climb into tunnels, push down chains for Kratos to climb, or operate puzzles you’re too busy to engage with.
You’re the muscle, not the switch-thrower or rune-reader. That’s left to the son.
Kratos is busy.
Son Action is a wayward satellite caught in the gravity of the acts and desires of the father, Kratos an angry sun God around which the entire universe orbits. The camera follows him eternally, never breaking from framing him throughout its long run time. His agency is paramount. Kratos isa character who was so upset at the Greek gods he killed them all only to move North, the disgruntled fulcrum around which literal cosmologies rise and fall.
Son Action is never used for anything other than the efficient completion of Kratos’ goals.
In one early scene, Atreus is stunned by having to confront and murder actual humans who try to kill you both. Kratos, from the platform below, uses the Son Action prompts to order Atreus forward towards a rope to allow you to progress. Kratos coaxes and consoles him just enough to get him to take the next few steps towards a thing you need. Press the button enough times? Kratos can be reunited with his son. You continue on. You don’t need to press the Son Action button again.
Son Action should, at the end of combat, at least let you rub Atreus’ head.
It would be a silly gesture. Petting your son, like a good dog, but at least it would offer something to break the stranglehold Son Action has on the game as the extension of Kratos’ right to control the entirety of the space around him. It should be a sad thing that Kratos would pet his son like a dog after he kills the sixty fourth room of identical monsters, but it is instead alienating to me that I can’t even do that. Son Action can only be for things that are useful. Care isn’t useful in God of War.
God of War is a game obsessed with the usefulness of the world only as it relates to Kratos and, by extension, the player. Kratos grumbles his way through hours of plot and questing with only as much interaction as is forced upon him by others. He resents asking for help. He openly antagonizes characters who assist him at great personal risk. He takes on side quests only after he extracts promises of weapon upgrades or magical artifacts. The game is an expensive production made to give you a large open world to explore and then asks you to play a character who outright resents being told to exist in it. And yet the game also presumes you’ll personally be excited to go back along one of its many spokes for more objects or to find another MacGuffin, never mind that you’re asked in the same breath to regard these tasks with Kratos’ enthusiastic and unending disdain.
Likewise, Kratos treats the beliefs of those around him as unimportant compared to their utility, a harsh stance for a man who exists in a game built on exploring myth. Atreus, when he isn’t being ordered to do something, spends his time trying to talk to his father about his belief system, the world of magical creatures and gods they inhabit (things his mother taught him). Kratos is rarely interested, to the point where he will meet famous figures of Norse myth only to have them have to stop and introduce themselves and explain their deal, because Kratos has never bothered to learn the geopolitics of the land he’s lived in for years, the land his beloved second dead wife and living son call home. He doesn’t care and we aren’t asked to care. Care isn’t useful to God of War.
All the texture of the myths and this region of the world? Offloaded to a journal, written in the tone of Atreus being interested in the world and engaged with the space and people he lives with. Written by a child who already knows that his father could not give two shits about what lives beyond his doorstep unless it gets in his way. I can only imagine some research-focused narrative lead, sad at their desk as they fill out these lore codexes, knowing for sure that only a fraction of players will read them. Kratos explicitly acts like they don’t matter, so why would a player who is following along with the direction given go digging for them? Games are already a navigation of the end user comparing their free time with the rewards of the game. If the game cannot regard its own inspirations as worthwhile, of course it cannot actually ask us to care. Instead it seems embarrassed it’s even bothering with gods when it’s really about dads and men.
When the time comes for lore to be plot relevant, the game digs up a new character that exists only to literally hang onto Kratos and deliver exposition he cannot escape from in the form of cliff’s notes for those who weren’t paying attention when they watched the Thor movies.
Kratos isn’t alone in his myopic worldview — the game’s narrative can only focus on a single plodding beat forward through the plot. After over an hour spent liberating Alfheim, a Dark Elf tells Atreus with his dying breath that what they’re doing is wrong. Atreus questions the morality of their choices but Kratos just shrugs. They needed to do all this to power up their magic key so they could continue the long chain of things to find to keep the plot going. Kratos’ divine anti-curiosity is a violence that seeps in around every action, not just the explicitly stabby ones.
As much as God of War tries to announce itself as being a reflection on a certain type of explicit physical violence, it doesn’t even begin to shed light on the implied assumptions that center the actions of the player against game systems as the only important thing for the player to worry about. It never asks you or Kratos to care about the living, changing culture he trudges through, even as it wants to stop and monologue about it when the plot needs a quiet moment. It never asks you to care for the mental state of other people, as personal problems are just impediments on your quest to haul some ashes up a hill. Kratos will act with impunity even if it actively upsets the world, and then blame the people he’s bullied into helping him for not telling him sooner that what he’s done is a net negative for him and for everyone else caught in the fallout.
God of War wants to have conversations about what it means for a cool murderer to become a dad. But it can’t even recognize that being a man comes with the ability to brute force your way through the world, causing irreparable harm to everyone by the very nature of unempathetic, patriarchal oppression. It’s a yarn more tired than the Aesop fables Kratos fails to tell, but it upsets the entirety of the thematic material by just existing. An elephant in the room that nobody involved can even bear to look at, much less begin to work on untangling.
Kratos might not be fucking and murdering his way through this new pantheon (much, or yet), but if anything, the New Kratos, with his cultivated disregard for anything other than his own form of ancient sovereign citizenship, manages to seem even more toxic than the young RageDad who blew up Greece so badly there weren’t gods left to be pissed at.
Whatever else God of War wants to say about dads and sons and cycles of violence, it is impossible to believe it’s on good faith terms when none of the rest of this is addressed. Your son isn’t the person the plot asks you to reckon with as Kratos tries to handle single parenthood — he’s an extension of Kratos’ will, a third arm always ready with a weapon as useful as your axe, with its own upgrade trees and loot tables and abilities that you control at your beck and call. Even Atreus’ divine powers are bequeathed to you, animal spirits you can summon to attack by holding the Boy Action button down, while in the plot sequences characters will quietly wonder what Atreus’ godhood will manifest as though you aren’t using it to clear out the next crowd of bad guys. Even at the very end, as you finish off the final boss of the game in an extravagant QTE-adjacent scene, the game asks you to slam on that Son Action button as Atreus assists you in dispatching this final threat. It doesn’t matter that you spent thirty plus hours navigating a story all about Kratos shaping Atreus into a better person with his own agency and path divorced from his father. When the game requires it, The Son will just be another tool in your arsenal, another flourish on your final gratuitous rage combo as long as you remember to press Son Action.
And if you don’t remember or don’t want to? Don’t worry, the game will flash the big Son Action button prompt on screen to tell you to do it. Either you work to get Kratos where he’s going, or you wouldn’t have made the cut. Because there’s nothing that doesn’t bend to his will, even as the game bends over backwards to try to be about anything else. Because there’s a lack of vision to bring about anything other than a world shaped entirely to make Kratos into the center of a second universe as we embark on another series of products devoted once again to telling us we’re grappling with deep issues and never actually confronting assumptions. There’s no context sensitive button made that can begin to grapple with the fallout of such a button existing at all.
Em is a non-binary podcaster and media critic holding it down in a small queer enclave in the Midwest. They are the co-creator of Abnormal Mapping, the last game club anyone ever needs. You can find them on twitter at @em_being and their work Abnormal Mapping’s website.
Deorbital is a videogame-aligned journal for insightful articles on games, culture, and society. This series of articles have been funded by readers like you. To support Deorbital in creating more space for under-represented voices in games writing, we are currently raising funds for a new year of publication. Please consider supporting us and our work, by donating HERE.
