The video game Hela is not due out until later this year, and in the lead up to that release, the developer has been posting videos, most of them short glimpses of gameplay. Hela is described as “a cozy co-op adventure where you play as a tiny mouse exploring a magical world inspired by the forests and wilderness of Northern Sweden.” It’s not natural, at least not in the sense of being realistic. Reads the description appended to one or more of those videos: “It will be up to you to help a kind witch care for the land she has protected for generations, while you explore, experiment, and create your own adventure.”
And among these promotional videos is a expansive, continuous, three-hour segment showing some of the mice characters resting out in nature. The point is less what you see, as the camera remains in the same position throughout, than what you hear. Sounds of running water, bending trees, and birdsong fill the air. Given the immersive nature of this sort of game, the advance taste of the world of Hela makes a certain amount of sense. There is, in effect, an acoustic ecology to modern video game playing. One can gauge the health of a given game — in the sense of its world-building cohesiveness, its level of detail, its version of realism — by just listening to it.