Zarf Updates

Fugue in Void

• Itch / Steam

Expectations count. When you fire this up, it opens with a langorously slow zoom into an abstract monochrome worldscape. I stared at it. I wiggled the joystick. I went and got a glass of water. It was still zooming. It was pretty, but, like, was the game broken? I killed the process.

Then I looked back at the Steam page, which says: "The game starts with a 10 minute intro." Geez, if I'd known that... To be clear, this is my fault for projecting my expectations onto the work. I should have been willing to say "What is happening is the thing that is happening" and then settle back to watch.

Anyhow. This work will make more sense if you view it as coming from the demoscene rather than the indie game world. (I have no idea if the creator knows this.) The noninteractive opening would be at home in any demoparty. The body of the work has the mode of a walking sim (with slivers of game trope) (pressure plates open doors), but it remains a piece about visual experience rather than world interaction. Specifically, a world of overwhelming concrete architecture, abstract sculpture, and blown-out visual contrast. The style has turned up before (e.g. NaissanceE) but I enjoyed being able to take it in without annoying platforming goals.

Mountain

• game site

Not a recent game, of course. I picked up the iOS version this month for no particular reason.

The followup Everything rather eclipsed Mountain, because Everything is larger (by definition!) and also has structure to make a gaming audience feel at home. But Mountain offers as much charm for its size. I have never before said "Why, yes, I do sometimes feel like a mountain floating in the void, trying to serenely meditate on the universe, and then a washing machine or a stapler or something flies out of the void and sticks to me, you know what I mean?" But now that you ask, the answer is yes, I do. It's a remarkably cogent question considering that the game asks it nonverbally. And it's reassuring to consider that the stapler will quietly decay. Someday it will be gone, even as more objective noise flies out of the void towards me.

I left the game running for a while, and when I came back, the mountain was gone. Now I've started over, and I have to keep the tablet nearby and take a look now and then. Well played. Hey, look, there's cake.

Alt-Frequencies

• game site

A game about radio stations with a genuinely awesome interface gimmick. You listen to broadcaster audio tracks in real time, flipping channels at will. Your only mode of interaction is to record a clip from one station and then play it as a "listener call-in" to another station. This gives you a broad range of action without the awful pit-traps of free text or speech input. Nice clear authoring model, too. And fully voiced for both game outputs and player "inputs"!

To keep the script under control, it's a time-loop game; you get three minutes on every channel and then the world resets. The writers decided to make the story about the time loop -- a natural (perhaps inevitable) interplay of form and content.

The problem is, there's no room to set up an actual conflict here. It's a vague "public debate about the time loop". Newscasters say politicians are for and against it, talk-radio hosts discuss dissent, pop DJs mention the upcoming vote. Conspiracy jocks insinuate that the loop has already started (which of course it has). But there's no actual debate. It's an unsubtle Brexit riff, but Brexit shorn of racism, nationalism, health care, banking, and the Irish border -- i.e., nothing about Brexit at all, nor any other current issue.

So it's fluff, yes, but by the same token it's broadly-drawn and a lot of fun to listen to. The voice talent are all having a great time. It's an easy play-through; very short overall, and the script gives you plenty of nudges about what you should be doing. Very much worth a run just to see how the gimmick plays.

(Big bonus points for supporting accessibility for visually impaired players.)