game is good! And I really like the approach they took by scaffolding the videogame progression and the early worldbuilding with the various vignettes – some of them are more successful than others maybe but I don’t remember being really underwhelmed by any of it, and even if it’s an overly self-conscious way to storyboard a videogame like this… that’s totally consistent with their other thematic choices.
I liked it a lot! It feels very singular for being such a youthful work!
i do feel like the few of Kittaka’s games i’ve played follow a trajectory starting from the early '10s Bay Area trans games that a couple posters were major contributors to and spinning out in the most twee and self-effacing way possible. and sometimes it really works to disarm you and hit you in a soft spot! and sometimes you give a single chuckle and move on. as a rule i think i prefer her non-interactive work
idk this game runs pretty slowly on my macbook so i don’t feel like i can give it a fair shake. i’m up to, i think, a bit where you have to revisit nano worlds? i got stuck on one puzzle and the whole process is chuggy enough that i haven’t really bothered pushing through. the textures and music, as i recall, are lovely, but it’s hard to tell how much of the jank is intentional. some of the little tragedies that have happened so far are really moving, but the “mom??” stuff is stressful in a very S Universe way. maybe that goes somewhere in the end
Do it. I am all for this.
re: the Bay Area trans stuff… the whole one-dimensional didactic empathy porn stuff about identity i never related to at all. and i can sort of see that in some of Kittaka’s other works that i’ve seen. but i will say that one of the reason Anodyne 2 resonated with me is it in a little way felt like a continuation of the sort of ideas i was trying to explore in my own game Problem Attic. like it’s part of a growing disillusionment with the sort of false comforts provided by institutions, or seemingly benevolent caregivers who are too insulated from reality to understand it. like there’s a smothering effect. in a way it also feels like a response to the kind of aesthetics of twee pastoral escapism that are becoming increasingly dominant in certain spheres of games. i guess you could call it like “the aesthetics of soft condescension”. Anodyne 2 is more like a traditional game and i perceive it to be more in dialogue with the aesthetics of nostalgia whereas Problem Attic is a lot more… nihilistic i guess. but i can at least see a through line there to something that i can relate to what’s going on in the world right now, which a lot of games really aren’t.
very happy to set you up for this alley-oop
y’all say emo like it’s a bad thing. it’s really rare to play a game with writing as personal, introspective, an intimate as anodyne 2. it’s easily what I like most about it. it feels like journal entries in videogame form. the fact that not everyone will connect to it as strongly or some might even be put off by this is honestly the game’s greatest virtue. so many indie games don’t feel indie to me because they play by the same AAA rules of trying to be as polished and focused as possible, and they don’t dare alienate anyone along the way.
even if the gameplay itself isn’t particularly difficult or deep, anodyne 2 is challenging in a way that most indie games never even touch, outside of relatively niche subgenres like interactive fiction, dating sims, visual novels, etc. it’s exciting to play a platformer/puzzle/exploration game that is willing to go there so freely. it has the same kind energy as 80s proto-indie groups like beat happening or galaxie 500, who quietly challenged the norms of rock music by focusing on the raw primitive expressive qualities of its most basic elements, without concern for production, anything more than rudimentary technical ability, or appealing to any existing demographic. and what I like least about indie games, even the ones that I truly love, is that they seem far too dependent on all of those exact same concerns.
I understand the many reasons this often must be the case and I don’t begrudge indie devs who play by those rules, but it’s so so nice to see a studio like analgesic exist comfortably outside of that space.
100% agreed on all of this. i like the beat happening/galaxie 500 comparison (even though Calvin Johnson is a creeper). coming from following indie music (and to some extent art film) i think i really just assumed that indie games would be come to be defined by embracing limitations and personal expression ahead of the technical stuff. and there are games out there that do that. but a non-corporate sensibility has never really become a dominant force in indie games. either it’s like Oscar-baity stuff or it’s just basically stylized remakes of older game genres. i think because the space is so corporate and commoditized and people who are immersed in games are lacking literacy in a lot of those other forms of culture. i think games people are also brainwashed by brand identification to some extent. and the pernicious influence of the tech industry and this desire to find technical solutions to everything instead of creative ones can’t be ignored. but tl;dr it’s something i find incredibly depressing and dark.
there’s a lot of carryover from software engineering and the warping effect of technological progress. I think as technical constraints eased, design changes have gotten wrapped in as progress just as inevitable as the visuals.
Incidentally, I think deliberately stepping away from ‘user-friendly’ interface changes is happening more directly in the Resident Evil-style PSX retro wave because of the specifically contentious design of those games and the very public defenders who felt RE4 ‘ruined’ the game. It doesn’t really stem from an examination of player-machine affordances but just a bitter old community fight burning after everyone has moved on.
I think at least some of this is conscious continuation of earlier artgames - Kitty Horrorshow comes up a lot as touchpoint in the Haunted PS1 discord as do games like Crypt Worlds, etc. A lot of people have pointed out that the new “PS1-style games” don’t actually resemble many of the originals; it’s almost like a motivation of the device type situation where that framing just becomes an excuse to delve into the shadow history of all the weird stuff the industry tried to declare obsolete. (I also think part of the reason this impulse went down a genre path is that “artgames” have gradually been pushed to divest themselves of anything too negative or abrasive in the fight for spots on the festival circuit.)
There is definitely a certain strand which is more interested in like replicating Doom or RE or Silent Hill specifically, but one of the funnier things about it to me is that it’s almost the games which were comparatively obscure or arty at the time which ended up being most influential to the new template: LSD, Echo Night. Even something like Petscop feels like it’s channelling old Love-de-Lic games more than Pokemon or similar.
You’re right, I’m over-reacting to the half-dozen explicit Resident Evil clones I just worked through. There’s a thread of survival horror revival and maybe it’s parallel to the community doing it through first-person exploration; do you get the sense it’s the same scene or a different one?
(I wish Echo Night was the game people who are influenced by it think it is)
my extremely haphazard reading is that survival horror guys ended up increasingly being pushed into the same category as high concept, mechanically loosey-goosey walkingsims after the infrastructure for mid-tier indie things totally collapsed, and are now in the weird position of being treated as comparatively more niche than stuff like Spooky’s House Of Jumpscares despite being more classically gamey in every other respect.
maybe similar to the old situation of deliberate recreations of old hardware styles just being grouped in with games that used the loose affordances of looking sorta pixel-y as both somehow representing “8-bit art”? but i might be thinking of the RE clones as more marginal than they really are!
everyone’s niche these days unless God or a streamer casts their gaze upon them
What don’t you like about Echo Night? I was entirely overwhelmed by how wonderful it was, going into it blind last year.
I wish I was into it! I’d really like a soft, moody, midcentury ghost story. Shadowgate 64 and its decrepit mood of King’s Field without the mortal peril is what I was hoping for.
But it came off flat and not evocative. Terse recreations of rooms in basic 3D without significant artistic perspective, rote ghost stories and checklist objectives. Normally I find a lot of meat inside From Software’s studiously-generic fantasy settings but I wasn’t getting anything here.
The Anodyne team’s next game got a demo
I’m fairly curious about it but have no PC
Sephonie, their new game, is out in 2 weeks
I played the demo and it was rad. definitely gonna pick it up, though I can’t say it does the same “thing” as anodyne 2.
have i mentioned how off-putting i find the dude’s character design? his clothes sit like he has a dump truck arse but he has the face of a gaunt academic
that is correct and it’s Good Actually
Otacon in jncos