a team of scientists just announced this. it’s a world called FleshJacket World and they’re setting up the rules now…
So it seems, like in the Game Hypogea, that the new world is mostly in an underground cavern, where you have become a robot whose brain awakes after how long… and then has to, pole vault around. to some a nightmare and yet i very much adored the strange challenges it proposed. why? because, the underground is a place with rocks and pipes and when you have wires and systems added, that’s fun. you are beautiful, i think, looking at my boyfriend.
so yeah a million bugs and they all have like 9 legs and six sex organs.
chitinous leg rubbing 3 sets of 3.
in the new underground reality i wonder if it will be like something like Cave Story. the game about the robot with the hat. it seems that so many robots live in an underground location based on two examples.
i had heard a lot of people talk about cave story but in vague terms perhaps because it was played so long ago, before even minecraft or even undertale, for a lot of fucking nerds. so basically i play it through in 2 days, it’s very captivating actually. and to think it was free. i think that’s so cool.
there’s bugs in that game but they’re like… rabbit people, which is kind of a bug (see the idea of Rabbids) gee I’m so tired.
anyway in FleshJacket world the news is pretty much mostly about the new bugs because in these craters in the world coming up … i sometimes have to slap myself to wake myself up.
The underground is ungoverned, unruled, there is no consensus on its ownership. A great demon tower has fallen into disrepair and its caverns flooded. the peninsula demarcated by its split and tragic form. they’ve modelled it and are wrapping a graphical skin for it. one that will buzz warm and attract flies and moths to bite.
they’re part of the one million.
so yeah basically anyway, if you’re a robot starting up or killing the ‘world machine’ then i guess you’re unders…
…
It’s the next day, I write this from my college course in data analysis. A room of silent people on computers, enrolled in online learning from a private company, I don’t know where the teacher is today, I got in late. Cut my face shaving and had to wait for it to stop bleeding.
The world is kind of like the dream of a sleeper. We move through it and our questions answer themselves or remain unanswered. In the game Cavern of Dreams, you are a cute little dragon in a mother world, a cavern of dreams both cute and scary where you collect eggs… see, FOAM.
cavern, it’s in the style of something from the early 2000s maybe, but with the unique aspects that a modern computer brings, finding new ways to render low poly environments and characters. new ways to move, borrowing favourite things… cavern of dreams, like Knytt Underground, has you rolling like a ball, has you bouncing around, like Orbo’s Odyssey has you rolling around as a tyre, and has you bouncing around as an orbo. really these are games of rolling and bouncing, trapped in an unfamiliar…
an unfamiliar rolling and bouncing world. we interface in new and yet familiar ways in unknown rolling and bouncing worlds until they are known. i use a controller for my laptop, a Gamesir product that reminds me of old playstation controllers but is more ergonomically sound… for my hands at least.
Oh roller oh bouncer oh world of strange bugs. The other aspect of these interface worlds being that you are killed and reborn by their hazards. hazards of pools of liquid and beings that are Cruel Enemies. the most intriguing of this aspect is in Cave Story, which enters a lot of ambiguity about the reasons for violence, for fun or not, by coercion, by necessity.
There is in each game an approach to the material nature of your predicament that perhaps is their distinction beyond visual style and movement mechanisms.
Hypogea is a story about the accidental but chosen co-operation of robotic beings in escaping a relic world, one that is mostly quiet but littered with the memories of oppression of the society that created robot life. your co-operation with a comrade bot is what both brings a life and allows an ascent.
Cave Story appears to tell a story about similar cases, of robots being used as tools of violent oppression finding a way to emerge out of that existence alongside bunnies and scientists, but rather than enacting relic excavation, the cycles of planned eugenic destruction of civilizations for the harnessing of power lives on inside the caves… this is a story that is narratively ‘stumbled upon’ by the robot who wants to leave…
Knytt Underground too, steps one step further in its world from one of an existing state of power flux, to that of cascading realities as caused by unknown powers, and how this spreads through a world populated by multiple interacting societies, each forming belief about the powers… Mi is a carrier of hope perhaps for some, the death knell for others, a toy and a funny girl, and she has a cadre of two fairies who themselves are each this. the incidental life that lives here underground finds much less reason to kill… the robots, they are there to do so…
Cavern of Dreams presents a world that lives only to torment the one exister, the dragon, and it’s multiple levels are possessed of puzzles from which eggs can be extracted for mothering/brothering and increasing power based on family size, this is a pastoral fantasy where your parental figures enforce that family is king over the whims of ambiguous but giant embodied evils and sicknesses. a portal prairie on the edge of worlds that themselves are not given to explanation, this is the case for many platformers such.
Orbo’s Odyssey features Orbo a disenfranchised worker and their friend Peeb getting trapped in a corporate office and trying to build a tool to escape by scavenging parts from associated portals connected to their work world. It is in this way and in its sarcasm, it’s disconnected depression expressed as humour, a hyperviolent game about defeating work.
The humour is shared with Knytt Underground, though Knytt aims its disenfranchisement at the structure of life more generally, in which one might meet multiple scammers and liars while the large hadron collider warps reality. poetic as it is humorous… the bugs are for me… this kind of… thing that bleeds through, indicating a hyperviolent structure to our conversation itself as i tell you about these things…
for while I tell you of the beauty of balls, and their political reasons to bounce, many millions of Bugs are born into FleshJacket world only to realise they have been mistakenly involved in some longstanding dispute, some creature war… and the only way out (or further in)… is to explore the cave… find our pleasures as they come… a cool rock. and many wings. a broken leg. replaced. with machine parts. new noises. new sounds. hayfever after rolling down a hill. a thousand miles an hour. could be fast enough.
GlitchOut 