Soft and Cuddly by Jarett Kobek: Book Review
It’s rather difficult reviewing a book about a videogame I’ve never played. It’s not impossible, but I do have the misfortune of self-publishing an essay on a website about videogames admitting that I haven’t played the videogame that the book is about. This feels to me like a critical reversal of the ouroboros consuming its own tail, only this time he’s vomiting himself back out and…shit, I’ve lost the metaphor before I’ve even mentioned what this damn review is about.
It’s about a pretty gross videogame.
Soft & Cuddly By Jarett Kobek is the 15th installment in the Boss Fight Book Series and, if I have a regular reader at this point, they’ll know that I’m low-key, high-key (I’m over 30 for fuck’s sake) obssessed with the series having already sunk a major portion of my paycheck into steadily collecting them all. The early books I acquired were about the games I had actually played before or watched on YouTube (Shadow of the Colossus and Silent Hill 2 being the big ones). I had no idea what Soft & Cuddly was; I had literally never even heard of the game. It sounded cute so I clicked the link and read the back-cover-summary which begins with this line:
A computer game so nauseatingly gory that it came with a barf bag.
I wish I could say that I immediately bought the book. I wish I could say I immediately downloaded a copy of the game and began playing it. I wish I could say I read Jarett Kobek’s Wikipedia page (which doesn’t exist!(someone please fix this) to find a listing of every book the man has ever written.
I wish I could say these things. But I can’t.
I bought Gabe Durhams book Bible Adventures instead because a friend told me about how ludicrous the games were. It was a good book, and I enjoyed it.
I eventually bought Kobek’s book, bracing myself for a truly horrifying experience. What I got instead was a fascinating breakdown of the social and technological history of the United Kingdom during the administration of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. I also learned about “Video Nasties,” the ZX spectrum personal computer, and a rather disturbing bit of information about the actor and media personality Jimmy Savile (whose sex abuses were so foul and numerous they have their own Wikipedia page(, but Kobek can’t get one?!)).
Kobek’s book spends a significant portion of the actual text(113 pages to be exact) just writing about the personal computer movement in the United Kingdom during the 1980s and how these developments mirrored Thatcher era ideologies. The book is as much a critique of the computer industry as it is about the conservative culture which celebrated England’s technological developments. These developments, it should be noted, were largely tied to the ZX Spectrum and its various iterations that were difficult computers compared to American counterparts like the Apple 2.
I’ll be honest, the book spent so much time talking about how much the ZX spectrum wasn’t a great computer I began to wonder when Kobek was going to actually write about Soft & Cuddly. I wouldn’t blame readers who might abandon the book believing they’d been hoodwinked, but I highly encourage them to avoid this impulse. Kobek’s book is wonderful, and all of these first 113 pages aren’t just a snarky, angry rant by a writer’s who’s known for writing snarky, angry satire.
Kobek’s book is exploring Soft & Cuddly to observe how grotesque art often elicits reactions from individuals, cultures, and society at large that is often just as grotesque in different ways.
To wit.
Kobek starts the book by just laying out for the reader what Soft & Cuddly actually is. He writes:
Soft & Cuddly was published by The Power House, a budget subdivision of the British software firm CRL. It’s very reminiscent of Go to Hell. The player's mother, the Android Queen has been dismembered. Her husband, the players father, has been beheaded.
The player must locate his father–whose body is kept in the refrigerator located at semi random places across the game map–and get directions to the parts of his mother’s body. Each piece of the queen must be returned to our husband in the refrigerator. (Every marriage is its own mystery.)
The player explores a grotesque subterranean world, beset on all sides by portly conjoined babies, sheep desecrating gravestones, monsters suffering from undiagnosed eye dystonia, and skulls clad in rakish berets.(2).
Before I tackle all that I have a confession.
I have to be honest, I did lie. I did play Soft & Cuddly. But only after reading this book, or at least these opening lines. I’ve always liked grotesque and horrific media whether it was staring at horror VHS covers at Hastings when I was eight, or even today as I steadily work through the manga series Berserk and any and all Hellraiser comics I can get my hands on (which ain’t easy let me tell you). Soft & Cuddly is a visually grotesque game and it’s still possible to play it. I found a website which hosts it, alongside several other ZX Spectrum games that can be played today online for any and all curious players on a basic web browser.
Getting into the game was easy.
Playing the game was another story.
Since this is a book review though I’ll hold off on critiquing the mechanics and instead just note that Kobek’s book accurately details and describes the repulsive visual aesthetic of the videogame. Soft & Cuddly is bursting with imagery that would likely make every southern granny I ever met clutch their pearls, shudder, and speak the phrase “Oh, now I don’t like thaaaat.”
In short, I love it.
And I suspect the reason why I love it is exactly because I know it upsets the sentiment of so many people who can’t fathom what it actually is. What it is is mostly punk fan worship of Alice Cooper and his aesthetic, but beneath that there is still a videogame that seems to be trying something else which remains rather elusive to the player.
Kobek regularly discusses the game designer John George Jones and his previous videogame Go to Hell which possesses many similar elements to Soft & Cuddly. He observes how these similarities in such close proximity seem to suggest something deeper. He writes:
When the process is repeated, then the situation is different. Do something once and you’re an asshole. Do it twice and you’re a genius. Beneath the gory graphics, beneath the teenaged madness, beneath the punk fuck you and the obsession with Alice Cooper, there is an unknowable thing. (133).
Kobek follows this passage with a brief quote by Clem Chambers, a figure in the software industry at the time who denounces the videogame as exploitation-ware and “schlock” but Kobek is keen to point out the problem with that. He continues:
But this is entirely wrong.
Schlock is schlock, because there is no mystery to the thing.
The heart of Soft & Cuddly is mystery.
What is this? Who did this? What is happening? What the fuck is going on? (133).
There’s so much happening on the screen during a playthrough of Soft & Cuddly. A sheep will be desecrating a grave while a red skull will be dancing back and forth shooting energy balls randomly. Skulls will be rotating in place, while platforms seem to be vibrating, possessed of their own spirit of energy. The colors of this game are vibrant to the point of being blinding; a neon yellow will completely distract me before I realize that it’s part of a baby that’s writhing in place, and it’s another moment before I recognize that there’s four babies all sewn together and making the same gesture. And even worse, the barrier that surrounds them may be a maroon or navy blue and my eyes are once again trying to figure out what is taking place.
I have to navigate all of this chaos while trying to find the parts of my Android mother, assuming I’ve even reached the refrigerator.
On that same note, Kobek notices how this creates problems and challenges for gameplay:
The basic mechanics of the game are as John George Jones described in his letter to Your Sinclair. Your first goal is find the refrigerator. It doesn’t actually appear at random. The refrigerator is always located at one of two predetermined places.
Once you discover the refrigerator and walk in front of it, your character avatar turns from blue to yellow. The only practical effect of this transformation is that you can now fly above the trees on the surface. The other effect of reaching the refrigerator is that a part of your Android Mother appears somewhere in the map. These parts are found in the same place in each new game, but their order of appearance is random. (136-137).
I wrote previously about how I have begun playing the videogame Fear & Hunger (another indie horror game that employs an ampersand in its title). One of the greatest struggles of the game is its sheer randomness. Everytime I begin the game the layout of the castle’s interior is changed, and all of the items held in barrels and crates are reset and randomized, meaning there is no way to completely strategize on how best to navigate the castle until I have actually entered the game and just started looking.
Soft & Cuddly follows this same pattern.
Chaos as a structure can be frustrating in videogames, in no small part because often players look for comfort in simulations. I suspect this is one of the reasons horror videogames are at times a highly niche genre and tend to attract a smaller but more ravenous fanbase. Even so there are exceptions in many mainstream triple-A titles, and the horror genre is not immune from repetition which can kill some of the very reasons it was disturbing in the first place (see the Friday the 13th and Halloween franchises for good examples). Despite its age the chaos of Soft & Cuddly never becomes a mark against it. Rather the chaos only further adds to this disturbing and visually grotesque aesthetic that, bit by bit, creates this experience of navigating a world that, from a conservative perspective, shouldn’t exist.
To be fair it is a videogame so it doesn’t exist in what we humans would call reality. But, as someone who has difficulty with that word and what it means there’s the question.
What is reality?
Who gets to decide what reality is?
What gets to be part of our reality and what shouldn’t exist.
I wrote at the start of this review that Kobek’s book spends a lot of time openly critiquing and observing the personal computer industry in Great Britain during the reign of Margaret Thatcher, and Kobek being the author that he is, he doesn't shy away from letting his political views dictate the narrative. This is a way of saying that the politically conservative establishment is often either the focus of ire, or else a self-parodying farcical group who holds power while trying to limit that of other peoples. The stuffy conservative can become a trope in the media, but cliches are cliches for a reason. And, if I can offer some personal experience to buffer what little ethos I have, growing up in East Texas can confirm that these characters are not always just tropes. In fact sometimes the cartoon conservatives are almost refreshing. I’m not a political writer, or at least I don’t try to be so I will keep my opinions to myself. What’s important for this review is that Kobek’s writing is effective at showing how the conservative political establishment often used their cultural and political capital in ways that didn’t reflect reality for what it was.
The ZX Spectrum was a difficult piece of hardware to use, and trying to program videogames was no easy task. To put it in perspective it employed cassette tapes as opposed to floppy discs for downloading and transferring software. It was hailed by the Thatcher administration as a demonstration of England’s ability to compete in the personal computer industry alongside the American and Japanese manufacturers who lead the industry. But Thatcher's government was as much a social conservative movement as much as it was business oriented and so Kobek’s book shows how games like Soft & Cuddly became pariahs of confirmation bias as much as they did examples of a healthy democracy.
Looking at the cassette and VHS media that began to arise in the 1980s, Kobek is able to observe how they demonstrated a challenge to traditional notions of power. He writes near the end of his book:
But the VCR presented an unprecedented problem. If the television and radio were useful tools, then their utility derived from controllable content. No matter how many television channels would proliferate, there’d always be someone at the stations, determining what went on the air. The VCR was controlled by its home user, granting people the ability to filter out the pre approved message. (154).
Kobek follows this passage by pointing out that more computers were more opportunity for the British government to show off its cultural power in the software industry as more and more families began owning personal computers. However he successfully points out the tradeoff of this:
Well, and good, as long as no one came along, and did anything gross or offensive or beyond the pale. But offensive was a near certainty, given the kinds of people who worked in the gaming industry. Kids with no hope of Oxford, or Cambridge, kids who weren’t even receiving private education. (154-155).
It is a rule well established that if one leaves an object in a publicly accessible space that sooner or later someone will carve a penis onto it. My reader may complain, but they know it’s true.
No one could tell in what direction the personal computer movement would go in the 1980s. Hell it’s 2023 while I’m writing this and there still is no clear indication of what the next several decades of technological development will bring in regards to software and hardware. The ZX Spectrum promised plenty of opportunity for new creativity and technological innovation, but it also meant that a lot of people would be able to do and make whatever they wanted. And this, in its own way, became one of the greatest democratic innovations for Great Britain.
Soft & Cuddly is a game that shocked and offended a great many people when it was published. The fact that it was released the same month as the “Hungerford Massacre”, the worst mass shooting in the history of England, only further intensified this reaction. The game was considered in “bad taste” for its depiction of violence and Kobek offers a sentence that serves all at once a beautiful defense of Soft & Cuddly, as well as a beautiful philosophical observation.
The only real horror is not violence, but its depiction, and John George Jones had the bad taste to present violence not as something disturbing, but as something that might be funny. (154-155).
Soft & Cuddly was a videogame that didn’t take itself seriously. It was a punk manifesto of everything that could possibly disgust someone published in a zeitgeist that was largely controlled by a politically conservative establishment. It was also a game published on technology that was changing how governments could control media as they had in the past.
Putting aside it’s merits as a game itself, Jarett Kobek manages throughout his book to show how Soft & Cuddly was as much a work of politics as it was of art, and how the democratization of technology would and could create art that wasn’t interested in being a part of the traditional reality. In fact it reflected a new opportunity for the lower class to create their own reality.
By the end of the book Kobek has managed to show how unique Soft & Cuddly was for its time, as well as show how much change has occurred in the production of videogames. The system has moved from single individuals programming a game, to large corporations generating massive blockbusters, to the rise of Steam and a reemergence of lone creators making games. It’s political, it’s commercial, it’s philosophical, and it’s disgusting.
The reader will just have to decide which of those applies to Soft & Cuddly.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
1.8.2024
You can find copies of Soft & Cuddly on Boss Fight Books website by following the link below:
https://bossfightbooks.com/products/soft-and-cuddly-by-jarett-kobek
I’ve also included an interview with Kobek about his book Soft & Cuddly
https://themillions.com/2017/05/tk-on-jarett-kobeks-soft-cuddly.html