on the way to work notes/on the settee after work notes: 3 games

games finished in the past couple days

leap year: the music from this platformer with a malicious approach to jumping is so delightful.

i think that, in designing, this could have been more frustrating, but thankfully (for me) was just enough pressure to get me to persevere past the first ten minutes.

the tightness of the intended route plays out as a magic trick rather than exploration if that’s what draws you to the look of it. it is short, but if you aren’t a Whizkid it stretches out to a few hours and playthrough lookups to get the logic piece you aren’t slotting in correctly. looks delightful, pixel art that is kind of just agglomerating adventure ‘area’ tropes without much thought but not investing them with much either thankfully.

whimsical and very smart mechanically and level design wise. good game.

Brno Transit: set in a post-soviet metro loop this short first person train driving comedy horror game is good fun, though its comic notes outweigh the fear ten to one.

my favourite bit is the eminently frustrating train driving segments, that have you watching the clock and distance markers, pulling forward to accelerate and reverse to hastily brake should you shoot over. your reputation as a driver being impacted by each station stop. the horror is all there already in a labour that requires your brain, body and social reputation be quantised all at once.

running a theme park ride felt very similar.

i do like that in its vision of the metro as a closed and inescapable loop you are fed to its monster no matter what. and its vision is of a homosociality between white men turned into a nothing hell.

i don’t know if this is intended or just ends up being the case when its population is so samey, reading as pale skinned, bald and craggy masculine, men and mad animals (a chimp, a dog). race isn’t entirely absented, in the vision of the music playing, fez wearing, carpet sitting fortune teller, who uses one of the models otherwise on one of the stations. the note of orientalism humming strangely as the amusing ‘other’.

as it wraps up, that kind of patness/triteness takes over the horror narrative which wraps up in a predictable way, attempting shock with nudity and a jumpscare.

gothicc breaker: this is an Arkanoid clone with goth girl pinup backgrounds, the levels are lightly challenging enough to make it a slick feeling adaptation of classic arcadeness.

with some easy powerups that demolish a level in a couple of seconds it can feel maybe too simple. but nonetheless satisfying. expanding on the genre of ‘clear the puzzle to get the nudey pic’ established early in video gaming its digital art pinups are of curvy goth-alt women, two versions of the image being available in the gallery, one slightly less prudish than the other though still censored from ‘full nudity’ per se.

the collection of art is charmingly rough around the edges, cartoon sexy and cashing in on a fetish for the gothic that is limited in scope. pale women in leather, red and black hair, remediating popular fictional bad girls and stereotypes with big boob porn aesthetics. a specific vision.