Ghosty, by Shensetta, is about our fear of the unknown, our fear of death. Instructions of a most cryptic nature, like a riddle told quickly, sprawl upon the screen at a tortoise’s pace:
Your objective is to destroy the ghost and eyes that over populate the world.
Thus sprach Shensetta; and thusly it was received:
The evil that lurks in the hearts of men is exposed via the looking glass of Art Gaming
Theatre.
Before the turn of the century, it stood alone as the only artistically credible medium — its playwrights the Jason Rohrers of that dark, pre-digital age — its players the carriers of a great weight of prestige, rather than merely a great weight.
Yet decades later, the creation of the automobile, the invention of AIDs, and a bevy of man’s other great achievements and modern conveniences have strangled theatre. Times change, and so shifteth the topography of the artscape. What could once only be appreciated by the critic has come to be appreciated only by the pimple faced high school drama student — a pitiful creature whose social nakedness is covered only by a beaten, gray Les Misérables sweater; whose first and only kiss came at the end of Act 2 of Batboy, a play in which he played the titular role.
Where Shakespearean wit and subtle sexual puns once filled modern high school auditoriums with awkward silence, the mechanics of Increpare‘s Theatrics achieve the same for the auditorium of the mind.
Imagine two overlapping circles. In the center of one circle, the word “Games”; in the center of the other, “Sexuality.” In the intersecting portion — the lemon-slice that exists between the realm of “Games” and “Sexuality”, the word “Art.”
The concept of sexuality is one rarely dealt with in the indie games community — a mysterious function which accepts an argument of type Effort and return void. To attempt to tackle such a broad and imposing concept would require not only a firm grasp on “Art,” and the ability to talk to a girl (one day, I swear it) but balls quite literally made of steel.
I have admired my distorted reflection in the cold, convex surface of Matias Kallio’s loins, a veritable hall of mirrors held within the groin of one man, and have looked a gay in the eyes — yet I have never seen such a brutal depiction of homosexuality as I’ve seen from this member of the NIGSource community. Yet the head upon which sits the Crown of Gay is not the head of Derek Yu — nay, the King of All Gays — the man who presides upon a throne made of another man’s naked flesh — is none other than Matias Kallio — he who possesses balls of steel and fists to match.
Yet his punches are not akin to the barbarism of our civilisation’s great fighters — Cassius Clay, Jack Johnson, Peter McNeeley — oh no, in fact they show little grandeur or fluidity, only an overly rehearsed combo, a powerful one-two, clearly drilled ad nauseum, a lifetime of work behind these two shots. The opening salvo? A threatening jab, not of bone and sinew coordinated in one glorious effort to dominate another being, but of art. Chased swiftly by the crushing animal force of a left cross (southpaw is the indie of pugilism) of intellect.
Matias Kallio’s ‘seminal’ (heh) work — Queer Village, is equal parts Mondrian and Borat.
You play a nameless character, a tabula rasa upon which to project your own identity. You are you, and you are leaving the comfort of Queer Village with your brother in search of mehrehem. You lose your brother. You must find him.
You glide with ease past sexual boundaries, unconstrained by the Puritanical views on sexuality. The metropolitan lifestyle enveloping you during your childhood in Queer Village stripping away any modicum of decency and self awareness your pitious soul may have once held. Your insatiable sexual appetite — and primal lust for mehrehem — your sole inspiration in life. Your deadful queer existence more a sad inevitability than a series of choices. Your quest not an unfolding book, but one long written, and covered in the dust of prejudice.
You are a gay, and no more than you can blame a dog for its actions can you be blamed for yours. Mattias Kallio has spoken the words on the Guantamo of our tongues, that which haunted our minds yet we thought destined to captivity forever, now given voice, given soul. What words has he chosen to impress upon the carbon paper of society for all eternity?
Gays are people too, no different to you or I. Not.
Queer Village by Mattias Kallio, 2.4 MB
“A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”
- Confuscius
Free will. Choice. The if-else statements that control the program flow that is the human existence — a program that ultimately ends with “return 0;” — a return to naught. To distill the sayings of a character in Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 4 — to boil it and extract the pure meaning of the dangerous poison of the Kojima Frog — one can become ten. Ten can become one hundred. But zero? A zero cannot become a one.
Bernie’s Treasure Hunter Man is a wonderful gamepiece in the Octacamo-ian guise of a petty game about treasure hunter. The main character, Marvin, or shall I say, MArviN (Note the capitalized letters for they reveal my gambit), must embark on a journey of a thousand miles — or at least, a couple thousand kilobytes — a journey full of peril, adventure, and above all, treasures. The role of treasure in this game plays the same role as it does in Passage (an oft cited game in academic gamepiece circles) — mere distractions from our inevitable returning of 0.
Treasure Hunter Man starts with the birth of MArviN — his descent from the heavens and crash landing on an alien world — Port Kruz. Here he is given a binary choice, two roads diverging in a yellow wood; the leftward path — a path off a cliff; and a rightward path; the path of progress.
I’ll not beat around the bush; I am a thinker; an iconoclast; I oppose the flow of the mainstream and choose to swim upriver to its source — the origin of meaning — the spring of the free thought. As such, I made a choice that reflected my attitudes — a destructive choice, to be sure — one that lead me off the ledge of reason and into the chasm of the unknown.
I went left.
The screen did not scroll — there was no hidden room at the foot of that pit, just the absense of level data — NULL, personified.
But the Game was not Over.
I continued to fall. Surely such an obvious folly could not have simply been an oversight on Bernie’s part. No. This was purposeful. There was intent behind this action. I sat in wait, staring at the screen, for a minute, then for ten minutes (I did not have the patience, nor stamina, to wait 100 minutes, sadly), waiting for a glint of change, but there was none. Two roads diverged in the a yellow wood (the wood flooring of the first level, is in fact, brown) — and I chose the one less travelled. And contrary to Frost’s depiction of this scenario, it did not make a difference in the world — the world continued — unchanged — unmoved. It did not even bat its metaphorical eye.
Now you are probably clamoring “How dare you write dismiss an entire game on behalf of a single bug?”
Bug? There are no “Bugs”, in life. The “Bugs” that inhabit your garden, for example, are not some oversight by our Holy Programmer — they are intentional and integral to the program of Life (not to be mistaken with the famous Game of Life, which is a shoddy portrayal at best). This gamepiece is a statement on choice, the permanence of human folly. There is no Game Over; no Continue. You cannot Save nor Load. The journey of life starts with a single step, but know this — the wrong first step will cut your journey quite short indeed!
Treasure Hunter Man (Direct Link) by Bernie, 4 MB
December 16th. The unsung hero of the Gregorian calendar.
Lamentable is the fate of the pauper. Languishing in obscurity, a fate pre-ordained and hand-picked from inception. As inseparable and integral to his being as the very genes which define him. It is through art we find a voice, and through our voice that we are heard. On December 16th, 2007, BenW requested an audience.
On this day, it is my pleasure to say: request accepted.
In Chain Reaction, you either are, or you control (according to your religious beliefs) a coloured square, occupying space on a tapestry of other coloured squares that endlessly scroll left. The squares that meet with the edge of the screen are detonated, and any squares touching them are also detonated. Hence the name. To complicate this task of “moving right”, occasionally a red square will scroll from the right. Needless to say, contact with the red squares, or contact with detonating squares, ceases your existence.
Ostensibly, you may say “I’ve walked right before. Passage is a bad game”. You’d be right, of course, but unlike Passage, this is art, not some child’s colouring book masquerading as a work of great profundity.
Our fate chases us, an unwelcome spectre haunting our every waking moment, our every sleeping dream. An invisible force pushing us onwards until we shamble from our realm of the living, into whichever nebulous afterlife you do or do not believe in. To fate, this is a mere playground activity, joyfully toying with our very existence, playing tag with all that we are, and moving inexorably towards the next victim.
A haunting melody backs your tango with the end, both the structured, internal ambience, and the unpredictable, external cacaphony, the sagas of life. Neither the most powerful man, nor the most pitiable wretch exert any sway over the omnipresent inevitability. Your time has been predetermined. Your fate carved in stone long before you existed, and shall exist long after you have departed. Not as a touching monument, but as a meaningless etching, a craggy edge amongst a sea of rough, igneous features.
For all your presence of self, your belief in your own free will, you are going to die. You know this. You know not when it is, but some great and mysterious force does. BenW has seen the face of death. He’s studied each remarkable feature of the iris, and lived to make a game about it.
Chain Reaction (Direct Link) by BenW, 8.52 MB
Hatman is, put simply, a great game. Unlike other titles, riding an endless wave of nostalgia fuelled by idiotic man children with no desire to grow up, Hatman feels like your first love, but it doesn’t make you feel awkward because it’s not 13 years old. Though clearly inspired by several other games, Hatman’s secret recipe has just enough proprietary noxious chemicals to differentiate it from the stampeding herd of NES games made in the Space Year 200X.
Using the ever popular Z and X keys, you guide Hatman through – as of now – 3 levels, each culminating in a boss fight. This is of course standard fare, and barely worth writing about. Hatman’s meat and potatoes comes from its central play mechanic, you attack enemies (crudely drawn, though they be) by throwing your hat at them, which you can control mid-flight. Hatman is, without question, no triumph of art. However, it is engineered with a calculated efficiency, a core beauty that is solely the result of programming.
You’ll not be moved to tears by its message, you’ll not be awed by its visage, and you’ll certainly not lose yourself in its rich sound. You will, however, be impressed by “it”. Its inner workings on display, a wondrous mechanical feat amongst the art on display in Indie Gaming’s Great Hall, clashing with its surroundings, mayhaps even ruining the aesthetic. Yet still deserving of its pedestal.
There’s no grand scheme in sight, not the slightest ethereal whiff of meaning, nor microscopic clue of message. Hatman stands bare in front of all who witness it, intellectually barren, yet intriguing and respectable on another level. Hatman attempts only to be engaging, fun, and solidly built, forsaking all other tenets of great culture, and yet, is that not a bold artistic statement in and of itself?
Hatman is a study in contradictions. The noble savage. The great intellectual slaving away at menial tasks, sweat pouring profusely from his forehead, tremendous effort exerted, not in the name of something he loves, but for the sake of remembering that feeling. What it is to be human.
Hatman (Direct Link) by Bibin, 2.66 MB
(Be sure to install the font that’s included in the zip!)
Ah yes — finally! A game whose play mechanics revolve around time. Time, that which heals all wounds, yet corrodes the cardboard of the brightly colored rectangular coffins that line up the Best Buy aisles — turning them into dust. Sony, Microsoft take note: Indie games aren’t sold in “boxes.” You cannot corrode an idea.
Hempuli‘s Timerocketxby stars a character armed with a bazooka who must reach the goal in each level while avoiding contact with various men in suits. To do this, you must manipulate time, shoot rockets, and kill the men in suits. Now without imbuing my own meaning into the game, here’s a decoder ring by which to untangle the ideological knots that are presented in the game:
Men in Suits: Commercialization/Globalization/Microsoft
Protagonist: You (As in the royal “You”, as in all of you)
Bazooka: Game Maker 7.0 Pro.
You might say this game feels a bit like the indie game “Braid,” to which I might begin to retort but then simply stop, only to ask “Indie?”, pointing you towards Braid’s $180,000 budget, and then towards a small door. A green “Exit” sign overhead — flickering on and off – beckoning you to enter. You open the door and step through. You are greeted by Mario and Sonic on the other side.
Yes, whereas Braid presented time as a means to solve all problems, Timerocketxby presents a starkly non-apologetic view of time manipulation:
“Wouldn’t it be great?” says the old man, “If I could turn back time and feel young again?”
“Wouldn’t it be great?” says the newlywed, “If I could stay in this moment forever?”
“Wouldn’t it be great?” says the criminal, “If I could forgo my prison sentence?”
“No”, says Hempuli, “Time is useful for one thing, and for one thing only — to make platforms of us all.”
You see, time manipulation in Timerocketxby has one purpose — to turn everything in the game world into something upon which you can stand. Society was built on the shoulders of others — what if it had been built on the shoulders of other things like bullets, rain, and explosions? There would be no such thing as slavery. What a beautiful world that would be.
Timerocketxby (Direct Link) by Hempuli, 1.28 MB
I’d like to preface this post with a rather poignant quote. Not preface the entire post though, because I feel it cheapens my genius if I don’t place several layers of abstraction between myself and other writers.
You enjoy all the killing, that’s why!
- Liquid Snake, from the little known video game “Metal Gear Solid”, of the Playstation era (truly the cave paintings of our medium)
Despite the rabid squawking of the “mainstream press”, and I’ve put that in quotes as you’re reading a blog and so you were probably born in 1997 and have never even seen a newspaper, violence has long been the premiere method of exploring morality in art. This is more than simply due to the effect that being edgy and offensive has on the unwashed masses, but because mindless (and on occasion most rare, mindful) slaughter, simulated though it may be, allows us to tear down the barriers erected by our corrupt society and confront the innermost tennets of our being: right and wrong.
Pro Killer Man is more than a Hitman parody, it is a stark indictment of human behaviour and the seedy underbelly of our world that we refuse to acknowledge.
“I need you to kill people.”
“Ok.”
There are people, people like you or I (ok maybe just plebes and ruffians like you, I am a man of refined taste and unparalleled culture) for whom this is not a satirical statement. People kill for money, for a variety of reasons, and much like video game developers, some are professional (me) and some are amateurs (Phil Fish, I very much doubt he has killed a person at all). Loud bumper stickers instruct us to praise and glorify the most prolific killers of our time, indeed, theirs is seen as a glorious task. What of the contract killer? Here we find a great silence.
In Pro Killer Man, you find yourself as a stylised member of the faceless masses, with orders to kill other human beings, for reasons unbeknownst to you. It’s not your job to care, as the vastness and depth of human emotion you will confront in the act of taking a life is enough to wrestle with. It’s a simple keyboard and mouse setup, which I decided to unsimplify, by using a laptop trackpad as a constant reminder that snuffing out the great spark of consciousness in a sentient being is no easy task. The eternal soul, at once so resilient, and yet so fragile, dissipates to another plane upon contact with a bullet. The choice you face is simple, them or you.
There are consequences for killing. There are laws. There is a balance to be maintained, though it is not so steadfast that a resilient man cannot upset it, that he cannot take so many lives and his own remain intact. But what kind of hollow life is this?
The hollow life of the Pro Killer Man, riding into the horizon with his bountiful wealth, and his abyssal soul.
Pro Killer Man (Direct Link) by JW, 2.85 MB
(Note: This review was written for the first demo of the game. All the links in the post have been updated to a more recent version)
Ninjas. The last refuge of the truly untalented, the jazz music of video games. Did you ever wonder why Arnold Schwarzenegger was always wildly firing guns, and not delivering complex soliloquies? Consequently, his talents never led him to the ultimate prize. No, not a big shiny statue, but anonymous people on the Internet lauding his artistic merit.
Such is the fate of the ninja game.
To be sure, there is not the faintest whisper of an artistic message, nor the dullest glint of an inner, obfuscated yet exquisite beauty to be found in JW‘s Super Ninja Hunter, and it has fallen into the filthy pit that commercial games writhe in until they embrace death.
Using your, it pains me to say, grappling hook (sigh, let me bust out my accented e) you maneuver the game’s protagonist about the levels, shooting your enemies – I’ll not stoop to typing the n-word again in this article – until they are dead, and you can progress to the next level, culminating in a boss battle. I just checked my shelves, and rest assured, the molds are still there and intact.
Sure, there’s a visceral thrill, fun, if you will, about the mechanics of it all, but this is the year 2008, is this really what we are playing games for? We may be lagging on the technology for flying cars, and monogrammed silver jumpsuits, but I would have hoped for a level of intellectual development amongst the game-consuming public.
If you’re an uncultured savage, by all means, download this game, I’m sure you’ll have a “blast”. However, if you’ve ever spoken a word of Nihongo, ever thematically analysed a French silent film, cried at an art game, or picketed a Gamestop, halt thy clicking finger, lest thy eyes roll so hard they eject from their very sockets. This isn’t buried treasure, it’s a shiny penny atop the sands, lying in wait until it is spirited away by a pea-brained magpie.
Super Ninja Hunter Ancient Civ Edition by JW, 1.82 MB
(Click the ”Download Now” button under “Play Offline” on bottom right.)
World Drawn By Me: Legend of Two Heroes is a controversial new platformer from the aptly named Hell Room. The story is told through a series of comic strips and tells the story of two brothers whose world becomes invaded by forces of darkness. The two brothers are part of a people called “Bigeyes” who are the “keepers of colours.” They have to escape to the “Black Citadel” in order to regain peace in their world. Ahem. Forces of “darkness?” ”Keepers of colours?” “Black Citadel?” Yeah. He went there.
The gameplay consists of getting the “two heroes” (Who are white. Surprised? Hardly.) to the exit. To do this, the two must work together. The older brother is faster (as is made apparent in the second level), and has the ability to push blocks, and throw (yes, THROW) his younger brother. If you want to (and the game tempts you in unspeakable ways), you can even throw the younger brother into a pit. Now, I’m all for video games as an interactive narrative form, but where do we draw the line between narrative and indoctrination? Is this game simply a means of telling a story, or is it training us to throw our siblings into deadly pits? You decide. But know that the answer is the “yes, a thousand times, yes“.
The music, while very well composed, is highly reminiscent of 日本一ソフトウェア‘s 魔界戦記 ディスガイア (Nippon Ichi’s Disgaea for you plebians), a game that unsurprisingly, makes light of satanic behavior. Hell Room (Note the name), you have a lot of explaining to do.
World Drawn By Me (Direct Link) by Hell Room, 14 MB