Dale: Lost in the City

link: https://wetgamin.com/dale.php
genres: adventure, walk ‘n talk, post-arcade
length: 60 – 90 minutes

this game starts out like a one-shot rpg drawn on a napkin. there’s a paragraph long blub on this screen that seems to contextualize things like an arcade marquee, only like, an obvious parody version. it sets the stakes: dale is missing, the city is dangerous, and “LUCKILY I brought all my bombs with me.” on this screen, you can decide what colors the game will use. there are three colors and three things to be colored: the background, the smaller objects, and the larger objects. it’s a silly and fun celebration of interaction.

this game starts out with a very literal bomberman pastiche. single screen, score visible, arcade game style. only… you can leave! just don’t trap yourself, blow up the floating guys, exit out the back, and journey out of the arcade and into a new mingling, narrative context. dale is lost in the city, after all, so just being a bomberman isn’t going to cut it. once you leave, the game shifts cameras. this is already just funny on its own, but it’s also weirdly poignant. the game shifts from accumulation tout court—abandoning the original videogame premise—as the new bomberman now searches for something not quite known.

the new bomberman is still bomberman, so he can only walk and drop bombs. he leaves the arcade game and enters the symbol of our simulationist present. now it’s an open world… but he’s still from a different world, still governed by the rules of the arcade. coming from the arcade game, our intrepid hero is awkward and ill-suited for this journey. in other words, he can only bomb shit.

Dale: Lost in the City is an item-hunt puzzle-fixer by way of bombing. the goal is to get better and better bombs so to waste more and more of the city. this is more violent and maximal than I expected. like, though it sounds straightforward, it’s a strange progression in practice. as your bombs get better, bigger buildings can be demolished, and the overworld starts to be filled up with rubble and negative space, consciously ruining its visual design. the game gets worse as you play it, defying game design best practices.

to make things worse, the new bomberman must explore each zone systematically, finding lock-and-key items along the way (including actual keys) that gradually extends permissible travel through each quadrant of the city. this baroque complexification of arcade standards puts the game in good company. the pacing is a lot like The City in sweeny’s ZZT, the sense of accumulation and subversion is like kiya’s Dragon Slayer, and the puzzles & dialogue pacing is like the seminal browser game Cartoon Cartoon Summer Resort. out of those, only CCSR comes from a (literal) post-arcade context.

both Dale and CCSR have the input standards of Chip’s Challenge or Adventures of Lolo, the physicality is mediated by tile-to-tile movement and limited animation. Dale and CCSR, while still puzzle games, aren’t regulated by visible, obvious programmatic orders and structures. the player isn’t an empiricist or an experimenter. they are a deadbeat and the game mocks them for it. in these two puzzle fuck-offs, the player is alienated from their gameplay, never exactly being sure of their goal, or the relationship between things.

obviously Dale differentiates itself from adventure game standards by also having a fully functioning bomberman system as a vehicle, or like, layered over the part of the game that allows progress. the ‘combat system’ willfully makes itself inert in such a way that points a mocking finger to the self-serious of your gtas and elder scrollses. the joke is very axiomatic: why is bomberman exploring the city? which extends to gunnerman and magicman and every other genus of combatman that listlessly and awkwardly define the simulationist present.

this conceptual alienation is filtered or doubled by a too online sense of alienation in the game’s writing. there are lots of npcs in the city. none of them are helpful, well, except for the shrinks, they’ll actually tell you where to go and what to do (lol). characters either express not giving a shit about each other, or are occupational pastiches dedicated to their own sense of class or national interest (such as worms saying worms rule, because they do), or, if none of those, then they’re just trying to vibe, man.

like the funny part of playing bomberman, the explosion size and amount of bombs eventually gets unwieldy. I missed some of the npc dialogue because they can be kilt by bombs. since lots of npcs are hidden from view until buildings are demolished, it’s very likely that they’ll get caught in the blast. I felt the impulse to restart so I could see variations on incredible banter like “Get out of here,” and which then made me realized I was a fool and I was getting invested in a way that the game predicted but didn’t care about.

every premise in the game is unserious or subverted, every progression just leads to more goofs and pointless shit. there’s no false honor code in place that goads the player into doing a mayhem or a terrorism just to see how it feels or what it looks like. Dale requires those things to progress and revels in a functional pointlessness.

Perdition

link: https://carrioncrow.itch.io/perdition
genres: narrative gallery, parkour, cyberpunk
length: 30 – 50 mins

Perdition has an extreme set up. the game starts without control, in an anti-establishing shot, and you see red eyes, and tops of buildings, without knowing where things begin or end, or why looking seems so painful. I like when games have the new context, some kind of first contact, whatever the hell to call that initial search, where you’re discovering how to move and how to see, maybe not for the first time, but in some approximation of rupture, the false birth that’s neither new nor old. here, the protagonist has to put as much effort in seeing as I do, and something spills out of me, I feel a misrecognition that underpins something droll or unsettling about first person cameras.

in Perdition, the silent protagonist-type is interpreted as an estranging or distancing effect. they move very slowly, surprisingly slow. ambling up to the first npc brings on a one-sided, videogame-type conversation, with a startling justification: the protagonist’s jaw is wired shut. their diegetic silence becomes a symbol of oppression and punitive excess. visually, it’s to be understood that they are also augmented in some other way, it’s unclear exactly how, but something they’re wearing keeps them alive, and filters the air. because this something is communicated by an overlay, it’s like the UI itself keeps the character alive, which is a sort of truth that applies to many games, and that truth is being projected back to me for initially unclear reasons.

this game isn’t quite a walking sim, but it has a dedication to a dioramic sense of place like one would. although deliberately slower than a parkour game, it is still more like those games, it’s a “find your way” platformer. while that description admittedly digs back into the ooze of what navigating a 3D space could be, it specifically resembles Désilets’ and Mechner’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, EA’s Mirror’s Edge, or BlueTwelve’s Stray. these games must be visually spot checked and scan-cycled by the player. played without assists means having a more sustained spatial awareness than a typical 3D game asks for. it’s very common to miss or just not know where to go, because it’s above or below the player, hidden by the architecture, just slightly out of reach. this style feels very good in Perdition because it’s a game that’s sort of commenting on the out-of-reachness of knowledge of one’s conditions and the impossibility of class mobility (shout out to Mirror’s Edge for also getting it). you search and search and it only seems to lead to more dead-ends…

if I were to criticize anything, it’s that there’s a bit too much gameplay. since almost all the mechanics are one-offs and don’t really develop, their inclusion feels questionable, and a lot of the systems in the game don’t really complement the stunning art and writing. I’m pretty aware of the temptations and dead ends that can arise in a jam context, so this is a no-fault zone, it’s peak for a jam game. in fact… Perdition is incredibly full-featured and polished for a jam game, to a degree that like, honestly, even feels a bit unnecessary for the aesthetic statements it’s trying to make. still, they’re good statements.

during the scenario, the game breaks its kayfabe, and shows that this isn’t a silent protagonist in the conventional sense. as they’re able to have internal monologues on objects, and the contrast between this game and others really starts to sink in. a plausible interpretation is that they have been physically silenced because of some crime committed. this videogame silence has narrative weight as it questions the false agency of a player character. by putting the dystopia on the body, it also makes me think about the false agency I have in my own life.

most of these monologues are reaffirmations that come from television sets (which double as checkpoints). amusingly, maybe in a way that’s a bit corny—you can gauge your own reaction by how much you like They Live or eXistenZ—all the affirmations come from a place of being spell-bound by media. in Perdition media is an apparatus of comfort and control; the dyad gets bound up with its ongoing manifestation of silence and control.

the protagonist of Perdition is lumpen-proletarianized and survives at the vulgar mercy of other unfortunate bottom-feeders. somehow, this doesn’t feel gleeful or edgy, it feels mostly sympathetic and sad. the impetus of the game quickly bifurcates from just figuring out who and where you are, toward doing odd jobs for scraps, while heading toward a nondescript temple and ‘ascending.’ as the protag naturally integrates into their stratification, they get the means to resupply their respirator and hold on to life. yet they also seem to become more symbiotically attached to their own cyborgian control measure. in this way, like a regular metroid game person, they will regain the ability to run and jump.

as the character becomes more empowered by their environment, their possibility space narrows. until, at the end of the game, their pattern of only commenting on objects or goods is broken, and the protagonist turns their introspection on themselves. within this pattern, and the game’s inescapable diegesis, it’s as if they themselves view themselves as detached, one consumer object as much as the rest.

Protocol Assault

link: https://casualcatharsis.itch.io/protocol-assault (use ruffle)
genres: platformer, arcade, endless
length: the rest of your life

the ebbs and flows of game jams means playing games without protocols and assaults. and you know it’s genuinely nice to just exist in the machine, with a shotgun leg, without any kind of external pressure to use it.

Kill Dad

link: https://nurseostsaudy.itch.io/kill-dad
genres: comedy horror, art-game, post-arcade
length: 15 mins to possibly hours, the skill check is real

this game is pretty one note, like, as an object, but it’s certified art shit. I won’t rant about paternalism, I promise, but just know it’s a sham pose. here’s an icebreaker that will make you a hit at parties, functions, conventions, meetings: define masculinity without any mention of elementary school biology or capitalist economy and relations.

okay but like, this is an extremely funny game in retrospect. I won’t invoke any of those forbidden dad games by name because the comparisons should be obvious to my fellow gamer-kin. another way of putting it is like, dad shit is ubiquitous normally in art stuff. outside of nerddom, the role usually isn’t cast as aspirational and cool, lol. you can find shadows of dads in all of Strindberg’s stuff, for example. I recently read We the Animals and it gets into the weeds of dreading the stochastic excess of masculinity, but also craving its approval, and then how that all gets tied up with gay desire…

so, the council asks, is it gay to kill your dad? the gay council will deliberate this question in the back. the council will now exit this review.

unfortunately, this game isn’t queer as in “kill your dad” but it is still arguably queer as in “the normative ways of being are being questioned,” by, yes, killing virtual dad, but also by playing the game.

Kill Dad is a command that sits on a title screen. and this command is saturated with a definitely creepy little ditty. this song keeps playing through the game so it’s basically 1/3rd of its aesthetic impact. it’s reminiscent of the canned nursery rhyme or childish song that crops up in horror, which I guess those are supposed to be creepy because of the sharp disconnect, the pervading sense of “this doesn’t belong here!”, or, for those sad few, a reminder of unmet and mismatched promises stemming from childhood.

but I describe all that to establish the negative. this little song in Kill Dad doesn’t actually parse as a cheesy little thing. it’s sort of a suspended version. the weird part of it is this sense of a second subversion of these expectations, where the droning vocals are playful, not childish. it’s an admission of some more real position of the voyeur playing this. in a real way it’s more funny than creepy, but then when you think about it, that shift is kinda creepy too, because sometimes it’s me creeping me out…

the creepy song that’s not fully creepy sits on the title screen that has its conception of itself, its land, the level that will soon be generated, unsettled and in flux. this is meant to just be more weird stuff, and it is perfectly weird, though it also kinda establishes the conflicted nature of the game.

I promised myself no freud stuff (I seem to struggle with this), but I’m where I’m at because I do not really hold myself accountable all that much: the game opens with a vague elektra set up. emphasizing that the player character is a daughter for freaking once!! the way the father addresses her daughter seems a bit off, like I forgot this was a “dad” and, well, I don’t need to explicitly illustrate the ways dad’s fail at their prescribed roles, because the game doesn’t specify it either.

the puzzle-like nature of the game’s one clever mechanic is actually so good lol. it’s so good that, if for some reason you’re browsing this website to play game jam games from over ten years ago, which I’m pretty sure is a standard, normal use case for web browsing? so if you’re normal, try figuring it out yourself. I did! the game “leads” into its mechanics pretty well, while not compromising on being surreal and illogical, two of the deadly sins of game making.

okay, well, we both know you’re not actually going to play the game, so here’s how it works. like one of my favorite games of all time, ice-pick lodge’s Knock-Knock, Kill Dad transmutes or stumbles on intuitive arcadey conventions.

first, dad leaves for work. the occluded daughter bops around in a floaty, imprecise way, across a world that can only be seen in slices, the rest of its expanse dithered, blurred out of view. dad seems to circle the entire world again and again. I decided this represents days at a time, but that’s sort of a cop-out, because this is the realm of non-representation, so you can pick your own valid interpretation. as he drives by, you have to do a pretty precise jump in order to clear the car. like Donkey Kong or Pitfall!, that kind of strict position transfer.

something like atari standards are a good place of comparison, well for me anyway, maybe not for you, but it’s like, Kill Dad is both strict and unknowable. it reorientates back to the feeling of “first contact” with the other world. though I guess jumping over dad, maintaining that status quo, that part comes intuitively, that’s a standard that’s being carried over. since all you can do is walk around and jump, it seems like there’s no way to kill dad. but the game is called kill dad, so I felt unsettled, and incomplete. I just knew I had to kill dad, because I always do what games tell me to do, but straightforward violence wasn’t part of this world. maybe, conceptually, it’s more like warshaw’s Yar’s Revenge where it’s a clothed in a familiar set-up, but you’re figuring out this alien standard.

there are these seed pods. I’d say there’s something domestic about them being the only interactable objects, but the daughter just bounces them on her head, so the set up and expectation is severed by silly videogame shit. this is a diehard, focused videogame conversion of things lol, where the only way to relate to the world is by bouncing seeds on your head. this felt like a cute addition, just to have something fun to do for its own sake, while avoiding being run over by dad.

wander long enough and eventually a strangely clear and distinct basketball hoop will occupy the focal point of the game.

I had a dad who taught me how to shoot hoops, one of the few things he ever explicitly taught me. that gap between my release and the ball bouncing off the rim or background is a punctuating memory of my childhood.

this would count as a life skill if I wasn’t 5’5.

despite the non-relationship between a seed and a basketball hoop, the strict minimalism leads to its syllogism. the bouncing seed can be guided into the hoop and out pops a knife. this is what “life” is in a Kill Dad system. and we know a knife leads out of a videogame system. the knife is my starting equipment in Final Fantasy, it’s the external paranoia in Resident Evil, it’s the turning point of Yume Nikki, and it’s going to kill dad.

the knife also bounces on the daughter’s head. the parody of twee play continues into its perversion, and I have to say it, it never feels quite suited for funny juggling or funnier violence. whether she plays with seeds or knives, dad still has to drive around the world. he keeps driving off to work, but never stops driving, he never stays in one place. the knife bounces as she waits and the game shifts to a waiting simulator, manifesting a dull sense of anticipation rarely felt outside of stealth games. as the rhythm of the knife and the rhythm of dad’s sliding temporality usually doesn’t match, I ended up missing a lot. killing dad is a hard, fiddly thing to pull off.

I sat with my frustration and strange inability to control or relate to this system for longer than I expected. I did eventually kill dad. the game’s ending tells me he looks down from heaven and chuckles. my defiance is apparently meaningless in the game’s order. it turns out dad’s not mad, he’s actually laughing, the whole thing is totally funny to him.

Whiskey Weather

link: https://denzquix.itch.io/whiskey-weather
genres: diorama, e-card, artgame
length: however long you can last

this game is unfinished, according to its itch page. it’s safe to say it won’t be finished any time soon. but what is finished, anyway? a miserable pile of limits!

Whisky Weather has its framing to orientate yourself in its new context. it seems to be about a rich bastard skeleton, or a skeleton that became a rich bastard. it’s left open whether or not the skeleton is or was a rich bastard. they wake up in a frozen purgatory, and react to the situation like it’s the continuation of their sunday on vacation, or maybe a country club.

and… that’s it! the skeleton can be moved around the screen, but can’t leave their final purgatory, and they’re left with this unresolved mystery and angst. honestly, I can’t really think of a better use of the “Video Game” than moving around a mysterious little skeleton guy…

I remember being a normal child and getting obsessed with carpets that had whole illustrations or patterns, I felt like I could push through to the other side. it’s not the same as a picture or a painting because I would physically be “there.” it was “interactive” but unlike a toy because there’s no form or function. just a picture you can rub your face on and only seem kind of weird for doing so.

look… if people are going to youtube their nintendo childhoods, I can write about rubbing my head on carpets.

this sort of feeling like you’re inhabiting a texture, or that you could project yourself on it, but it lacks a certain physicality because there’s nothing that can be messed with. I like games that could fit on a postcard, games that just want to be looked at for a little bit, games that highlight their composition and how these collaged objects relate to eachother. its not trying to be ludic or ludological, so its asking for a more simple appreciation, one that's ironically more challenging to sustain because it’s outside game heuristics. whether or not you can “finish” a game is oblivious to these possibilities.

Reflections on the Game Jam and (Some) Historical Context

I’ve been wanting to get into magicdweedoo’s games. Because I’m Like That, I started at the author’s first game Dale: Lost in the City. I was pleasantly surprised by the game and, seeing that it was part of a game jam, I used that momentum to check out the rest of the jam, so I could challenge myself to write something I’ve been wanting to for awhile (that something will be explained in the next section).

Each author pulled out themes or mechanical restrictions from a dreamed up list, made by the jam organizer. The idea was probably just "this would be fucking cool" or "this would be fucking funny" and the results definitely stack up.

It was great how weird the games were. This probably reflects more on the small forum culture they came from than anything else. I did recognize the forum, because I searched out Ghosts of Aliens from a thread there, which I only know about from an old write-up from what feels like another era. It’s both eerie and incredible that these forums are just still around, all of its threads frozen in time. This jam almost feels like one final creative hurrah before the encroach of social medias and the anxiety of professionalism. I say almost, but some stragglers are there organizing game jams as recent as this year!?

I will resist name dropping for #clout, but it was kind of wild seeing a few names on there, there are probably some interesting stories to be told, but I’m not that kind of writer, and they’re not mine to tell.

I chose not to track down the games from the jam that were delisted out of respect for the creators. This feels bittersweet. What impulse that caused these games to exist couldn’t sustain themselves. The choice to be or go public is basically fundamental, axiomatic in any DIY maker culture. On the other hand, to paraphrase a friend, cutting off these early and loose ends gives a false impression of how game makers change and mature into their present style. Personally, I’m just not really interested in that perfect, ready-for-MoMA mystique. I like having access to the full gestalt and enduring every impulse.

It’s tempting for me to read the weirdness and alienation in these games into 2013 as a time capsule. There’s something about these games that feel like they came from a more closed social space with shared (yet transgressive or silly) ideas and inclinations. Even so, that kind of injokiness can probably manifest at any time, in any place. From reading the threads around this jam, I can sum up the vibe as “daring each other to make some cool shit just to do it,” which is something I really get along with.

What a great thing to voyeuristically enjoy a decade later like a creepy novelist who admits to people watching.

Addenda for Vextro Long Haulers

I’ve created something very non-standard in game criticism, so I felt like writing a statement of intent. During Vextro’s game crit heyday, when it was an aspiring collective and not exactly as fun as it would become, I decided that explaining methodologies behind my crit to be condescending. My goals then aren’t the same ones now, but they’re broadly similar. I’m highlighting how these games make meaning with shoestring budgets, while deliberately focusing on work that has an ambivalent relationship toward the global consumer economy. With some time in the interim, I’ve considered that this lack of transparency made it slightly harder to understand what the point of my writing is, or what I believe can be at stake.

I personally do not really love participating in a typical game jam (short turnover, mechanical focus) and carried that prejudice into how I wrote about them in the past. I would find myself playing entire jams and picking out the best one, or the one that I could easily write about in order to meet a self-imposed deadline. Ironically, my practice mirrored the jams exactly. This was a very silly pose to maintain in retrospect. I still don’t find ludum dare-style game jams exciting as a participant, but people continue to jam out anyway because they’re satisfying community events, functional at kickstarting short-term motivation, and are enjoyable ruptures into creativity that can free someone from their daily routine.

Despite the ubiquitous nature of game jams, they’re seen from the outside (and sometimes from the inside) to be like pressure chambers that can produce gems. They’re classically imagined as spec-work or portfolio padding. I don’t think I settled on my prior writing practice in a vacuum. From observation, if game critics deign to cover game jam games at all, they’ll pick out the “winners” from the group, or the ones that are easiest to write about. Finding inspiration for crit is difficult, so this is not a blame and shame. I do think, for a lot of jams, this is an unnatural instrumentation of the material into making “good criticism.” At the very least, the more well-known or famous game jams, like Ludum Dare or IFComp, are explicitly contests, and lend well to this format.

There are other kinds of game jams, ones that strive to explore a particular interest, ones that attempt to experiment past the seemingly ossified forms of game design, ones that are made to serve a particular community. These types of game jams would be complemented by a different kind of criticism. A more skilled critic, with more time to waste, could possibly “read” an entire jam of games, and save a lot of labor time, and reading time. Still, it became my aspiration to write about a whole game jam, and I think the serial format is nice too. Because I set achievable goals, I find myself achieving them. I hope that it’s possible to imagine a collage of relationships between these games, so they can be situated within each other, instead of in competition with each other.