been feeling kind of distant from vgames lately, so have been pushing myself more to catch up on my itchio backlog… i guess i mostly dislike the feeling that everything in vgames is either part of the same continuum or like one degree removed (indie) or two degrees removed (altgames) and what i want are things that feel either five or minus one degrees removed… like either so distanced that the medium feels like a fading dream or alternatively so bought into some specific existing genre that it starts to take on an inexplicable termite art insularity of its own… well, i’m still looking. i want to believe. anyway here are some things i tried today.
3D Dogs - short game in the venerable “fill up the world with junk until the user’s game crashes of its own accord” genre, mvp here is the movement, alternately dreamlike zippy or slow and sludgy whenever you slowly try to turn. the 3D Dogs spawn on the ui layer and rattle around with a physics effect when you move, which is a nice touch, you can also hold space to drain them back out of the bottom of the screen which happens slowly with a mechanical churning sound, like a capsule machine dispensing. the more i think about this game the more i respect it. i wish i’d gotten to wander a bit more around the town.
31 Unmarked Games - a droqen compendium, you pull cassettes at random from a mailbox, open them up, slide them into the loader and see what happens. this won me over pretty quick when the very first tape i tried appeared to do nothing, or at least nothing intelligible besides making a cheerful beep noise, which is indeed my main memory of trying out unlabelled pirate floppy disks on a friend’s amiga when i was a kid. most of the others i’ve tried have been gnomic and punishing in an era appropriate way but also kind of more-ish and funny, and i think it works in the context of the individual games being things you pick up, try out, eject in disgust, maybe circle back to later on. i’d like to dig into this one more.
And Other Stories - basically four bitsy games playing at once in a loader - so not only do you get the deluxe version of the Binary Land style grinding-into-walls experience but you also get fragments of text triggered almost at random across four different games as you do so. i liked the enhancement of the bitsy shuffled text experience and they do some structural things with the four overlapping game voices - one of them is more abstract and poetic, another more domestic, another records a trip out - but kind of wish the mishmash had been more frenzied and contrasting. i feel like a recurring thread across many different games i tried was text that all settled towards the same tone and level of like, personal-winsome, and thats fine, but you can be personal and winsome without sounding that way… hopefully there’s a futurist sound poem dlc coming for this soon.
Baby Labor - the opening job interview section is great, the baffled, sluggish resentment of the Baby explaining how screaming is a great way to get people to do what you want being framed by the equally weird and abstracted cruelty of demanding it justify itself by means of standardised interview questions… after that it morphs into a more familiar kind of industry critique and felt kind of diminished for me as a result, i don’t think i needed to have the protagonist explain how bad a baby would be to work for or how ridiculous the fast-tracking of a baby’s career would be. but some good lines and i liked the solemn, churchy music.
Beautycopter - magnificent…! the part where you leave the resort and the town is just a single endless road with a Eurospar next to it and these beautiful clouds and basil-kirchin-abstractions-of-the-industrial-north type library music alone made me feel delighted that a game could be so dreamy, funny and weirdly recognizable all at once. probably my favourite thing ive played in a while.
check_input - you grab and twist the microphones to make different things pop into view but it’s mostly use to pace npcs you walk between. i would probably have been more into this if it didn’t give me motion sickness from the extremely giddy mouse camera tracking… i’m an old man now.
Dondgynns Auv Ye Wyrdd - next to Beautycopter the best thing i’ve played lately - sort of plays on the weird back and forth between ui and gameworld elements that you’d find in something like Ultima Underworld, with a little personified game avatar acting out you motions and also talking to you, with things like attacks represented very differently in the actual game, tossing inventory items directly into the world etc - but i think beyond that it’s just surprisingly dense and pretty, very open about itself but at the same time with a funny sensibility that feels just out of reach, which is a mix i always find very appealing.
Screensaver Subterfuge - wander around the Windows Screensaver maze. pretty direct but improved a lot with the addition of voice acting which is clearly just the developer or a friend having fun trying out dumb voices and reciting plot beats from old cyberpunk novels as you roam the mazes. just committed to the bit enough to work.
Painted Tomb - in many ways feels like a kind of de rigeur example of this kind of game (jarring contrasted mixed-resolution pixel graphics, malformed kimberley kubus ish figures, long empty or inscrutable sections that seem to play with or punish your internal tolerance levels, shifts in gameplay type and perspective etc - sunfishlikes?), maybe that’s unfair, i think there’s always kind of a mental shift needed when something goes from a single outlier to kind of a recurring genre, like noise music. it doesn’t mean it’s bad but i guess it means a change of emphasis to what the work is doing in that genre setting. in this case the grotesque mushroom guy you play as is followed around at the start by a smaller, otherwise identical grotesque mushroom guy. and it actually does come off as sort of moving in a weird way to have some level of mute companionship in what are typically almost caricaturally alienated worlds. unfortunately it doesn’t last long… but little mushroom guy will live on, in my heart.