Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 56

Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire only adds to the noise

According to its Kickstarter campaign, the first seed of what would become Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire was the game’s emblematic image: a woman in blue looks down at her red, burning city. There’s a paucity of details that add to the drama; the mountains are uniformly dark, while the desert is boundless and bare. Both are supported by the game’s plain, unsophisticated aesthetic, charmingly complete with rotoscope animation. All of the above combine to create an interesting drama out of drabness: two splashes of color set against a dun disaster.

But this image represents the whole of Tahira in more way than one: a few bright spots contrasted against a dull plain.

there’s little of substance beneath the sands or stone

Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire is set on a dying planet centuries after the collapse of a stellar empire. As the world begins to fall apart, the Astral Empire seeks to conquer their way to the city of Babylon by, effectively, wiping clean any state between them and their goal. The protagonist, Princess Tahira, of one such kingdom, Avestan, returns from a self-imposed exile to try and save her people from this genocidal army. But being a savior here merely amounts to repeated delaying tactics and skirmishes. She aims to hold back the Astral Empire’s army long enough for the long stream of refugees to escape.

Unfortunately, the narrative’s more enticing broad strokes are betrayed by the overall poverty of the script. There are a few wonderful moments: “A city built for millions, inhabited by thousands,” laments the villain, and the line implies a fall so profound and damaging that only the memory of unspecified loss remains. But then we return to Tahira’s main arc, which concerns that of a princess coming to terms with her role. Again, it’s all promising, until her conversations with her horse (who responds with things like “dejected whinny”) begin to tire. Until bad jokes between supporting characters about baldness and ‘beautiful’ hair fall flat. Until the player bears witness to tedious flirtation that would drive anyone to celibacy: “I’m surprised you got here so soon, your little legs must make travel difficult.” “My little legs, but you are forgetting my most important leg—” is his penis. Yes, we get it.

Perhaps I’m judging it by the wrong benchmark. Tahira’s Kickstarter page helpfully lists the game’s inspiration for the tactical RPG elements: Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and The Banner Saga, for example. Indeed, certain elements—the animation style, the isometric viewpoint, the turn-based battles, and even the double health meter of armor and HP—are lifted wholesale from The Banner Saga. And, if Tahira does anything well, it is in learning the lessons of its tutors: just as in The Banner Saga, Tahira’s battles are defined by a sense of desperate flight. The player’s rag-tag group are constantly running fighting retreats; battles are comprised of multiple stages, from the entrance to a monastery, to its rooftops, to its rear, from the walls of a fortress to its courtyard. You’re either trying to set a trap to delay the enemy, or break through one.

a few bright spots against a dull plain

Tahira does manage to innovate on its predecessors in places. There are opportunities to hide your soldiers, waiting for the right moment to reveal them in an ambush. It’s a neat gimmick, and helps maintain that sense of being on the defensive. Granted, this oppressed atmosphere isn’t always consistently present. It is hard to present yourselves as being on the ropes when one unit’s eminently spammable attack is able to churn through eight archers in a single turn. But this objection feels more like a quibble when it’s the only thing stopping one of your heroes from being aerated.

The game’s geography represents another stream of inspiration. The terrain of various battlefields are stark deserts in the model of Rajasthan or the empty quarter. The mountains are meant to evoke the Himalayas, while cities are inspired by the Baghdad of the One Thousand and One Nights, and sit in the appreciative vein of Aladdin’s (1992) Agrabah. All of this was inspired by lead writer and producer Peter Castle’s travels across the Middle-East and India, and the attention to stylized detail reveals a real affection for the original inspiration. But there’s little of substance beneath the sands or stone: the monastery has prayer wheels, but they are just another piece of terrain to block an enemy’s flanking move. It’s not that the world is unlovely—far from it! It’s that the sun and stone and sand is ultimately uninteresting. The game’s villain monologues about dirt and how his men will not die in it. That dirt is the heroine’s home, and she will stand by it, we are left to presume. But without anything more compelling than a binary dynamic, without any emotional hooks, it’s all just a backdrop in the end.

This shallowness ends up defining the entire game. As Michelle Ehrhardt noted in her earlier discussion of the game, details from the contrast in armor styles between the plucky Avestan and genocidal Astral Empire, and the very story of a conquering army burning through the desert, evoke the crusades and a long history of brutal colonialism. But nothing is done with these connections: the Astral Empire views the Avestans as mere animals, fit only for slaughter; an attitude that feeds into the ease with which they slaughter civilians. Both sides have faith in some kind of light, but there’s no Kingdom of Heaven-esque depiction of religiously-motivated warfare. The guerrilla warfare element is just as intriguing, but remains unexplored. Furthermore, the game simply feels incomplete. The narrative that we have lacks any real resolution, it being the bare story of a flight up the mountains. More is hinted at in both the background material and in the story itself, but that ‘more’ is utterly invisible. What’s left is disdainful slaughter and badly-written hand wringing segueing into bad jokes.

And that’s all you get: a competently executed tactical RPG with a jejune script and stylized window dressing. Perhaps the sequel baiting at its end will lead to a follow-up that redeems Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire. But, for now, the game is just echoes; echoes of The Banner Saga, of India and the Middle-East, and of poorly-written Saturday morning cartoons. But the thing about echoes is that they are always less substantial than the original word: “good enough” comes back to us as “enough.”

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In Calm Down Stalin, great vodka comes with great responsibility

The Cold War was as much a war of personality as it was a war between nations. For more than 60 years, everyday tensions for U.S. and Soviet leaders risked boiling over into nuclear war. It took hordes of advisors on both sides to talk down leaders like Reagan and Gorbachev when faulty intel or empty threats threatened to wipe humanity off the map. In hindsight, it was as much coddling as it was diplomacy.

Calm Down, Stalin is a darkly humorous look at just how close humanity can get to offing itself. Quite literally, your only job is to calm down Josef Stalin. That seems pretty simple until you realize Josef Stalin, level 1 boss of the Cold War, was a famously hotheaded genocidal dictator.

as much coddling as it was diplomacy

Calm Down, Stalin plays with all the fun and grace of its namesake. That is to say: it doesn’t. A balancing act of mundane tasks—like answering the phone and flipping a light switch—alter three stats: tiredness, integrity, and progress. All the while, Stalin’s hand hovers over “the big red button” that controls the nukes. It’s necessary to use this threat to turn back time on the doomsday clock that hovers menacingly over your shoulder. Unsurprisingly, if you actually press the button, you lose.

Fitting in smoke breaks and vodka shots becomes increasingly difficult as more and more tasks are added to patch together Stalin’s sanity. It’s comforting to see that, like real politics, alcoholism and nicotine addiction are just as essential as diplomacy to maintaining world order.

I suppose that, if you’ve ever wanted to be a hero, Calm Down, Stalin is the game for you. To be clear, I mean hero in the martyrdom sense—no one will remember your name. The point is, like all those nameless aides who have advised world leaders against nuclear war, you’ll pull the strings. You’ll keep humanity alive, and receive absolutely no credit for it. All in a day’s work, I guess.

You can purchase Calm Down, Stalin on Steam.

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Fear of a videogame dystopia

Some weeks ago, a piece of news shook my world. It wasn’t the primary election results, nor was it Muhammad “The Greatest” Ali’s passing—even though that one was really, really sad. Nope, it was a parrot. CBS reported on June 10th that Bud, an African grey parrot who kept repeating the phrase ‘don’t fucking shoot’ after his owner was murdered, could become a witness in trial.

We all read bizarre stories online every day, but this one instantly reminded me of a Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (2001) case, where a parrot testifies in court—and there’s more to the parallel too, as the game is set in 2016. Therefore, we can now bafflingly state that Ace Attorney accurately predicted a rather unimportant fact in our everyday lives.

Jokes aside, this unusual coincidence can remind us of our fascination for clairvoyance. Characters endowed with foresight have been part of Western culture since classical antiquity. In Aeschylus’s tragedy play Agamennon, Cassandra—princess of Troy and Helenus’s twin sister—is given the power of prophecy by Apollo in an attempt at seduction. When Cassandra refuses to lay with the Olympian, Apollo puts a curse on her: no one shall ever believe in her visions. She’s deemed mad by everyone after she foresees the fall of Troy by the hand of the Greeks.

Many centuries have passed since Aeschylus. Yet, mankind has kept itself enthralled by the future and the power of predicting it throughout the years. We’ve even reached a time when authors, film directors, and game makers assume the prophet’s role. But, unlike Cassandra, they don’t have to worry about being credible since many of their works rely on our suspension of disbelief to properly enjoy them.

mankind has kept itself enthralled by the future

What fuels the imagination of these modern creators? What gives them the idea that humanity will face the sovereignty of dystopian dictatorships or gargantuan corporations? I believe the answer lies in their very own present: technological advancements, social questionings, the disquietitude of society. We are constantly surrounded by these things and our perception of them can inspire creation.

Since it’s now been mentioned, it’s worth considering that dystopia has been quite a popular theme in various media since the late 19th century. From H.G. Wells’s short story A Story of the Days to Come (1897) and Fritz Lang’s acclaimed film Metropolis (1927), to the avalanche of post-apocalyptic videogames that surfaced lately like The Division, envisioning an ominous future—or even a horrendous, parallel present like The Last of Us (2013) did—has created a whole stream of media that keeps captivating its public.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four lies among the most celebrated works of the dystopian genre. Published in 1949, the novel is set in a world composed of gigantic, multi-continental and dictatorial countries engaged in war. Its plot focuses on the political system of Oceania, named English Socialism and demonstrated by the trajectory of protagonist Winston Smith within it. Orwell’s fictional state is driven by a nationalist force which bows to the figure of Big Brother, its ruler, who might not even exist. Also, the Oceanian government frequently resorts to historical revisionism, brainwashing, and persecution to extirpate any individualistic thoughts within its territory.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was inspired by the author’s comprehension of his own time. World War II was coming to an end during the novel’s incubation and subsequent materialization. Like many, Orwell was trapped in a boiling cauldron. An exposition of his take on his contemporaneity is made in a letter addressed to a certain Noel Willmett, who had asked him if totalitarianism would really be a tendency after the war ended. The content is revealing:

“I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. (…) If the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.”

We could credit the author for foreseeing a polarized world order which was fundamental for the Cold War to exist. Also, the lack of transparency and abuse of censorship in the USSR resemble Oceania’s modus operandi. For example, Leonid Brezhnev’s assassination attempt in 1969 was followed by a news blackout.

imminent atomic end

The year of 1984, though, didn’t look anything like Orwell’s prediction. The Soviet Union was facing its decay in the 1980s—Brezhnev’s ruling was named the “Era of Stagnation” due to its continued failing social and economical policies, and the Gorbachev period was determinative for the fall of the USSR. In fact, Gorbachev’s glasnost, which made government decisions more transparent and gave people more freedom of speech, entirely contradicts Nineteen Eighty-Four’s envisioning.

It is interesting to note that a piece of Orwell’s correspondency shows that these dystopian visions were seen as legitimate concerns during the 1940s and not solely praised by its literary content. In a letter, Aldous Huxley compares his predictions on Brave New World (1932) to Orwell’s and claims his hedonistic and alienated society is more likely to become real.

Aside from iron fist rulers, another considerable effect from World War II’s aftermath was the fear of a nuclear holocaust. Amazing pieces like Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear (1955) have depicted this postwar concern as a matter of its own present, but atomic fallout-ridden worlds were a fascinating and futuristic setting for many works.

Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), which was adapted to the big screen in Ridley Scott’s cyberpunk opus Blade Runner (1982), foresees a mass evacuation from Earth to space colonies due to the results of World War Terminus, which polluted the planet with radioactive dust. Written at the height of the Cold War, the book is originally set in the year of 1992. For literary reasons, presumably, later editions postpone its apocalyptic setting to 2021. Still, it is not incoherent to believe that our justified fear of nuclear weapons will prevent the world’s demise until then.

Interestingly enough, it seems that society feared an imminent atomic end to itself until the late 1980s. Interplay’s Wasteland (1988), which inspired the studio’s Fallout series, predicted that a nuclear doomsday would take place 10 years after the game’s release. Its plot, though, is set in 2097.

a horrendous, parallel present

On a lighter note, some early 1990s videogames showed concern about ecological issues. Environmental damage had been a central matter for years due to events like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) publication, and conferences held in cities like Tbilisi in 1977 and Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

An example of the sort is Aerobiz Supersonic (1993). An aircraft business simulator, Supersonic let the player manage an airline in four different scenarios comprised in 20 years each: 1955 to 1975, 1970 to 1990, 1985 to 2005, and 2000 to 2020. During the years prior to the title’s release, the game presents real-life events like the Olympics and the rise of Fidel Castro, which change geopolitical situation, economical balance and, therefore, flight demand to some destinations.

In the last playable period, the game tries to foresee its close future by creating fictional events. During these years, the player is constantly asked for money by countries to fund research on alternative, less pollutant fuels for airplanes. Even though public awareness was drawn by documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth (2006), climate change has lost its space in media during the current decade to be replaced by social and economical issues—a reflection of the 2008 crisis.

Aerobiz Supersonic also tried its hand on the future of commercial aircraft by claiming that supersonic travel would lead the market. To this date, only two civil supersonic airplanes were used in commercial flights: the Concorde and the Tupolev Tu-144. Both were retired.

Whether they depict a dystopian setting or try to keep their feet on the ground, predictions of the future in media remotely work like fashion shows or concept car designs: they might not reflect the final product, but they try to point out tendencies—truthfully or not. We might not be tormented like Cassandra, but it seems that we’ll always try our hand at clairvoyance, even though we’re constantly flawed by our perception of the present.

it seems that we’ll always try our hand at clairvoyance

However, some theorists are taking this urge to foresee to unexpected paths. In his 2001 article, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?, Nick Bostrom defends the notion that we might be living in a computer-simulated environment, created by a highly-advanced civilization. He argues that if we can envision a future when technology permits mankind to faithfully reproduce a society with a highly-developed, conscious AI, then we could already be living in this simulation itself. Obviously, this is but a short summary of Bostrom’s argument, but I recommend reading his full article, especially as his work was recently defended by entrepreneur Elon Musk during this year’s Code Conference.

Right now, our predictions of the future are concerned with the integrity of our own reality. It’s not surprising when you consider the rise of videogames and virtual reality in recent decades. You only need to look at a group of adamant Pokémon Go players trawling your local park to realize how quickly we humans are to abandon our reality for another. And so we can see how our tendency to predict the future, as useless and fearmongering as it can be, is able to bring the public consciousness into a position where it may  at least consider the philosophical questions that are deeply connected to our current form of existence.

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The creator of Off-Peak is making another uncanny museum

Early last year, independent game maker Cosmo D came bursting onto the scene with Off-Peak (2015), a bizarre exhibition of artifacts that is museum, musical, and story all at once. It threw you into a train station on the very edge of reality and gave you a task to do, begging you not be distracted by the infinite staircases or the inexplicable, repeating figures. Like lots of games, it was a “love letter to a lot of things,” and like lots of games, it evokes the desire to re-explore.

Luckily, Cosmo’s new game The Norwood Suite is being realized in the same vein. Think The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) meets The Beginner’s Guide (2015) meets Dali: The Norwood Suite is swimming in surreality just like its predecessor. Instead of a train station, this time you’re in a hotel formerly owned by P. Norwood, a renowned pianist, whose old bedroom is the eponymous “Norwood Suite.”

The Norwood Suite is swimming in surreality

A suite that was composed for him supposedly plays into the main story, as explained on Cosmo’s devlog, and glimpses of drawers full of sheet music can be spotted in the teaser trailer, as well as a whole lot of pianos. It’s all contained within the uncanny environments pioneered in Off-Peak—they’re set in the same universe—though nothing so far looks quite as bold as Off-Peak’s infinite collage of ephemera.

The cool thing about The Norwood Suite—besides all of this, of course—is that it’s not going to be a linear adventure. Cosmo doesn’t call it episodic, as it may not have a specifically directed arc, but he does say that it will be released over time like a graphic novel. He compares it to the process of making music, and explains that his additions to the initial version of the game are reactions to each other instead of something heavily planned. The hotel setting encourages such organic growth, as characters can come and go, stories can overlap, and the setting becomes an important constant between them all.

Good news for Cosmo is that the upcoming Fantastic Arcade as well as Off-Peak’s upcoming Steam release mean that The Norwood Suite will get a boost in the next few weeks, but he’s been quiet about possible demos even though the game itself seems to be making significant progress.

If you want to hear more about The Norwood Suite as it opens its doors, you can follow Cosmo on Twitter or keep an eye on the game’s devlog.

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A museum is trying to reunite people with their old game cartridges

“Did you ever write your name on game cartridges?”



That question greets you at the top of the Museum of the Preowned Games Collections’s (MPGC) homepage. It is, at first, a bizarre ask of an adult, complacent with their belongings that rarely leave the house or pocket. But its meant to bring back memories of being a kid going to sleepovers, sharing Super Nintendo cartridges, and wanting the world to know that that copy of Pitfall (1994) is, without a shadow of a doubt, your game—at the very least so you could get it back at the end of the day.

give back a piece of technology that houses both a videogame and a memory

The MPGC is a non-profit organization hoping to reunite those old cartridges to their original owners; to adults, potentially comfortable in jobs and families, who want to reclaim their copies of A Link to the Past (1991).



Launched in January by director Junji Seki, the MPGC started, appropriately enough, with him seeking out the original owner of a game he bought pre-owned. “[On] October 3, 2003, I purchased an NES game from a game shop in San Diego, [California] which had someone’s name written on it,” he writes on the museum’s website. “That’s when I realized I want to return this priceless piece of memorabilia to its original owner!” Seki began seeking out cartridges with others’ names on them, hoping he could find that person and give back a piece of technology that houses both a videogame and a memory.

As his collection grew into the hundreds, he and some friends decided their best course of action would be to found the MPGC, opening its archive to the public and allowing others to seek out their old games. The organization now claims to have 800 games. Its website allows people to search for their game by title, system, publisher, and developer. But it also gets more intimate, allowing users to note any phone numbers that may have been written on it, the color of the cartridge, and even any stickers that may have been stuck to it.



It’s an interesting, heartwarming mission, but one that, so far, looks as if it hasn’t yet proven itself as effective. There are no testimonials on the MPGC’s website to convey that it’s been able to return any lost games to its previous owners, so time will tell if Seki’s mission is successful or not.



To keep up with the MPGC, visit its website and look for games you, too, may have lost to time.

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Winter’s pretty low-poly world hides a dark story

Each person in Winter‘s world is given a choice right before the moment they’re to die—life or death. Time is frozen in the one second before the outcome. Winter creator Happy Volcano calls this place The One Second World. It’s where the game takes place, across a series of beautiful dioramas.

More specifically, in Winter, players will look into a spot where a teenage girl is supposed to die (or not die). But it’s not exactly that spot. It’s recreation of what the girl remembers. It’s more of a shell. A really pretty shell.

Dark stuff for the vibrant popup book–styled world

The world is set on tiles, each its own colorful diorama—every room appears to be its own tiny habitat. Secrets are hidden throughout each snippet of the low-poly house the girl’s memory conjures, as well as throughout the rest of the world, filled with the places that others have died in the same second as the teenage girl. It’s dark stuff for the vibrant popup book–styled world.

That contrast was a purposeful decision: setting Winter in a “dark and moody” world would have been too cliche, Happy Volcano’s Jeroen Janssen said. The team wanted Winter to be mysterious, and for players to be eager to explore—a place players haven’t seen before. Moving tile to tile, the story will slowly be constructed.

“In Winter, the afterlife is conceived as a state of mind, a construction of the dying mind, combining distorted memories and references,” Janssen said. Winter is not a “deeply philosophical” game, he added—though it certainly sounds like there’s a lot going on underneath. “Dying remains, of course, the biggest mystery of all, although every religion claims to have it solved.” Winter is just another way to look at death; a way to explore “a character trying to free herself from her upbringing, however difficult and painful that can be,” Janssen said.

Check in on Winter at the Happy Volcano website. Happy Volcano expects to release the game in early 2017 on PC, Mac, and mobile devices.

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A game about the tough task of being a woman

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Perfect Woman (Xbox One)
BY PETER LU & LEA SCHÖNFELDER

Perfect Woman is about the impossible performances of being a woman. It takes you from the first breath to the last in the life of a woman, making a number of decisions that affect the trajectory of her life along the way. But it’s not just the choices you make that determine her fate: each step in her life is followed up by a performance of that role, the Xbox’s Kinect tracking your full-body movement as you try to match the positions shown on the screen. Whether it be working in a sweatshop in a third-world country, conducting dolphins as a magical princess, or teaching a class as a professor in science, if you can’t contort your body to society’s demands you will only find failure. Perfect Woman is a tongue-in-cheek game but it’s built on a serious message about gender norms and the pressures of conformity.

Perfect for: Women, men, dancers

Playtime: 10 minutes (and the rest of your life)

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Undertale, one year later

September 15th marks a full year since the arrival of Undertale, Toby Fox’s 16 bit-style role-playing game for PC. Its auspicious reception, which even delivered the game into the Pope’s hands, seems now more than ever to have been a flashpoint in current debates as to what constitutes excellence in videogames. Standing apart from the colossal world-building efforts that typically crowd year-end lists, Undertale offered something else: an epic-in-miniature, the latest entry in a tradition that might also include the animated shorts of David OReilly, Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), and Chopin’s preludes, which served as the inspiration for Jake Elliott’s short game Ruins (2011).

Like all these works, Undertale is both purposefully small and ferociously determined to transcend its own smallness. Henry James called Jewett’s volume, “a beautiful little quantum of achievement,” because of how economically her sequence of interrelated short stories evoked the dense lived history of Dunnet Landing, an isolated fishing village on the coast of Maine. David OReilly’s 2009 short film Please Say Something is a study in economy as well, intentionally using roguish animation shortcuts like preview renders, isometric perspectives, and low-poly geometric models, in order to tell a sweeping love story between cat and mouse. “One of the main problems with 3D animation is that it takes so long to learn and then to use, from constructing a world to rendering it,” OReilly remarked in a 2009 essay. “My goal was therefore to shorten this production pipeline to a bare minimum.” Chopin took a similarly irreverent, pragmatic approach to the classical form of the “prelude,” composing them as brief, freestanding pieces rather than introductory works. His shortest prelude runs just 12 measures, and most were so sparingly conceived that they moved an irksome Robert Schumann to comment that they were, “sketches, beginnings of études, or, so to speak, ruins, individual eagle pinions, all disorder and wild confusions.”

Wedding small objects to specific feelings is put to poignant effect

“Ruins” is also the name Fox gives to the first playable area of Undertale, which inhabits a spare, hermetic series of spaces, not unlike Jewett’s vision of Dunnet Landing, sketched in a way that leaves ample room in which to magnify the inner worlds of its inhabitants, each replete with unique hopes and dreams. Fox created Undertale’s landscapes and interiors using GameMaker: Studio almost entirely on his own over three years, filling its secretive, maze-like world with a host of tiny yet meaningful treasures. Walking around and inspecting all the objects on display (an anthropological practice also considered essential to Jewett’s literary style) is a reflex that can feel rote and automatic to RPG initiates, but Undertale aims to turn it into a kind of emotional odyssey, punctuated by the cumulative impact of each photograph, scrapbook, and memory.

Because small epics succeed when they wring universal truths from granular elements, scale is a crucial aspect of the game’s world. Small gestures, modest tasks, unique tokens, unassuming figures, curios, and minutiae of all kinds contribute to the grainy texture of the its emotional core. In one area, the player can bet on a snail to win a race, only to watch it heartbreakingly fold under the pressure. Item descriptions contain endearingly meaningless character details, such as the Temmie Flakes, which upon further inspection are “just torn up pieces of construction paper.” The game’s random encounters are menu-based “battles” with one-of-a-kind monster types, each with distinct fears and desires, who can be befriended rather than slaughtered wholesale.

Becoming fluent in the game’s trivia—the way a particular character’s dialogue undulates across the screen, for instance—is both encouraged and rewarded. Wedding small objects to specific feelings is put to poignant effect time and again, whether it’s the force of a mother’s love distilled into a butterscotch pie or a small piece of a snowman that you can’t bring yourself to discard. One character cannot be befriended unless you decide to offer her a cup of water at a critical moment. In Undertale, these small decisions matter, albeit sometimes in ways the player could not possibly predict. Ultimately, the game is able to succeed because it infuses its austere spaces and 16-bit sprites with an epic depth of feeling rarely glimpsed in videogames.

extracting joy from the littlest, stupidest things

Small-scale works are often derided for feeling embryonic or unfinished, throwaway motifs or fledgling ideas that the artist failed to integrate into a sufficiently ambitious whole. Game designer Jake Elliott, who drew the title of his Ruins from Schumann’s appraisal of Chopin’s preludes, defended their proportion in an interview: “Maybe [Chopin] felt like they were complete objects, but there wasn’t a vocabulary for talking about pieces of music that were short at the time. Their length is what drew me … there is a lot that’s unspoken.” Having conventionally privileged length, magnitude, and formal unity, games too have left critics bereft of a clear rubric for evaluating intentionally abbreviated, serialized, even disorderly exercises in interactive design. As games have inched steadily toward simulating the infinitely huge world—a feat that the procedurally generated universe of Hello Games’s No Man’s Sky took to its (il)logical extreme—games like Fox’s Undertale and Elliott’s more widely known Kentucky Route Zero (2013) have deliberately chosen impressionist, circumscribed, “underground” milieux as their settings.

That game-worlds are at once radically expanding due to hardware improvements, and imaginatively shrinking due to emergent design philosophies, suggests a potential rift in the medium that Elliott compares to the transitional moment in 19th-century music away from Neoclassicism and toward Romanticism: “[The Preludes] came at the beginning of the Romantic period … The game ideas I’m working with, as well as the games I am playing right now, are similarly moving into Romantic and more expressive territory, instead of being overly formalistic.”

Ruins, by Jake Elliott

One of the prime advantages of smallness, then, is that it can help liberate ideas from the tyranny of formal expectation, allowing more expressive concerns to flourish. When Chopin released the prelude from its conventional purpose, he inaugurated a charismatic new approach that treated the form as a kind of “mood piece,” influencing generations of composers to follow. Although the Romantics were no less interested than their Neoclassical forebears in capturing the complex and the infinite in their aesthetic forms, they modeled their art primarily after the jagged emotional landscape of human consciousness, in all its moody, restive glory. Using a particular emotional or cognitive state as the guiding force behind level design has proven not only a stimulating creative challenge for game makers, but also an attractive approach for small teams on Kickstarter budgets who lack the resources required to code massively detailed open worlds. Like minimalist composers or judicious fiction writers who prefer to sketch by omission, game creators are becoming more confident that withholding embellishment and cabining scope can be powerful ways to build a world that evokes a precise emotion or reaction. According to OReilly, an ardent defender of simple and even crude animation styles, “The more elemental and simple an environment, the more exciting and visually rewarding it is when we introduce changes to it.”

Undertale deposits you in a radically simple and lonely circumstance—a fallen human in an underground world, alone in a black void with a soft pool of light in the middle. Although the mother figure Toriel offers you a home, the game only truly begins if you manage to flee her solace and rededicate yourself to the adventurous and life-giving task of being alone in the unknown, a humble visitor in a seemingly vast world. Having left Toriel behind, each of the game’s save points generates further reasons to “stay determined,” each more memorably inconsequential than the last: “The feeling of your socks squishing as you step gives you determination,” “Partaking in worthless garbage fills you with determination,” “Playfully crinkling through the leaves fills you with determination.” If Undertale can be said to have a moral or an ethic, it might be this: extracting joy from the littlest, stupidest things—especially those things—can be a strategy for enriching our lives, refining our ability to relate to others, and cultivating resilience in the face of loneliness. Whether it’s listening to Napstablook’s “spook-tunes,” telling Alphys you’ll watch her favorite TV show, or reassuring Papyrus that you like his “Cool Dude” t-shirt, these modest acts of goodwill accumulate and give rise to delicate seedlings of friendship.

videogames can feel like a crowded refuge for the lonely and isolated

Undertale, in its quest for the humanity that distinguishes the epic in all its forms, becomes a simulation of loneliness. Its most distinctive mechanic, which allows the player to choose mid-battle whether to kill or befriend the game’s “monsters,” allegorizes the riskiness inherent to human sociality by leaving the player constantly open to attack. Emotional pedagogy is not something we tend to expect from videogames, but at its most epic, Undertale manages to capture the magic that transpires in those rare and fleeting moments, seemingly only rarer with age, when we disarm ourselves in order to welcome others. Those moments—in game as in life—are sometimes exceedingly hard-won, and the game’s complex “bullet hell”-style battle system smartly (and often tenderly) evokes how difficult it can be to navigate the minefield of another person’s neuroses, prejudices, and assumptions.

When faced with two hostile royal guards, for instance, the player must avoid conflict by puzzling out a peaceful resolution, which entails cleaning the second royal guard’s armor until it shines, and then asking the first royal guard to be honest with his feelings. Having performed these small gestures, the battle music halts and a sentimental theme begins, as the two guards haltingly confess their affection for each other: “The way you fight … The way you talk … I love doing team attacks with you. I love standing here with you, bouncing and waving our weapons in sync … I, like, want to stay like this forever …” By encouraging seemingly minor, selfless acts, Undertale’s battle system neatly expresses how they can be precursors to forging a meaningful connection with another, and that the risk can be worth the reward.

In short, it teaches us how to be less lonely.

The lesson is important because loneliness is here to stay. In an interview with The Guardian, John Cacciopo, the director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, defines loneliness as “perceived isolation.” His findings on its impact are striking: loneliness typically affects one in four people, can be contagious, and has a public health cost comparable to obesity or tobacco use. The topic of loneliness has been raised often in relation to videogames, given their remarkable potential to provide an engaging social and emotional outlet for people who are alone, or feel isolated. At the same time, they run the risk of re-entrenching those vulnerable to feelings of isolation and alienation in familiar emotional terrain. As a result, videogames can either feel like a crowded refuge for the lonely and isolated, or a remote satellite of their own. Toby Fox, for his part, has publicly acknowledged what he hoped Undertale would achieve. Two months after its release, he tweeted, “Hearing ‘UNDERTALE made me want to be kinder’ or ‘UNDERTALE helped me through a dark time’ feels more valuable than any award or score.”

Whether games are drifting toward a kind of expressive or Romantic era is unknowable, but if Undertale’s success is any indication, more and more designers are experimenting with formal limitations in order to express messier and more suggestive emotional states like melancholy, alienation, loneliness, and nostalgia. This experimental domain is where Undertale resides. One year later and it almost seems inevitable that a game that revolves around small acts of kindness and charity would wind up in the Pope’s hands. Near the eve of the game’s one-year anniversary, Fox wrote, “UNDERTALE’s almost a year old. Somehow, I feel both ‘wow, didn’t it just come out?’ and ‘THAT WAS BY FAR THE LONGEST YEAR OF MY LIFE.’” The confused proportions ring true for a game that delights throughout in attending to matters both big and small, a quantum achievement with epic heft.  

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The vaporwave games and glitch art at this year’s Bit Bash festival

This year’s Bit Bash festival in Chicago, which took place on August 13, saw the independent videogame showcase expressing its clearest curatorial vision to date, evolving its DIY ethos into a more polished version of the plucky little party that debuted two years ago. The venue change this year may have stripped some of the makeshift charm from of the festival, but alternatively it granted Bit Bash the opportunity to cater the space to their own needs instead of stepping around someone else’s stuff. With that evolution also came a recalibration of Bit Bash’s image, landing somewhere on the gallery opening side of a warehouse party. Not that Bit Bash has turned into a stuffy museum affair (it hasn’t), but the front room, which set the tone for the rest of the show, was decidedly more art exhibition than video arcade.

Bit Bash 2016 was held at Revel: Fulton Market this year instead of t-shirt company, Threadless’, store/warehouse of years prior. The building’s enameled concrete floors and white-painted brick walls provided a far blanker slate than Threadless’ busy wall murals and functioning storage facility. The venue wasn’t exactly a “white cube” gallery space, but it came close. The layout allowed for clear divisions between different types of games, including a quiet games nook, a curtained-off 18+ corner, and the aforementioned arthouse space in the entry hall, among others. The juxtapositions of games felt purposeful beyond mere convenience, particularly regarding the thematically intertwined pieces in the front room.

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The pervasive themes of Bit Bash’s entry hall were vaporwave and glitch, as indicated in the festival’s Windows 95-styled promotional trailer. Each projected rectangle lining the walls of the front room brimmed with fluorescent blues, yellows, and pinks. Seaquest 1992 and VHS vs Betamax directly incorporate early polygonal graphics, and seem charmed by the quirks of now-obsolete technology from the late 80s and early 90s.

Bands of pastel rainbows swam in and out of existence

Glitch Tank, Beglitched, and Sadventures in Glitch all proclaim their adoration for the graphical hiccups in their titles, but just about every piece in the front room employed glitch aesthetics in some form. The spartan confines of the entry hall offered ample contrast between the broken and/or messy aesthetics of the games and the practical, clean nature of the space in which they were housed, further highlighting the thematic through line.

after_the_party – Benji Blessing Sayed

Not all of the works in the front gallery were games though; in fact, some weren’t interactive at all. Cascading code fidgeted in a Chrome tab as Nick Briz and Jon Satrom’s Kludgy Krawler scraped through the internet. Benji Blessing Sayed’s after_the_party was glitched-out psychedelia to the point of total abstraction. Bands of pastel rainbows swam in and out of existence while speakers blared pitched-down vocal noise that sounded like it was causing the speakers physical pain.

Foster Beach, Chicago – Paul Hertz

Paul Hertz’s print Foster Beach, Chicago is a photography-derived image where a line of beachgoers congregate along the shoreline, each individual a patchwork of pixelated blobs that coalesces into a human figure. The wall label said it was a video, but whatever the mix-up may have been, the static, paperbound image was actually a welcome surprise—it was just about the only piece in the room that allowed for both distance and up close viewing.

Taken as a whole, Bit Bash using glitch aesthetics as an avenue into a more art-driven curatorial stance makes a lot of sense. So many games seek to immerse players in their virtual worlds, creating a suspension of disbelief that commands attention. But when a videogame glitches, it breaks and unplugs players from the matrix. Glitches call attention to the artifice of games and the fragile web that holds that architecture together. In short, intentional glitches are self-reflective, and offer a critique of the medium of games itself. Thus, glitch aesthetics prove a solid entry point for considering games and game-like things in an art context.

Find out more about Bit Bash Chicago on its website.

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A short history of food in videogames

It’s well known that Pac-Man, released in 1980, was the first time a game presented food as a relevant feature. At the time, arcades were flooded with musty smells, spaceships, and violent aliens. Pac-Man had to slide through a maze eating small and big pellets, all while avoiding four ghosts to beat each stage. Its five iconic fruits—cherry, strawberry, orange, apple, and melon—stood out with their vibrant colors among the greys and browns of 1970s sci-fi games. Toru Iwatani, the creator of Pac-Man, said in an interview that the game was created to appeal to women, and it did.

Back in 1982, the Electronic Games Magazine released an article, which was also a study on the types of people who played at arcades, titled “Women join the arcade revolution”, the cover depicting a woman playing Centipede (1980) on an arcade machine. The author claimed that “Women have officially arrived in the world of electronic gaming,” adding that “[Pac Man‘s] record-shattering success derives from its overwhelming popularity among female gamers.” The game, women’s favorite at that time—followed by the shooting game Carnival (1980)—showed how food had the power to change an environment previously dominated by men shooting aliens, one that the same article described as “a strictly male preserve as the old corner barbershop,” into a more family-friendly one.

What’s particularly notable about Pac-Man as a force for cultural change is that, before it, people could only get points by shooting and killing in games such as Asteroids (1979) and Space Invaders (1978), and since arcade gaming was about being represented by the top three letters on the scoreboard, they would shoot and kill ceaselessly. When Pac-Man arrived, players could earn points by eating pellets, fruits, and ghosts—it’s a small but significant change. It proved that people were not discouraged by a game without guns because what they cared about was the competition to the top; the means of getting there didn’t matter. 

From Pac-Man onwards, food was transformed in its role in videogames and has been used in several ways. Role-playing games like Chrono Trigger (1995) had food as a source of health regeneration, while some Nintendo titles expanded the usage of food to increased endurance and extra lives, such as Mario’s mushrooms. Some real-time strategy titles like Age of Empires (1997) used wheat and meat as commodities, and survival games like Don’t Starve (2013) give food its more conventional use as an essential item for keeping starvation away.

It proved that people were not discouraged by a game without guns

But then came I Am Bread (2015). In it, the player controls a slice of white bread which has to butter itself, find a way to fall inside a toaster, and eject itself out of it before it burns entirely. Somehow, this bread can slide, grab onto cupboards, and stick to walls. When we analyze its behavior and goals, it’s not that different from that of human protagonists in adventure and action games, in which they have to overcome small obstacles to reach secondary objectives that will lead them to the main one. And this slice of bread is not food either because it’s never actually eaten.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, one of the greatest sociology scholars to study sign processes and meaning-making, stated in his 1938 book The Formation of the Scientific Mind that “reality is initially a food.” He used the example of how children “put objects in their mouths before they know what they are, and so to know what they are.” When food becomes the single type of object that can be digested, we can only know that something is food if it can be eaten. Therefore, I Am Bread is a game in which food is not food, and not because if this bread existed in real life it wouldn’t be edible, but because it is not eaten by anyone in the game.

Take for instance the mobile hit Candy Crush Saga (2012). The red jelly beans, orange lemon drops, and blue lollipop heads are used as puzzle pieces that must be matched with two of their kind to disappear and solve part of the stage. They are also never eaten. They exist as an artistic choice only, and the game would work the same way if they were turned into rocks, squares, circles, or any other shape—it already worked, way back in 2001, with gems of different colors in Bejeweled. These games use resignification as a key part of their creation process. Resignification is to assign a new meaning to an image, to an object, such as when I Am Bread’s creators decided to use that slice of bread as a protagonist instead of an edible item, or when Candy Crush’s creators transformed sweets into puzzle pieces. The shape of the image resembles the object we already know, but its meaning in that context is different. 

Vanillish and Vanilluxe, the two ice cream creatures introduced in Pokémon Black/White (2010) are also a result of a resignification. They even have eyes and mouths that let them blow cold wind and cry. Their function is to battle other Pokémon and win, and fortunately, we are yet to see either of these two being eaten by another character. The Frozen Burrito in Hylics (2015), the Cabbage-pult in the Plants vs. Zombies series, and the Deku nuts in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) are other examples in which food is used in battles, specifically as weapons. Interestingly enough, the three of them are related to round, heavy-weight, or hard projectiles that were used by humans in actual catapults or slings years ago.

But its meaning in that context is different

When we think about Cookie Clicker, one of the games responsible for triggering a mass addiction to idle games in 2013, we see cookies as a commodity just like food was in Age of Empires, similar to currency. You click the giant cookie on the screen to produce more cookies that can be used to hire characters or buy machines to produce more cookies and … you get the idea. You repeat this cycle over and over until you notice you hadn’t bathed for four days and hadn’t eaten a real cookie because you must produce more virtual cookies. You must! People using resignification to create their art can make objects weirder—though, I’d rather say “more interesting.” When the Like Likes, those tube-like slimes, in The Legend of Zelda series eat your shield, or when the pink slime Poring in Ragnarok Online (2002) eats your whole dropped loot, these items become their food. You can retrieve and use them as they could have been before it happened, but in that fraction of a second, their meaning is food. 

The dung pie, an “Atrocious fecal waste material” in Dark Souls (2011), as described in the game, can be used to feed Kingseeker Frampt in exchange for souls. Most zombies, once again in games such as Plants vs Zombies, feed on brains. In the Fallout series, though, the eating of strange food is directly linked to the player because she can eat Strange Meat, which is suspected to be human flesh. Because eating implies having a mouth full of teeth to crunch, lacerate, and rip the food, when it’s associated with meat—specially human—food is turned into a horrific object. The creatures that eat become symbols of terror, such as Werewolves and Vampires, and we can’t help unconsciously associating their images with ourselves dying by having our flesh slowly ravaged by them. The power of transforming the brain into food was so strong that it became a trope in games. It’s used by so many modern titles that its image as a foodstuff put has aside an earlier one—the exposed brain or the big head in the shape of a brain as a symbol of the knowledge of masterminds. Doctor Neo Cortex from the Crash Bandicoot series and Mother Brain from Metroid fit into that symbolism but have since been overridden by the brain-as-food idea as in the aforementioned Plants vs. Zombies and the Brainsuckers of Bloodborne.

These weirder uses of food in games show how the power the fruits of Pac-Man had persists. It’s why food has reached a point now where it’s becoming so rich of meaning that it’s a staple part of games, used to give players a sense of differentiation as they progress. Even though we are yet to see food once again ignite a time of cultural experimentation in games, as it did with Pac-Man, it is triggering technological experimentation in food with electronic Arduino boards like MaKey MaKey, and turning fruits and drinks into computer inputs—or joysticks. New food interactions in games might be interesting, but the limits to those interactions become uncertain, fortunately, when food is the one under control.

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