Indie As Hell: Where We Remain
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
You are the player. The island is indie games. You must escape the island.
“If you were to be stuck on a desert island, what items would you take with you?”
It is a question that has festered in the minds of fools for ages; a parlor game of sorts — but one that holds a mirror to reality, and reveals the jagged edges of the human condition.
Where We Remain, is Twofold Secret‘s retelling of that story, though twice removed from the realm of the real via the lens of both Video Games, and Art. It is a story of a young lad stuck on a desert island, searching for “the prettiest girl’s name you know,” as the game puts it. Presented with a text entry field for you to type such a name into, and with well practiced accuracy, you type in “Derek Yu,” as you have done so many times into Facebook’s search bar. And then the mirror is turned — the game is afoot — and reality’s pixellated edges come into focus.
Nearly 30 years after John Carmack invented the independent games scene with his seminal, but largely overlooked indie game, Doom, we, the new blood, the tenants of the Yu-coined “New Wave” of independent gaming, are able to look into the rear view mirror that is Indie Games and see progress that is much smaller than it appears.
For the mainstream, it has been a decade of growth, with many game developers casting away the training wheels of their Game Makers and Multimedia Fusions, and adopting a platform that appeals to a much wider audience of babies, the Nintendo Wii. Mainstream gaming took its first steps as a more adult form of storytelling with the heart-rending death of the the protagonist’s love interest, and one of video game culture’s most endearing female characters, halfway through Japan’s influential game, Cave Story. But what of indie games?
The gameplay of Where We Remain is simple — move your character around a procedurally generated island, avoiding a malevolent whirlwind whose sole purpose is to find you. Sanctuary can be found within the many caves that pockmark the island’s face, though safety from the storm, you soon learn, may be the lesser of two evils.
On this island of independent games, we are trapped.