itch backlog 1
Casadastra (2021) - 3d maze game, feels sorta Baroque inspired in the cryptic npcs and interest in sprawling flat tile labyrinths. i played on "tourist" mode after talking to an npc in normal mode seemed to cause my screen to black out, and only after i'd played through a bunch of it did i realise this had been intentional - i think the intended way to play is by mapping out the areas in advance, then talking to the npc which obscures the screen while you try to find your way out in pitch darkness. i didn't realise this because when the screen went black my first thought was that i'd been teleported to a totally new area where the lighting didn't load, or where i'd fallen out of bounds... the developer describes it as "a virtual trust-fall with the game" and i guess i distrust computer games by default, ha ha ha.
without that layer it's more straightforward as you'd expect. i did like the comparative bareness of the mazes , an empty quality that reminded me of getting lost in FPS maps, roaming the same circular nest of cleared-out areas again and again.
When I Said "It's OK To Be Cringe" I Didn't Mean Like That (2024) - gameboy-styled exploration game. feels sort of like a parody or inversion of Yume Nikki - the dreams are intimate and mysterious, but you spend most of your time roaming a flat, sterile-feeling "real world" that nevertheless sprawls like the most abstract videogame dungeon. made me think of something deliberately going for the effect of people's first rpg maker games where they spend all their time putting more and more rooms into the very first town - here's the hotel, here are the three identical floors of the hotel, here are the fifteen rooms of the hotel which do or do not have little differences between them, and the maintenance room, and the empty roof, and...
i think when we play a videogame we treat the player character as a kind of sonar ping - we send it out to keep moving until it can move no further, until it bounces off some hard limit to the space, and those limits become our sense of what a game "is". so there's always something disquieting in a game where you keep going, and going, accumulating bits and pieces that sometimes connect to something else but mostly don't, heading out further and further into the hinterlands and always waiting for the other shoe to drop. spoils the ending of an al pacino movie.
Daymare Stray (2009 / 2023?) - rerelease of one of the games in the Daymare flash series! it's interesting playing this now without being familiar with it at the time - as cool and distinct as the style is it definitely feels like part of an older tradition of this kind of art forward platformer mood piece, more Seiklus than Gris which is imo a good thing... there's kind of a sense of taking pleasure in videogame effects we would now consider "low", like hopping up ladder rungs as platforms rather than smoothly segueing into a climb animation or pushing a big lever to make stuff happen, or the way you play as some kind of unspecified hopping critter rather than an explicit character, that i find very charming... when a developer is tired of hopping up ladder rungs they are tired of life. glad for all the people in the comments who played this on their dad's pc.
Death Of MEgaverse (2016) - the power of rpg maker will never be harnessed.
