“And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve” – Joshua 24:15
If the motivating theme of El Shaddai is the human necessity of choice, the game then must present the player with clear options. In my last piece, I talked a bit about the nature of that choice. But the game does something very clever to drive home the implications of those choices. It embeds the two options – either serve God, or serve humanity – in the two primary characters of the game: The protagonist Enoch and the protagonist and player’s guide, Lucifel.
I appreciate El Shaddai for its ambiguity; it is determined to allow the player to make up their own mind about where they stand. But it’s not ambiguous about the nature of that choice. Though the choice may seem difficult, the options presented are no less stark.
Those choices are helpfully personified in the two main characters of the game, and by being allowed to play as Enoch, the player is forced to “play” with the idea of devotion to God over all else. In other words, the player is allowed to “play” with the idea of faith. El Shaddai is in no mechanical sense a sandbox game, but it does provide a kind of sandbox for the player to act out various beliefs and presumptions about the world.
Enoch is introduced by Lucifel in the intro to the game as a “pretty good guy,” but the goodness of his character goes much deeper than that. The Old Testament account of Enoch merely says:
“After he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked faithfully with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Enoch lived a total of 365 years. Enoch walked faithfully with God; then he was no more, because God took him away.”
Here was a guy who was so faithful, so theologically evolved, that God was like, “Okay, you’re ready,” and gave him the luxury of being the first to be raptured. The implication here is that Enoch was so on-board with the faith that he had no need to prove his devotion any more than he had already.
Then again, by taking him up to Heaven, God was helping him believe. He was keeping him for himself. And Enoch was happy there. He was a scribe for God, a writer who devoted his writing to his glorified Master.
Probably the defining quality of Enoch, then, is his willingness to do anything God asks. Much of the game is spent “purifying” angels, demons, and lost souls, basically beating them up until they evaporate. It’s not up to Enoch, or the player for that matter, to know where they go after that. He’s been given a job to do, so he follows through. When a command is given to him by his creator, he sees no need to question it.
But Enoch isn’t perfect. He struggles more and more with doubt the more he comes in contact with the ‘real world’. In a sense, he is sheltered. He’s spent most of his life unaware of certain truths about the world – not that there were people who believed and lived differently than him, but that they are happy doing so. It’s a truth that shakes him, especially when he sees the way his own faith often puts an end to that kind of happiness.
