[video game post] Three indie games
Oct. 10th, 2022 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaI feel like I was really tapped into the indie game scene in the 2010s and now I'm not. Alas! I decided to try and catch up a bit.
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
At its strongest, this game reminded me fondly of Alter Ego, a much older game (1986!) about the experience of growing up. But while Alter Ego spans the whole length of a human life, IWaTE focuses on age 10 to 20—and also you happen to all be members of a generation ship that fled earth to make a new start on an alien world 20 years and one wormhole away—but really it's about growing up. The writing is sharp—every voice distinct and interesting, and every character really feels like a ten-year-old, then a twelve-year-old, then an edgy teen... Watching your cohort grow from little brats getting in stupid spats on the playground, to jittery tweens playing Spin the Bottle and giggling, to actual adults, is oddly satisfying, and done with impressive verisimilitude.
And the core game mechanic, while not being particularly challenging, is so clever and wonderfully resonant that I loved it to bits anyway. It's a deckbuilder with simple mechanics, but the schtick is that each card corresponds to a memory, and various events throughout the game will cause you to accrue more cards, just like living inevitably accrues more memories. The memory of a talent show victory may be fond (and have a correspondingly powerful card), whereas the memory of hurting a friend obviously hurts (and has a card with a correspondingly wince-worthy drawback). You'll forget some memories, over time, but never enough to wholly rid yourself of the bad. It offers just enough resistance to satisfyingly simulate the feeling of growing and struggling without really hard-gating much progress.
The core game loop is reminiscent of Long Live the Queen in just how addictive it can get, and the strange possibilities you can unlock each run. At one point I cheated on my hot engineer girlfriend with a hot alien, only for the alien to meet an early and dramatic death (wow, way to shame alienfuckers, game >:(((( ). On a different one I got so good at computers that I made the ship's AI into my BFF. It's all very fun, all very cozy.
But...
Well, okay, if you know me well, you should know "cozy" is the kind of word that normally prompts a reflexive flinch reaction from me, haha. And when I first saw the art for this game I did flinch—too Gen Z, too twee, I thought.
It is on the sweet/pander-y side, though only rarely did it ever actually make me cringe or roll my eyes. So it's not an issue of it being to twee, so much as it being... vague? hazy? undefined around the edges, in a way that left it feeling a bit toothless at times?
This mostly shows in the worldbuilding, which has some strokes of brilliance (particularly when it's describing the local flora/fauna of the planet, which are generally delightfully zany/strange/cool), but more often, the worldbuilding merely gestures at interesting ideas without following through. Like—relatively early on, you find out that your colony ship society was founded by a bunch of hippie cultists who read an L-Ron-Hubbard-alike book back on earth. Creepy! Weird! But your colony doesn't seem particularly culty, and we never really dig into their core beliefs/driving forces, outside of vaguely-sketched anti-fascist and fleeing-a-climate-fucked-earth motives. And a little too often, the game's teenagers feel like 2020-era teens dropped in a radically different setting, without any substantial changes to how they act or what they believe. The adults all seem very concerned about letting "kids just be kids", which seems like a weird desire, given that by all accounts the adults fled an earth that had been thoroughly chaotic and fucked for generations, and given that I'd assume terraforming a new planet is all-hands-on-deck kinda work. (That in and of itself could've been interesting thing to push on—overly-lenient parenting styles versus harsh environment—but it doesn't seem to really take that angle, either..) Like, you have the edgy teen kid who complains about being a "cog in a machine," and... I dunno, that seems like a very industrial-society kind of complaint? This colony is not full of extraneous faceless office jobs and TPS reports; you could be pushed into a lot of unfortunate positions but "cog" just doesn't feel like one of them. I'm not saying you don't have Holden Caulfields before modernity, but I'm saying they'd manifest pretty differently, right? The kind of stifling you get from a small and overly-interdependent community where everyone knows everyone is different from the "just a number" feeling you get from living in modern suburbia...
But I also did like three playthroughs in quick succession, so. Revealed preference says it rules, haha.
Umurangi Generation
It's a punk game, not in a shouty-yelly kind of way but in lo-fi shit-quality-recording goth-y or post-rock-y kinda way. It's Pokémon Snap but with some sand in the gears—you work for your shots, and the game makes you clamber to actually figure out how to properly utilize your camera.
I don't have a ton to say because it's really about the experience. Gameplaywise, it's straightforward—you're in some environment, and you've got a list of specific subjects/angles/etc to photograph, so you explore the level snapping away until you've finished all the tasks. So it's all about environmental exploration and storytelling, both which are really good—the world feels both very strange and very real, and there's a story here, cleverly told, with those aforementioned punk sensibilities. The final photo is a touch transcendent. And it all feels handcrafted in a good way. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but if you've got the hankering for a photography-ish game that does something different, here's the one.
Hypnospace Outlaw
Picked this one up based on rionaleonhart's writeup! I don't have much to add that wasn't already said there—if you've got nostalgia for late-90s/early-00s internet, it's a very convincing replica, with some very distinctive page layouts that reminded me of pages I built pre-Geocities—an era I totally forgot existed! but which I totally messed around in, sharing my bad poetry and putting myself in the little site directory... ah.
And I liked the ways the game played with the relationship between moderator-and-moderated—as a mod, I was cringing inside when I was making some of my moderation calls, gritting my teeth like "okay this is what the official policy says but," while delighting in bringing down the banhammer on some true assholes.
The core gameplay, though, is a little obtuse—I couldn't do most of the puzzles without a guide—and while I liked the nostalgic romp a decent amount, I didn't like it enough after the first hour or so to explore nooks and crannies that weren't related to those main puzzles. I think something like Secret Little Haven was ultimately more satisfying as a story, and as a whole, while playing with similar nostalgic themes and environments... but man I'm not kidding when I say they really nailed a specific era of the internet, and I'm glad I played it!
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
At its strongest, this game reminded me fondly of Alter Ego, a much older game (1986!) about the experience of growing up. But while Alter Ego spans the whole length of a human life, IWaTE focuses on age 10 to 20—and also you happen to all be members of a generation ship that fled earth to make a new start on an alien world 20 years and one wormhole away—but really it's about growing up. The writing is sharp—every voice distinct and interesting, and every character really feels like a ten-year-old, then a twelve-year-old, then an edgy teen... Watching your cohort grow from little brats getting in stupid spats on the playground, to jittery tweens playing Spin the Bottle and giggling, to actual adults, is oddly satisfying, and done with impressive verisimilitude.
And the core game mechanic, while not being particularly challenging, is so clever and wonderfully resonant that I loved it to bits anyway. It's a deckbuilder with simple mechanics, but the schtick is that each card corresponds to a memory, and various events throughout the game will cause you to accrue more cards, just like living inevitably accrues more memories. The memory of a talent show victory may be fond (and have a correspondingly powerful card), whereas the memory of hurting a friend obviously hurts (and has a card with a correspondingly wince-worthy drawback). You'll forget some memories, over time, but never enough to wholly rid yourself of the bad. It offers just enough resistance to satisfyingly simulate the feeling of growing and struggling without really hard-gating much progress.
The core game loop is reminiscent of Long Live the Queen in just how addictive it can get, and the strange possibilities you can unlock each run. At one point I cheated on my hot engineer girlfriend with a hot alien, only for the alien to meet an early and dramatic death (wow, way to shame alienfuckers, game >:(((( ). On a different one I got so good at computers that I made the ship's AI into my BFF. It's all very fun, all very cozy.
But...
Well, okay, if you know me well, you should know "cozy" is the kind of word that normally prompts a reflexive flinch reaction from me, haha. And when I first saw the art for this game I did flinch—too Gen Z, too twee, I thought.
It is on the sweet/pander-y side, though only rarely did it ever actually make me cringe or roll my eyes. So it's not an issue of it being to twee, so much as it being... vague? hazy? undefined around the edges, in a way that left it feeling a bit toothless at times?
This mostly shows in the worldbuilding, which has some strokes of brilliance (particularly when it's describing the local flora/fauna of the planet, which are generally delightfully zany/strange/cool), but more often, the worldbuilding merely gestures at interesting ideas without following through. Like—relatively early on, you find out that your colony ship society was founded by a bunch of hippie cultists who read an L-Ron-Hubbard-alike book back on earth. Creepy! Weird! But your colony doesn't seem particularly culty, and we never really dig into their core beliefs/driving forces, outside of vaguely-sketched anti-fascist and fleeing-a-climate-fucked-earth motives. And a little too often, the game's teenagers feel like 2020-era teens dropped in a radically different setting, without any substantial changes to how they act or what they believe. The adults all seem very concerned about letting "kids just be kids", which seems like a weird desire, given that by all accounts the adults fled an earth that had been thoroughly chaotic and fucked for generations, and given that I'd assume terraforming a new planet is all-hands-on-deck kinda work. (That in and of itself could've been interesting thing to push on—overly-lenient parenting styles versus harsh environment—but it doesn't seem to really take that angle, either..) Like, you have the edgy teen kid who complains about being a "cog in a machine," and... I dunno, that seems like a very industrial-society kind of complaint? This colony is not full of extraneous faceless office jobs and TPS reports; you could be pushed into a lot of unfortunate positions but "cog" just doesn't feel like one of them. I'm not saying you don't have Holden Caulfields before modernity, but I'm saying they'd manifest pretty differently, right? The kind of stifling you get from a small and overly-interdependent community where everyone knows everyone is different from the "just a number" feeling you get from living in modern suburbia...
But I also did like three playthroughs in quick succession, so. Revealed preference says it rules, haha.
Umurangi Generation
It's a punk game, not in a shouty-yelly kind of way but in lo-fi shit-quality-recording goth-y or post-rock-y kinda way. It's Pokémon Snap but with some sand in the gears—you work for your shots, and the game makes you clamber to actually figure out how to properly utilize your camera.
I don't have a ton to say because it's really about the experience. Gameplaywise, it's straightforward—you're in some environment, and you've got a list of specific subjects/angles/etc to photograph, so you explore the level snapping away until you've finished all the tasks. So it's all about environmental exploration and storytelling, both which are really good—the world feels both very strange and very real, and there's a story here, cleverly told, with those aforementioned punk sensibilities. The final photo is a touch transcendent. And it all feels handcrafted in a good way. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but if you've got the hankering for a photography-ish game that does something different, here's the one.
Hypnospace Outlaw
Picked this one up based on rionaleonhart's writeup! I don't have much to add that wasn't already said there—if you've got nostalgia for late-90s/early-00s internet, it's a very convincing replica, with some very distinctive page layouts that reminded me of pages I built pre-Geocities—an era I totally forgot existed! but which I totally messed around in, sharing my bad poetry and putting myself in the little site directory... ah.
And I liked the ways the game played with the relationship between moderator-and-moderated—as a mod, I was cringing inside when I was making some of my moderation calls, gritting my teeth like "okay this is what the official policy says but," while delighting in bringing down the banhammer on some true assholes.
The core gameplay, though, is a little obtuse—I couldn't do most of the puzzles without a guide—and while I liked the nostalgic romp a decent amount, I didn't like it enough after the first hour or so to explore nooks and crannies that weren't related to those main puzzles. I think something like Secret Little Haven was ultimately more satisfying as a story, and as a whole, while playing with similar nostalgic themes and environments... but man I'm not kidding when I say they really nailed a specific era of the internet, and I'm glad I played it!
no subject
Date: 2022-10-11 05:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-11 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-11 07:45 am (UTC)the mechanics of teenage exocolonist sound fun (it reminds me a little of Thousand Year Old Vampire, but less brutal), but i think the worldbuilding issues would be insurmountable for me, especially just like... ignoring the cult thing/not caring about it? idk i know people who got swept up in cults so i think i would just be mad the whole time they're not taking it seriously (idk just don't have them be a cult if you don't give a shit about cult dynamics & their inherent harms? very easy choice!)
no subject
Date: 2022-10-11 07:49 pm (UTC)idk just don't have them be a cult if you don't give a shit about cult dynamics & their inherent harms? very easy choice!
YEP, exactly. it has a very "oh oops we realized we didn't have time/space to explore this angle" feel, which is fine, but in that case i wish they'd just deleted the handful of scenes where they bring it up in the first place.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-11 11:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-11 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-12 08:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-14 03:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-14 09:31 pm (UTC)