I’m a digital kid. Half of me is the internet, dial-up in my bones. I grew up at twenty-six kilobytes a second, hit adolescence with fifty-two, found myself in a megabyte. My world has, for near long as I’ve existed, been defined by the idea that websites and forums are as much places as school or home, that what’s real is less clear than we once thought, that the physical is a blur and the digital a fog and neither of them easy to tell apart. To grow up like I did in the 2000s was to watch the world we knew slip away a dozen different ways in a dozen different times. But what exactly was it replaced by?

There’s simply not much out there that is more boldly, loudly 2000s than Galerians: Rion. An oddball CG adaptation of an equally oddball PS1 game, the film—originally released as a three-episode OVA series before being massaged into a feature—is a ninety-minute teenage scream, a wail of post-millennium angst overflowing, adolescent confrontations with the world and the anxieties of adulthood given shape in lightning and fire and hot psychic kids in chokers. It exists deep in the mud of chuunibyou seriousness, an overdose of what we now call edgy but as teens called true: an intense adherence to the belief in violence as expression, suffering as admirable and society as a scam.

Following the eponymous teenager Rion, a kid ripped of identity and memory in exchange for psychic powers via cruel experiments by even crueler adults, and turned into a hollowed-out army of one to stop the all-powerful AI, Dorothy, Galerians: Rion is an unabashed mess of sci-fi imagery and anger; absurd and wild world-building so rapidly shotgunned at the viewer that it all abstracts into merely another tool for aestheticized emotionalism. Bodies pile up as feelings manifest into weapons because isn’t that what existence is? Isn’t that the true shape of the world? 

I’m increasingly convinced that if videogames are about anything (and they’re about everything) then they are about place. It’s a medium profoundly capable at deepening and twisting our understanding of the physical spaces we inhabit and how we navigate them. Whether it be a AAA open world squashing cities into symbols or an old adventure game blinking through static images as a stand-in for movement, games are always and perpetually about building a unique relationship between yourself and your surroundings. And very few games are as much about place, as dedicated to the exploration of architecture, than the genre the original Galerians belongs to: survival horror.

In the land of horror, a single mansion acts an entire world, an ever-unfurling maze of secrets and unknown connections which both become increasingly familiar as the player repeatedly traverses through the same rooms, and increasingly unfamiliar as they expand impossibly into underground labs and hidden stations, both far too large for the exterior to ever contain. They are games that encourage intimacy with hallways while also suggesting that you will never fully know them. They are games where the world outside fades away until all there is is the mansion, the police station, the Louisiana home.

That’s what the internet—my home—was like back then. Or at least, how it seemed to my young eyes. A series of abstract mansions standing alone in empty space. A forum, a site, a flash animation library, a digital arcade for games; everything islands of their own, unique and separate, the internet lacking transitory spaces between websites in the same way a game so often lacks transitions between levels. To be online when I was younger was to cut myself off from the physical world entirely, phone line and all the connections it represents severed as a toll to enter, my own identity shifting as I stumble my way through hallways I thought I knew but never really did. 

In Galerians: Rion, the whole world seems disconnected from itself in the same way as the internet and a game. Directly adapting the level structure of its PS1 counterpart, it occurs over several locations—the lab, the home, the hotel—each singular and separate, the space outside and in-between all but deleted. A house, Rion’s childhood home, is introduced via flashback as a building in a void and when he goes to it, it seems to really exist in one, all but floating in its own little world left out of time. There’s little attempt to create a sense of worldly cohesion, and without the tactility of videogames, the abstraction only comes through stronger. Unlike a game, there's no wandering in a movie, no running up endlessly against walls or loitering in a room for no other reason than because you can. All that remains are the locations themselves, abstractions of reality abstracted even further. It’s like the internet I knew, turning truth into data. A community makes a website and that website transforms into its own place; a person posts on a forum and their posts are seen as someone new, divorced from who made them. The places in Galerians: Rion drift in the same haze of shifting possibility as my old, indistinct home.

But the internet has changed. It has been successfully taken over by a small number of corporations that have replaced islands with continents, floating expressionism with concrete greed. There was always a cruelty and violence to the online world, but that violence is now propagated and supported by capital. Twitter is an unending stream of hateful bile reposted under false promises of get rich quick schemes that line Elon Musk’s pockets. Instagram reels provide a vehicle for death shorts, where car crashes have been flattened beyond mere entertainment into emotionless backdrops for product placement. YouTube has propped up a cottage industry of exploitation and the celebration of harm in exchange for seconds added to video retention. Suffering isn’t tragedy anymore. It’s a way to lose time and make money, pain abstracted through calculated addictive repetition until it doesn’t mean a thing but eyes and ads.

And then there’s the AI. Even when you aren’t being force-fed cruelty against your will, every inch of the internet has been infested with a plague of generative AI, of fake posts and fake videos and fake voices and fake articles and fake music and fake pictures and fake drawings and fake facts and fake knowledge and fake products and fake people and fake everything everywhere every time you look, all of it used to completely isolate, to make you and only you the last living person online. The mansion has become a rotting, perpetually expanding megastructure. The more it grows, the more alone you become.

So the question is: what happens when you live in this mansion with no place, grow up watching your home and identity slip away to ever growing corridors? For me, and millions others, the answer is simple. You become like Rion.

Rion is empty, a character stripped of memory and thus stripped of identity. He is missing his self like a doll that’s suddenly gained sentience, this strange facsimile of what we thought was human. You can see it in how he moves, how he looks, Galerians: Rion delighting in mid-budget CG not far from what you’d find in a PS2 cutscene, characters often feeling like rigs with joints where bones should be, eyes unmoving like glass.

He’s been emptied against his will. He’s furious about it. How could he not be? He didn’t want this, didn’t volunteer himself to become what he did. The entire film is an assault as Rion rampages for answers and vengeance and a way to be whole, of screaming superimposed over strings of code and bodies melting to reveal burning robot forms. Lightning bursts from his eyes and fire explodes from his hands, anger and sadness and feelings so strong that they become more physical than the machine world he lives in.

The twist at the end, of course, is that Rion too is a Galerian, one of the superhumans created by the AI, Dorothy. He’s been as much shaped and defined by this godlike computer as all of those he fought and raged against. So many of us have been, too, knowingly or not. The algorithm is powerful, the AI sneaky and easy and overwhelming, the companies monolithic and all-knowing. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not too late. Rion refuses to be defined by his cruel digital mother, striking back and killing what he knows to be wrong even if it destroys himself in the process. He revels in his emotions and lets them overflow, channels feeling into rebellion. He fights.

You are not a doll. You are made of more than either flesh or code could ever contain. Remember what Dorothy wants to hide from you. Remember what Amazon and Facebook and Google desperately want you to forget. Remember the wail of dial-up. Remember how to scream.

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Baxter Burchill is a freelance writer and critic. You can always find him on Bluesky (@cosmicspooks) and on his blog, Tsundoku Diving, where he explores the depths of Japanese art.