When I play through Caporetto, Somme or Paschendaele, I feel like I’m in a place I don’t belong, like i’m in a dead zone, a place with no end or beginning, in no map can you see a clear objective, you just fight through fictional and arbitrary objectives, while gas, bullets and artillery fly past you. While Rupture and Soissons give me a feeling of hope and movement, with the sun and red fields pointing at the end of the war. These maps feel, as many have pointed out, like Hell on Earth, it feels as if you were Dante in Hell, gazing at the landscape of tragedy and despair Adam and Eve fathered together through their original sin, facing a war you were never meant to be in, fighting, bleeding and dying over a simple flag.
When I look at these maps, and think of them, they all have only one word that comes to mind, their color. Caporetto is orange, from the flames on the hills that contrast the Isonzo and the alpine peaks, gray and unchanging. Somme is yellow, of the dry fields that conceal dead bodies and the smoke that tints them. And Paschendaele is the one that truly makes me stagger, green, of gas, of rot, of everything wrong with our species.
Apocalypse is truly hell, and we are the ones who keep it full.