Zarf Updates

A musical city, a record store, and a 90s soundtrack album! Okay, and a Lovecraftian adventure game.

• Phonopolis
• Wax Heads
• Mixtape
• Call of the Elder Gods

Now that I think about it, the Lovecraftian adventure has a puzzle where you control alien technology through musical resonance. See. It all fits.

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Phonopolis

• by Amanita Design -- game site

An adorable animated puzzle-adventure game about a city ruled by sound.

I almost said "tiny adventure game", because of course Amanita games are tiny. It's part of their charm, right? But in fact Phonopolis is pretty substantial. I mean, it's not gigantic, but it's comparable to Keeper or Mind Diver (to name two games which I played recently and didn't call "small").

I'd say Phonopolis leans more towards the "puzzlebox" side of the genre than to puzzle games per se. The aesthetic is machinery that you don't know how it works. You play with the controls until you've done the right thing. Very often that's "make the machine explode messily and satisfyingly all over the place." Then you encounter a new weird machine.

I'm not saying it's not puzzly. You definitely have to pay attention to the game's reactions, think about where you're going, and put together consequences in the right order. And there are some mechanical puzzles that would be entirely at home in Riven. It's a mix.

What I'm saying is that (a) if you feel stuck, it's because you haven't played around enough to see everything the machine can do. And (b) fairly often, when you discover the new thing it can do, it will complete the puzzle right there and leave you saying "Hey, what did I just do? Why did that explode succeed?"

Usually that's a bad reaction! You always want to understand the puzzle after you solve it. But in Phonopolis it didn't bother me. The fun is exploring all the weird little animations and reactions. If a scene wraps up unexpectedly, so what -- you get new toys to play with. Win!

The toys are all modeled and hand-painted before being animated. It's a different style than Harold Halibut -- krunkier, in a word -- but watching everything move is a joy. And everything moves. The main menu rattles as you move the mouse and collapses in a heap when you quit. It's all like that. Wonderful.

Wax Heads

• by Patattie Games -- game site

An adorable deduction-ish cartoon game about working in an indie record shop somewhere in Middle England. A customer comes into the shop and tells you what they're looking for, and then you flip through the stock and give them what they want. Or what they need -- not always the same thing.

This isn't a iron-brained deduction game like Golden Idol. Really, it's lighter than Strange Antiquities was, and that wasn't particularly heavy. But it's not simplistic either. You'll find you need to think all over the record shop: sleeve art, reviewer comments, social media, the indie zine shelf. You wind up absorbing the backstory of several local bands, and then that turns out to matter.

(The riffs on band and performer archetypes were all dead-on. They weren't send-ups of specific names like in Birch Tree Theater, but they're still recognizable. I laughed.)

In the end, it wasn't even about the puzzles. I was there for the character stories. Wax Heads is staffed by a coterie of queer nerds and alt-music-heads. They are all beautiful and I love them. The owner is an (equally great) cranky old lady, a refugee from a burned-out-not-faded-away 80s rock band. That turns out to matter too.

I could have done without the Spotify subplot (on-the-nose but too easy a target). But the big finale show brought an unwonted tear to my eye. A bit of Stray Gods-style dynamic musicologue, even, just to cement the game's place in my heart.

Mixtape

• by Beethoven & Dinosaur -- game site

A reprise of 1990s high-school life as perceived through Stacey Rockford's headphones.

Just like Bloom and Rage, and for that matter The Artful Escape, this is set in an era that I never visited, with a musical idiom that I don't know a thing about. I have never inhabited a world where "Wanna go sit under the power lines and get blackout drunk?" was a question that people asked. But now I have some idea what it was like.

Our protagonists are a tide-locked trio of extremely different teens: the music devotee, the rebellious coddled kid, the stoner artiste. Not that they're limited to those cliches. The joy of the game is seeing their future selves flicker through the self-centered adolescent burn.

Rockford, as she tells the camera up front, is on a beeline to New York to transform her musical hyper-consciousness into a career as a hotshot music producer. Her friends are not entirely keen on being thus ditched. But they are entirely united on the need to find some alcohol to bring to Camille Cole's illicit summer beach party. Can't roll up without booze, man.

The game is -- yes -- a mix: a series of vignettes, each with its mood, mechanics, and (of course) soundtrack. (Rockford introduces each track to the viewer with the elan of a born radio-host-to-be.) Just like in Artful Escape, the music underpins your acrobatics and puts you in the groove. But where Artful Escape had a single move -- the high-flying guitar riff -- Mixtape gives you everything from nighttime sneaking to a lazy day skipping stones to a furious rampage. You're never doing the same thing twice.

Really, Mixtape is the same plan as What Remains of Edith Finch. (Did I really never review that one?) Except instead of recounting generations of Finches, the scenes recount a single (triple) high-school existence, disordered, in flashback. Even the "present" scenes are rendered in the exaggerated colors of memory; surely this is Rockford's adult reflection how How It Was. Kids on skateboards, outrunning cops and their onrushing future.

The art is stylized and generally great. (Photorealism has been ruined, it just means slop now.) I admit that I'm getting tired of the low-frame-rate stop-motion effect. "Animation on twos" made me look smart the first time I mentioned it, but I can't keep doing that, can I? Anyhow I think this one is on threes. Just jerky. However, the portrayal of the glow in a Sharper Image plasma sphere was dead on, and I have to admit that's what counts.

Usually when people refer to a game as "cinematic", they mean that the game knows the camera can move around during cut-scenes. Mixtape is cinematic in that it's keenly interested in what the camera is showing you. And how, and what the soundtrack (of course) does alongside. I can't remember the last time a game made me laugh at a camera cut and Mixtape does it twice. Okay, now it's Virginia, except instead of Twin Peaks it's doing a 90s music-nerd Sixteen Candles.

(Non-romantic candles. Crushes lurk, unvoiced as deep-sea magma, but this is not a kissing game.) (When you get to the kissing scene you'll see what I mean.)

Anyway: I laughed, I cheered, I gasped. I pushed the buttons and did all the things. I made a horrified noise when Rockford said Brazil was the best movie of the 80s and her friends hadn't seen it. That much was true to my life. As for the rest, it's still palpably awesome. Go play it.

I don't think anybody names a year beyond "the 90s". Since this is my schtick, I choose to believe that it's 1995, and the planned summer road trip (of course there's a road trip) will pick up two teenage hitchhikers in Northern California. And then, you know, whatever happened to Kat.

Call of the Elder Gods

• by Out of the Blue Games -- game site

A followup to Call of the Sea, a Lovecraftian puzzle adventure that I quite enjoyed. Sea wasn't the deepest-rooted exploration of cosmic-horror-minus-the-horror, but it landed the vibe. I enjoyed Elder Gods too. It introduces two new viewpoint characters, both connected to the previous story, and sends them off to explore a mysterious jungle island, overwrought cultic basements, an alien city lost to the depths of time. And more!

Early on, Game 2 lets you choose which of Game 1's major endings you got... or prefer. The story proceeds from either starting point. It's ballsy way to avoid the classic Soul Reaver fumble. Norah, the protagonist of Sea, is absent either way (for different reasons). But she is still palpably present, both as backstory and as the offscreen narrator.

Mind you, she narrates the game with an ironic tone which I found a bit distracting. I kept expecting her to refer to the current protagonist as "Stanley". Maybe that's just me.

As with the previous game, the puzzles are numerous but consistently light-weight. They're meant to pace the story, not deadlock you. On the other hand, a lot of the story they're pacing is that you explore a place in search of the clues you need to solve the puzzle. (And absorb story background along with the clues.) So, a collectathon, when it comes down to the foundation.

This lands a bit off-key sometimes. In several scenes, you reach a "Leave or continue exploring?" choice. This sort of winking fourth-wall break usually indicates a story's finale. I don't expect to see it at the end of a scene. Here it doesn't mean "Finish your side quests", because this game has no side quests. It's a bare admission that they couldn't work all the background info into the story progression. They've just scattered it around the room. If you don't read it all before you leave, tough.

(The Invincible did something like this. But that had multiple story threads, past and present, so it felt okay to focus on some of them and not bother journal-scraping for the others. Elder Gods isn't as successful; you really do want to read everything.)

And the story? Not as satisfying as Sea. Pretty good though.

I think Harry and Evie were less palpably connected to cosmic strangeness. They had both been touched by weird stuff, but their real involvement was second-hand. (Harry's wife, Evie's father.) Their stories didn't have the element of cosmic self-discovery that gave Norah's story in Sea its kick.

Still, there's plenty of weird stuff, rooted in Lovecraft's mythos but building in interesting directions. And plenty of ambivalence in the ending. In Sea I was committed to one interpretation of Norah's story; the ending choice was an easy one. Elder Gods, in contrast, gave me pause. And then, once I chose, it didn't try very hard to reassure me that I'd chosen correctly. A happy ending, to be sure, but just that little bit too pat.

Maybe a trace of cosmic horror after all. But only if you want to see it.

Content warning: literal Nazis. I am not 100% off games where you take down Nazis. (Obviously!) But I don't need a lot more Nazi imagery in my life. Times being what they are. ("...Indifferent.")