I’ve been playing Misspent Youth every week for the last couple of months with Evan Torner, Kat Jones, and the designer, Rob Bohl. It’s his first publication and it’s in ashcan form. I believe it’s sold out now (EDIT: It’s not! But there aren’t many left. Check the comments to get a copy!), but the ashcan phase is nearing completion, so you’ll be able to get the full version sometime soon.
It’s maybe 50 years in the future. New Orleans has been hit by hurricane after hurricane and its management has been handed over to the Mangrove corporation, a hotel and disaster population management company.
In the center of the city are the floating remains of New Orleans, repolished and slick for a few hundred “perfect” people living inside — perfect being a matter of genetic fashion. Outside is a ring of desperate people, used as cheap labor and fed on a nourishing but narcotic “Goo”. It keeps their bellies full and their motivation low.
This vast ring is all floating rafts, lashed so tight and close you never see the water. People live in houseboats. Neighborhoods have tides and waves. And everyone knows that the Big One, the truly terrifying hurricane, is on its way. But three kids are tired of that shit.
They are Lillybelle (played by Kat), a hippie earth mother, genuine and naïve and infectious with her passion …
Sammy (played by Evan), a kid with money and connections whose firmest belief is that he is a great author and a great hero…
and Benoît (played by me), an Algerian/French punk raised on the inside by (and to be) a chef, back when they had real food in there and everyone wasn’t just to be fed Fancy Goo.
They wanted people to eat real food, smoke real weed, and fuck for love and passion. Together, they sold drugs (a lot of drugs), beat policemen very badly, did what you do to rats (a lot of rats) and raised a (frankly, shitty) popular revolution against Mangrove. They (at least two of them) fucked a lot and had a vague, 17-year-old kind of relationship.
We finished the game with some revelations about the characters:
Sammy was truly asexual — I couldn’t ever figure out if that was going to change about him, and Evan played him that way to the end. And it turned out, he truly had it in him to be a real author. His fake accent, attention whoring, and action movie heroics were just grist for the eventual mill.
Lillybelle was curious: alternately gracious and scheming, sexually free but manipulative, she first raised a crowd to our aid, then wound up founding a religion.
Benoît was furious at Mangrove. He wanted to simply kill every person therein and turn it into a populated greenhouse, with the able people from the ring farming and living inside in the safety of the dome. It turns out, the one thing that was in his way was Lillybelle. For all his narcissism, he actually loved her and knew that he relied on her to keep himself from self-destruction. In the final episode, in our epilogues, Benoît had sold out completely. He’d been willing to sacrifice everything for his revenge against the people in the dome, but Kat sold out Lillybelle to save him. She spread her religion — a watered down “Spiritual, but not religious,” crystal-waving religion — for Benoît. My big plan had been for him to self-destruct completely without his democidal dream to sustain him. But the rules intervened on Kat’s and Benoît’s behalf. Benoît wound up farming, teaching everyone how to cook again, and eventually finding a non-violent compromise when Mangrove came back to finish the job. It was in no small part due to Kat’s public, religious persona that Benoît was able to so negotiate. But he was so disappointed in her, they never managed to see each other again. Sammy wound up having a clique of asexual artists. They wrote together and formed the “creation myth of our society”.
The game does what it’s supposed to do. I was some extreme version of 17-year-old me, all violence and comedy. The dude got laid a lot more than I did, though.
There were also, of course, scenes of underwater action, a fight with not one but two hot ninja women, a storm that scrubbed away a city, a villainous black-eyed middle manager with an escape pod, illegal rooftop gardens full of tomatoes, basil, and marijuana, a plastic underwater chill room, Cajun sepratists, sabotage of the Goo network. The game gives plenty of latitude and direction on the aesthetics of the environment. But all of that is in service to the teenage rebellion that you are the center of — in our case a teenage rebellion about drug use, social class, and sex. Its story arc mechanics give you good direction on what’s to do at any moment.
The game really does what it promises. It’s a good time.