The Hand Eye Society has been invited to the Bentway Block Party, and so are you! The Bentway is turning 60 years old and they will be throwing a series of FREE events open to the public for all ages at Strachan Gate. We have been asked to animate the space with physical games brought to you by local indie devs. There will also be live performances and art installations as well as dance workshops and streetdance competitions. See evening performances by The Darcys, Brave Shores, Myles Castello, and MONOWHALES. For more information about the entire event and the Bentway, click here!

Where: 250 Fort York Boulevard, Toronto, ON
When: Saturday, August 25, 2018 from 12pm to 10pm
UPDATE: We will be on-site from 12pm to 6pm

You can RSVP here on Facebook! If you’d like to be a volunteer for this event, email us at volunteer@handeyesociety.com.

Here are the games that we will be playing at the Bentway:

Games For Giants by Yifat Shaik

Games for Giants is a series of simple childhood games/toys blown up to giant proportions and converted to team sports.

Yifat is a game designer and artist working on creating autobiographical games and subversive art. A Master of Design graduate of OCAD University, she is currently a professor of game design and 3D modeling at York University. Yifat organized of Different Games in Toronto, is co-director of Dame Making Games and is currently working on The Mattress of St. Dundas and The Medium is the Message.

The Lobster is In! by Allison Kyran Cole and Audie Maginley

You’ve dreamt of being a great artist ever since you were nothing more than a tiny lobster egg stuck to your mother’s tail. There’s just one problem — you’ve never quite mastered the dexterity to hold a paintbrush with those clumsy claws of yours.

Never fear, The Lobster Is In! is a collaborative, creatively crustacean, recreational activity designed to help make art accessible to you. Claw your way to the canvas using clamp friendly utensils designed for critters like you.

Audie Maginley (she/her) is a conceptual artist, photographer, and game designer from NYC daylighting as a Canadian who isn’t ashamed about how much they like Drake.

Allison Kyran Cole (she/her) is a game designer and artist known for her strong belief that any problem can be solved with a positive attitude, a trip to the dollar store, and a glue gun.

See you there!

In the meantime, check out this month’s game: The Yawhg, a choose-your-own-adventure with a twist, made by hometown hero Damian Sommer and London legend Emily Carroll, with sound by Ryan Roth and Halina Heron. We sent the Yawhg for free to our Hand Eye members. Not a Hand Eye member? To join, head here!

The Yawhg and the Art of Ending

The Yawhg begins with calamity, said in brief.

“The Yawhg will be here in six weeks… and no one expects it. Not one of us. We just keep on living our lives, week by week, unaware…”

But I am aware, and I play the rest of the game dreading/anticipating (dreadticipating?) some unknown catastrophic villain.

Part of this is because of Yawhg’s artist Emily Carroll. I remember coming across her signature fairy tale savagery within His Face All Red a couple years back, a comic lush with scarlet terror and terrifying implications. The other part is because Carroll’s collaborator is Damian Sommer, a Hand Eye member whose games are like Charlie from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, jumping out of a moving van: completely unexpected, but awesome. Of the games by Sommer I have played, I’ve always dived into them with clear expectations that end up being subverted by clever mechanics that made me rethink my approach to game logic. The duo had made the game for Comics vs. Games in 2012, and after tweaks and updates, released it on Steam.

Carroll and Sommer brought the best out of each other in the Yawhg, a randomly generated short story with Ye Olde Magical Village aesthetics and sensibilities, contrasted by spurts of mystical weirdness. Right along the usual townspeople and royalty shenanigans are the strange beasts in forests and badly timed demon summonings.

Each character gets one turn, which causes a week to pass by. During their turn, a character can visit one place, which is told through modular storytelling. This repeats, until the Yawhg arrives. And then the consequences of how you spent your time are laid bare, determining the fate of your home.  

The characters are blank templates, who don’t take on any attributes with their identities. In spite of this, I don’t know of a single player who hadn’t assigned some sort of internal narrative or weird backstory to their character. It’s because Carroll’s artwork is adept at using colour and style to make people that embody histories on their faces and skin. The vignettes, that work as rotating backdrops for characters doing essentially the same things in them, become uniquely transformed depending on the character, which can perhaps change how they’re played. I know that as soon as I realized I could make the bearded male-presenting badass the belle of the ball, I was going to be partying with the bourgeois every damn week.

It was refreshing how physicalities didn’t affect gameplay. If I wanted to dance with strange women, give a king fertility advice, or awkwardly encounter my ex, my gender presentation didn’t seem to affect encounters that would have been taken into account in traditional game contexts. So long as I had a high enough stat I could pretty much do anything.

When it comes to mechanics, the Yawhg’s system works okay for the single player looking to grind out as many outcomes as possible, but really shines with multiplayer. This is one of those games that are fun to watch from the sidelines. (One time I watched a father and son play and witnessed the son spend most of his weeks pickpocketing, to his dad’s horror.) Sometimes there’s unsaid competition to beat your fellow Yawhg player, even though your characters never run into each other while fighting or getting wasted at the bar. Plus, it’s exciting to watch a character’s story unfold, knowing your buddy’s awful choices determine what kind of person they’ll be.

As you bustle from tavern to tower, triggering events with every step, there’s a constant apocalyptic promise in the air. This is probably because interspersed throughout the weeks are cryptic notes of caution, that you can’t help but read in a grizzled-fisherman-sitting-at-the-end-of-the-bar voice.

“They say the last time it came, the YAWHG devoured houses whole,” reads one warning.

We’re never given a clear indication of what exactly the Yawhgcould be. A natural disaster, a plague, an evil entity? Maybe none of them, maybe all of them. In the end, it doesn’t even matter. Yawhg’s coming, Yawhg’s here, Yawhg’s over.

When the Big Bad isn’t meant to be overcome, an ending is important. The Yawhg has over fifty endings, with varying levels of probability. For many games, multiple endings are their downfall. Players strive for a “true” final destination, going so far as to follow walkthrough guides and change their allegiances to make choices they weren’t naturally drawn to. While the experience has its perks, it can sometimes feel inauthentic, like the game is guiding you with one of those condescending toddler leashes through the Eaton Centre.

Thanks to the fluidity of unseen random variables, none of the Yawhg’s endings feel like that. Since you can’t really calculate outcomes off the cuff, your actions are more like wild science guesstimates, where you veer towards certain places with a weak hypothesis or a strong hunch. The amount of endings add that beloved “replay value” factor too, making this game less about following concrete routes and more of a stumble through the forest.

Not only is the range of endings impressive, the depth of them is pretty sweet. They delve deeper than a simple happy or sad abrupt stop for an individual. Instead, post-Yawhg endings get their own conclusions too, which aren’t necessarily reflective of the fate that befell your home earlier.

Taking into account the richness of events and endings, it’s practically ensured that runs always feel satisfying. After the Yawhg, your home could flourish, but you might end up jumping into a lake and turning into a star. Or your home could lie in shambles, but you’re too busy fighting crime to really care. Whatever happens before and post-Yawhg, you can’t really complain because something cool probably occurred a couple times in the brief span of time you’ve played. Say what you will about the life you led in the Yawhg, your accomplishments or (liver) failures: it’s undeniable that, at the very least, it was a full life.

And there ya have it! Thanks for tuning into our Spotlight series. The Yawhg is available on Steam, as well as through its official website. Check out some official gameplay, feat Toronto game community folks screaming about lutes. 

Homo Synthetica and the Art of Language

Can I offer you a cybercorrupt visual novel about broke college life for radical androids, intersectional oppression and Black Girl Cyberpunk Excellence in this trying time?

In general, I want you to play all the games we feature for our Spotlight series (now entering its twilight weeks, godspeed you palliative column), but I have a crystalized all-caps NEED for you to play Altopunk’s Homo Synthetica.

The entire game is a line-command interface immersing you in Oya, an android whose malcontent manifests in deliberate corruption of her own data – a Digitally Transmitted Infection running rampant in her pre-programmed mind, altering and exposing her truths. Pluralities of sincerely experienced moments mean Oya has multitudes within her, Shrek-tier onion layers to each interaction that weigh heavier when they’re mangled.

That all comes later. What comes first is 0Y4-46710, the biped. This is the serial number and derogatory terminology that Professor Abel calls Oya, and how players are introduced to her. It’s a perfect primer to navigating Oya’s reality, where your very being is considered unhuman, so dehumanizing comes easy.

You have access to her root menu, which lets you browse other directories. You defrag temporal sequences and debug memories to find deeper levels to interactions you’ve previously witnessed. On first encounter, a conversation may seem like a one-way exchange, but recovering the file reveals what Oya had actually replied or how she interpreted the speaker’s words.

Take Lavender, a human co-worker of Oya’s. We read Lavender’s dialogue in the first memory module, and assume Oya, an unfeeling automaton, has barely talked to her. Delving further into the second module reveal that’s far from the case and far from who Oya is. Playing a later version of the memories, we watch Oya catch feelings for Lavender. Another viewing of the same set of memories bellies Oya’s frustration with Lavender’s human allowances.

Players rely on the words relayed to Oya, our understanding shifting with new responses and thoughts added. Surface truths, which show what happened; deeper truths which contextualize Oya’s choices and unsaid power dynamics. It’s these revelations that directly name the language of others for what it is – personally invalidating and politically dehumanizing. Language in Homo Synthetica gives form to systemic cruelty.

Like Canadian racism, there are folks in Oya’s life who hurt her in indirect, microaggressive ways. They are complacent with “meeting people where they are”. They call her things without her consent that they assume they are allowed to say. They assume she has never been in danger. They police her hair (because #ruinablackgirlsday2134).They take her silence as being agreeable or conflict avoidance. But avoiding conflict isn’t weakness. It’s what you do to survive, when dissidence means violence.

As the game progresses, corrupted text in Homo Synthetica becomes poetry in errors. It’s incoherent, interrupts the plot, and is impossible to verbalize, making it the best vehicle for expressing Oya’s rage inside the machine.

Error messages and glitches are inherently reality-bending. They are characters who clips through walls and remind you that someone coded this game. They are the cracks on normalized societal conventions that remind you that someone institutionalized this pain. The noise of senseless technical wrongness is the meaning. The medium is the message, and Oya sounds realest when she’s distorted.

If Canadian alternative games were a class and I were an embattled TA besieged with “my laptop/android girlfriend hybrid had a virus” emails, this game would be essential reading on the course syllabus. Games like Homo Synthetica are why I care about indie game culture. Games like these build mirrors. Informed by systems, they decipher AI truths for humans. For everyone else, they are reminders that your corrupted operating systems are flawless.

Starseed Pilgrim and the Art of Intuition

As a kid, I spent some springtimes breathing on alfalfa sprouts. I would beg milimetres from baby greens in clear plastic cups with every gross exhale, relying on some pop science factoid about carbon dioxide speeding up growth. I’ve accidentally revived the same approach in my playthrough of Starseed Pilgrim, my bated breath spittling up the screen whenever my galactic garden is swallowed, yet again, by dark tendrils of oblivion. And every time it happens, I have no idea how I could have played better.

If you haven’t battled Starseed Pilgrim before, let’s put it this way: the game’s help page just tells you to keep going. There’s a silent agreement between anyone who has played it to explain as little about the game as possible, so others can go through the journey without expectations. The least spoiler-ridden summary I can give is that you play a pilgrim puttering around white voids, planting symphonic space seeds that repeatedly succumb to a creeping darkness from below. I’ve seen a few terms for a certain place in the game related to the darkness, but I’ve ignored them and dubbed the place the Shadow Realm. The Shadow Realm, the white voids, and the seeds all thrive off your head-scratching, only unfurling when you’ve gone from noggin-picking to trying to bash your skull into the nearest wall. Somewhere between those moments lie the game’s greatest move: actively encouraging intuition.

Visuals or narratives cause most “is this a good game” squabbles, but Starseed Pilgrim divides players because of mechanics alone. Hardcore fans insist it is an experimental masterpiece that can only be played to fully understand. Cynics argue that if the game doesn’t make how it works easy to comprehend, the experience isn’t worth understanding. I can see both sides. The learning curve is steep, but it eventually straightens out and rewards those who fiddle with the resources they’re given, instead of relying on tutorials and spoon-fed protips. However, I can understand why the time-strapped can’t invest in an experience that no one can guarantee is traditionally fun. This is what separates those who have no idea what sudoku is, but fill it in anyway from those who chew their pens to crosswords.

There are many unseens in the game. Not necessarily invisible, just beyond the periphery of patterns we have rooted in our lizard brains to detect. Without spoiling, the behaviours of the seeds and environments don’t get progressively more encrypted. They’re mysterious in the biblical sense, closed off to the uninitiated. And they stay closed off, until players stop expecting something that’s deliberately obtuse to suddenly become predictable. Players can only cultivate comprehension of the game’s reality when they forget about goals and bask in trial-and-errors.

While writing this, I played Starseed Pilgrim in short, ragequittish intervals. I never quit because I was mad at the game or my own abilities; it was frustration with my own ineptitude in diverging. What was holding me back wasn’t how I played, but the narrow scope of procedures I had tried. I hated that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. When I eventually unearthed new ways to combine actions, or discovered unexpected fruits to my labours, it didn’t feel like the game was rewarding me. Starseed Pilgrim was just acknowledging a consequence of my actions.  If that kind of gameplay appeals, set some time away for this and try sowing.

You can get Starseed Pilgrim on Steam and from its official website. Hand Eye members got it for free via Humble Bundle. This spotlight game series will only be around for two more months, so if you want to support us while getting a free local game, join up while you can.

Everyday Shooter And The Art Of Stripping

You’re a white dot patrolling the confines of bullet hell, against backgrounds like those pulsing Windows Media Player visualizations. You hit shapes, get points, and go onto the next level. That’s all there is to it, really. If shoot-em-ups were supermarkets, Everyday Shooter would be No Frills.

What’s striking about this exercise in back-to-basics design is how simplicity honed this game. Bruce Li probably once said, you should be afraid of people who can execute one move flawlessly rather than a million moves half-assedly. Everyday Shooter is a full ass kind of experience. Playing it feels good period. Your pale vessel glides like a dream across expanses. You shoot and shoot and shoot at your geometric enemies, be they blobs that organically sprout onscreen, orbs that slowly fade into vision, or vessels marching in from beyond your screen’s confines. Each level has different enemies, with their own behaviour patterns and chain commands that set off satisfying strings of harmless explosions around you.

This is not a visually pretty game where high-def graphics and intrinsic details rule. Instead, it’s got a sensible kind of beauty, where there’s loveliness in how shapes smash and collide. The legions of fleets and lights spinning around you are elegant in their plurality, gorgeous in their strict outputs and timed attacks.

Creator Jonathon Mak started Everyday Shooter after jumbling with his more complex work Gate 88. Mak told Game Sutra the development taught him he only knew how to make games from a technical standpoint. Simplicity became Everyday Shooter’s goal. It shows, given how stripping a shoot-em-up to its core elements allowed every abstract deviation afterwards to stem from an already comfortable gaming experience.

It’d be remiss to mention how the music takes this game into album territory. The rad guitar strumming throughout the game, courtesy of Mak, is pre-recorded, but hitting enemies produces sound. Instead of the jarring pewpewpews shoot-em-ups are known for, gentle guitar twangs signal direct hits. You’d expect discord, but pulling off chain commands harmonizes a victorious multi-layered hymn orchestrated by your sharp shooting.

While playing the game is accessible, losing all your lives means starting from the very first level. You can increase your capacity of lives with points you get in the game, but those can be a hassle to collect enmasse. They materialize after you defeat an enemy, but they don’t automatically move towards you. It can get irritating to manually pick them up, especially because they disappear eventually, but taking the extra steps to do so made me realize how spoiled I had gotten on games where currency or points would immediately fly in my direction.

And that’s the crux of it. Like the thought process behind New Year’s resolutions, or the nagging feeling that you should make your bed even though it’s going to get all messed up again later, Everyday Shooter is a refreshing rehash of what’s tried and true. It reminds you why you enjoy playing a game and resets what standards you hold them to. Using traditional mechanics well sheds light on newfangled approaches. NostalgiaVision can varnish what Back-In-The-Day was really like, but games like Everyday Shooter show that old school still holds up.

You can get Everyday Shooter on Steam or through the PlayStation Network. Oh yeah, please check out Everyday Shooter’s website. It made me yearn for Geocities aesthetics. There’s also Mak’s follow-up game Sound Shapes, which ain’t as much a solo project musically, what with Deadmau5, Beck, and Jim Guthrie featured on it. You may have heard of them. That Beck guy’s going places.

They Bleed Pixels and the Art of Blood

As all good boarding school stories go, They Bleed Pixels (TBP) starts with you finding a blood-soaked grimoire that compels you to transform into a purple claw child.

What can be said about Lovecraftian-inspired They Bleed Pixels that hasn’t already? Over the years it’s gained a cult following bordering on actual cult. It’s spawned fanwork, let’s plays, mind-boggling speedruns, and cosplays. (Fun fact: the protagonist’s claws aren’t covered in blood. lore says they’re actually red!) It’s got a lovely TV Tropes page, and a strange Your Mileage May Vary page with someone wondering about “oriental” motifs. Um okay.

Then there’s the local love in They Bleed Pixels, which is astounding. Not only does the art gallery feature homegrown talent, the bonus levels revamp Toronto games Ryan Creighton’s: Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure (which comes with a banger remix) and Golden Gear’s Seraph, as well as adapts journalist Matthew Kumar’s exp zine.

For a game so beloved, it’s kind of ironic that Lovecraft himself hated games. The side-scrolling nightmarish gorefest has been called “Lovecraft Lite,” but the nickname downplays how every death damages your psyche. Personally, I delighted in how futile my existence was, as I struggled to murder bomb imps and avoid spinning saw blades. I marvelled at how I could leap onto the same damn spike 20 times in a row. I considered how my mind must have transcended human reasoning and was astral projecting into Hell, because surely that was why I was fool enough to torture myself on the same level for a week.

It’s all the game’s fault for making one of the most satisfying killscreens to watch. Blood oozes the landscape, you shriek, and nearby wraiths keep clawing at your carcass, long after you’ve died — which isn’t long, since continuing from a savepoint takes an almost instantaneous restart. Replaying is so easy when the dread that chaperones typical game over pop-up messages never comes.The checkpoint system works better than a power-up, giving incentive to survive to kill another day. It only rewards saves based on creative murder. Without it, gameplay on your last heart would be a lot less desperate and players might be more likely to off themselves on traps.

that trajectory <3

Which you will do. In spite of the simple two-button commands of jumping and attacking, buttonmashing will get you nowhere.The game demands precision, making you master each pixel and memorize every sprite. It asks you to master pacing and premeditate every strategy against enemies and traps, changing your movement patterns to beat absurd ascents. (Which is a very telling direction. If this game wanted you to feel doom and destruction was imminent, you wouldn’t spend most of your time scaling walls and double-jumping upwards — you’d be diving into the depths, fisticuffing with the Old Ones in an ill-fated cosmic throwdown.)

Precision may be They Bleed Pixels’ lesson for successful runs, but the game’s depiction of blood, the free-flowing variable players can’t control that coats every visual, adds an element of predictable volatility and unadulterated glee.

We think we know blood. We have bloodlines, bad blood, blood ties, blood brothers; we sweat blood to make blood money and have a bloody fine time. We’re bloodthirsty for gore, for great globs and raging rivers and spurting aortas. Televised murder mysteries are #1, because if it bleeds it leads.

We crave carnage, but as long as it’s trapped. We saturate the red runny stuff pumping through our flesh vessels with definitions and symbolisms and allusions.

They Bleed Pixels eschews all of that and lets blood be blood. Gameplay wants you to enjoy bloodbaths, whether you playing badly or well. Your beheadings are just as gloriously gushing as a Shambler. If you die before hitting the spear-covered ground, the camera follows your corpse, knowing this will give you something to avenge. It boasts to you how many pints you spilled at the end of levels, and rattles off a blood or Lovecraft-relate. Blood isn’t a sign of weakness or prevailing over the enemy or any profound statement on humanity — blood bleeds and it’s fun to watch.  Even a certain enemy epitomizes the blood and gives you a just reward for beating them.

Sometimes, games get heavy-handed with references instead of focusing on what it feels like to play. Games can choose to rigidly adhere to source material or inspired idols, which if They Bleed Pixels chose to do with Lovecraft, might have meant no game at all. So kill your darlings and your authors. Or at least, let them bleed a little.

Hand Eye members get a metric ton of perks, among them a free Toronto indie game every month. November’s game is Osmos by Hemisphere Games, a 2009 sleeper hit that snagged many awards and was Apple’s iPad game of 2010. Above all that, they’ve got Bart cred. You know you’ve made it when you have a Simpsons reference under your asteroid belt. Not a member yet? You can buy Osmos off their official website.

NEW DISCOUNT FOR MEMBERS: REAL ESCAPE GAME TORONTO

You might remember Real Escape Game Toronto’s spiffy cursed forest event from September. Now card-carrying Hand Eye members get 10 per cent off Real Escape Games! Discover the joy of of being trapped in a room by heading over to their locations near Kensington Market and Trinity-Bellwoods. Find out about becoming a Hand Eye Society member here.

OSMOS AND THE ART OF CONSERVATION

Cosmic flatulence was my downfall in Osmos. I made the mistake of thinking an ambient game about motes in space would let me breeze through levels, blissfully cruise controlling through a playable ASMR. Instead, I farted myself into killscreens and blazing suns and pulsating hell orbs.

I should’ve paid more attention to Osmos’ opener. The game kicks off with a quote from Isaac Newton: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

Levels expect you to remember that with each energy-crackling toot your mote expends. In Osmos, you play a single glowing orb surrounded by similar shimmering motes, hoping to absorb your brethren and become the biggest, no big deal. The zen drift I had anticipated was only really present after I’d eaten all the smaller motes. Until then, you have to conserve your movements. In a game where it’s eat or be eaten, you end up spending time calculating each hover; every move is projected so you don’t get digested.

The dance of celestial motes means Osmos isn’t an exact art. Zooming in and out is crucial to strategizing what’s best for short-term size boosts while near a sustainable crop of assimilated-to-be.  The ability to slow or speed down time helps decision-making, but I play without patience. I want to zip through ambivalence, lulled into sure-fire victories by meditative instrumentals. I end up dashing myself off by hurtling straight into foes, fatted by my mistakes.

A big selling point for Osmos is being able to randomize any level. Everybody’s favourite term “endless replay value” will get thrown around, but new environments really quell frustrations. You’re blessed with being able to bound into the unknown when difficulties get stale.

Osmos’ accommodations for players like me are reminders that gameplay doesn’t have to hurt and challenging isn’t code for condemnation of abilities. Many games illicit anxiety, fear, or angry when they present players with tricky puzzles or terrifying visuals. Ragequit is what these games want you to reach for; they know you’ll come back anyway. You have no choice.

Osmos knows that unlike the cosmos, your existence is finite and your energy is replenishable, but not something that should be depleted willy nilly.  You can expend a lot of energy trying to catch up with that dazzling colleague that’s taking the universe by storm, reach accomplishments on “time” (we all know time’s an illusion anyway right? Good), or fit expectations that would be detrimental to your health. In the end though, rushing what’ll happen eventually just makes you gas up the place. You burn out, and dying motes don’t dying stars make. Your death throes aren’t glimmery planetary nebulae warbling on stellar winds. You’re snuffed out with the fanfare of a killscreen. NASA doesn’t go paparazzi over your demise, and nothing glorious you’ve done becomes part of your legacy. In space, no one can hear you humblebrag.

Thankfully, Osmos knows us carbon-based life forms need all the grace we can get. You’ve got to become huge, but you need to do it in a sustainable way. Sometimes, levels will stick you in orbit with an impossibly huge, corporation-tier entity that you have no chances of bettering; that’s okay, as long as your personal objectives are met.

Osmos is a throwback that emphasizes a pretty recent movement to actively be involved with self-care. I can’t help but feel better as I adapt to the game’s rhythm, setting my own pace. My hands are busy with zooms to keep things in perspective. I’m always a click away from slowing things down to figure out my next move. The laws of conservation are at play with physics, as well as my little moteself’s mental health. There’s still motivation to play and a spirit of competition present, but they all take the backseat in our galactic voyage; gazing at collisions of colour, motion, and sound takes precedent over how far you get.

You can get Osmos DRM-free, on Steam, iOS, and Android.

HOME AND THE ART OF MEMORY

Home is where the heart is. Too bad your booze-stinking amnesiac heart is wedged deep in the shriveled guts of past sins and dried in the old blood of dead loved ones.

Benjamin Rivers takes you on a trip down memory lane in Home, if memory lane was rife with potholes, bad traffic, and the occasional corpse. This pixelated horror’s set in a deserted town and one man’s reminiscing, his surroundings informing his vague memories of who he is and what he’s done.

Playing Home got me thinking about trauma, and how it doesn’t happen in the thick of devastation. Trauma imprints afterwards, distinguishing horror from terror, the slow sick dawn of realization from the dizzying starlight of jumpscares. Your stomach curdles as gameplay progresses, building up with each terrible revelation.

Home gets gory with descriptions rather than visuals. It’s much to the game’s benefit, because the mere suggestion of decay is far more potent than what pixelated graphics could offer. The real frights aren’t in what you see, but the underlying context, which shifts and deforms depending on which actions players take. A box of old clothes boxed up in the attic could be just that for one playthrough, or they could be something much more sinister in another.

It raises the same question again and again with each choice, like that damn catchy Arctic Monkeys song: do I wanna know? Are the mysteries of the town worth uncovering, at the expense of your mental state? Do you really want to find out what your wife did?

DON’T LOOK is graffitied on walls, so yeah, consider that.

That being said, Home is a game very much centered in the present. Inside buildings, your lamp only illuminates a small radius around your smaller existence. The world isn’t real beyond what you can see and you can only see what’s immediately there; untold things and people are existing and unexisting around you, Schrödinger’s catting up the place.

I liked how physically leaving spaces became an act I dreaded. When you leave a stage, there’s a door exit animation that thrusts you from third-person to first-person perspective, peering into the unknown darkness before you. You always half-expect a jumpscare at this point, or for something just as jarring as your transition to interrupt your flow of play. Moving away from the familiar and inhabiting the protagonist became a way of reinforcing how every area you ventured into, even the ones you’ve been to before, could lead to something frightening.

The past is murky but defined in its unchangeable state. The dead stay dead, no matter who you think killed them. Because there are multiple endings with no “true route”, Home questions the worth of memory. If we’re shaped by our experiences, and awful ones erode us for the long-term, is there value in trauma? Even if you did or didn’t commit certain crimes, the fact that you have been exposed to them has changed you irrevocably. No matter what conclusions the protagonist ends up drawing, he’s still horrified, despairing his future, and very much alone.

What’s really remarkable about Home is that it ends asking players to post their theories on what happened. Just as the protagonist would ask the player if they had taken certain actions and therefore change his memory, the game gets players to keep remembering and keep altering what had happened, long after the actions they took wrought consequences. During my playthroughs, I took one stance, but reading what others thought made me realize how my biases, lived experiences, and pop culture knowledge swayed me towards my verdict. Ultimately, there are no answers.

When Home’s unreliable narrator is relying on players, the most unreliable of entities possessing them, for backstory, Home is bound to always be cloaked in questions and a pervasive sense of guilt.

You can get Home by calling an uber, taking TTC, or on Steam, Humble Bundle, iTunes, and PlayStation.  Also, check out Home’s official website’s WTF section and please explain it to me. Game gave me enough questions as is, I can’t even deal with that.

This essay’s going to be a bit different. The first time I played a version of Shu’s Garden was last spring at Bit Bazaar. Space cactus Shu would tumble across grassy plains, Katamari-style. As you rolled, new plants would sprout behind you. So long as you moved, the world was always growing.  I was charmed, so I pitched writing a review to a now defunct arts publication. Then, I sent developers Colin Sanders and Jason RT Bond a few questions and they answered graciously. The review never got published; the answers lay dormant in my inbox.

Source: Shu’s Garden, Itch.io

I stumbled across the answers again while sorting through emails about this game — now finished, with enhancements and on multiple platforms. It’d be a shame if I didn’t use them. However, Shu’s grown (a lot) and I’ve grown (kinda). In keeping with that, here’s a Q&A from Shu’s Garden’s developers with retrospective musing on the side.

What inspired the cute, plant-centric aesthetic of Shu and Shu’s world?

Jason: The gameplay prototype we made years ago at the Toronto Game Jam just lent itself well to the feeling of joy in rolling through grass and bouncing over hills. So when we started on Shu it was with a vague mission to capture this feeling. I think the natural setting was always there because it conjured up thoughts of happiness and freedom. But it became more of a focus when we decided to make a very contained game instead of a wide-roaming adventure: the scope was narrowed, but the world went from being a background to being an active thing. It was at that point that we evolved Shu from a simple expression of happiness and freedom to also being a symbol and champion of the natural world. Thus, today, she’s a space-cactus-ball thing out to restore the planet.

There’s something really cool about a character with incredible power choosing to be gentle. Flowers collect on Shu’s head and seeds spill from her mouth. Then, she’ll swallow an entire tree and jump off the planet.

Shu evokes that “just ‘cause” feeling that would overtake you as a kid, leaving walls covered in toothpaste or pouring a cup of milk over your head. Why not eat that flower? Go ahead, dive deep into the lake and nudge the turtle until it comes ashore. It won’t do anything of value, but you’ll be filled with a sense of accomplishment anyway.

Freedom in Shu emphasizes what mindset you have to be in to play this game. Without goals or easter eggs, roaming is everything. Sometimes, you’ll feel driven to investigate a fallen meteorite or roll around a specific planet. That’s okay. When you’re in play mode, the way you interact transforms. You aren’t compelled to act a certain way to meet quotas. Encounters are purely to see what makes you feel good.

What ruins the experience is searching for purpose; while following a gaggle of yellow birds, do you playfully swat them, to see how they bob in the breeze or do you smack them, in hopes of unlocking an achievement? High scores are artifice. Roll down a hill or something.

Source: Shu’s Garden, itch.io

Did Toronto have any impact on creating Shu’s Garden?

Jason: Knowing that Toronto has a strong indie community influenced my decision to go independent in the first place. But to be honest I’d say the eco-friendly vibes of Shu stand in contrast to city life. I like Toronto a lot, but grew up in the country and have always felt the city culture denies the importance of our natural ecosystems.

Colin: I guess you could say that the impact of Toronto was very influential.  For one, Jason and I both live in Toronto and we first met each other several years ago in Toronto.  And second, the job market for game designers in Toronto isn’t very strong.  There just aren’t that many opportunities.  So creating our own game, together, seemed like a very practical choice.

I’m the type of person who feels uneasy in small towns. I love concrete and steel, the crush of crowds, the way streetlights make up for a starless night. At this point in my life, I honestly can’t imagine living without other urban denizens around me.

Shu is one of a handful of creatures thriving in the game. They tend to do their own thing, on whatever planet’s orbit they get pulled into. You could spend entire sessions alone on a planet, where you’d do no harm. Rather, it’s your inaction that causes the only negative consequence of the game: left long enough alone, plants wither and falll. The worlds need you to be present, to explore them and coax newness into their landscapes. You don’t get that kind of responsive acknowledgement of your existence in urban landscapes. In games where players are in built societies, there’s always the sense that everyone and everything will continue to go on, whether you participate or not. The potions seller will keep hawking their wares, the missions will keep being doled out. The opportunities are scarce because demand never ends. Here, when the grass sways and stars streak the horizon, you know your small efforts have kept all of it alive. And there’s entire planets’ worth of space free for you to cultivate.   

What are future plans for Shu?

Colin: For Shu’s Garden we plan on releasing at least a couple updates and possibly port it to other platforms.  Of course, the success of the game will be the deciding factor as we will need some income to justify the time we put into it from here.  If it was a success we would strongly consider making the grander, more adventure-style game.  And of course there’d be plushies, t-shirts, candies, TV shows, and a theme park.

Since our interview, Shu’s Garden has definitely gotten the updates Colin wanted. Might not be theme park status yet, but it’s racked up a Kill Screen playlist nomination and was nominated for Canadian Videogame Awards Best Social/Casual Game of 2014.

I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more acclaim from parents. There are no ads and a privacy statement is available for adults. All the music is soothing, featuring trickling rainsticks and soft human voice-acting (major props to the giraffe’s posh “Oooh” and to the way background music echoes when you’re submerged underwater).

I don’t know what future plans are for Shu’s Garden or for its developers. Funny thing about growth though: it doesn’t stop unless you stop moving. I hope Shu keeps rolling.

N 2.0 And The Art Of Dying

N is kinetic necromancy, making you hit replay after every wayward leap. Walljump, dodge missles, fall into a pit of spiked bombs. Die. Soar above the mines, land onto a moving platform — no, miss. Die.

Even the start screen of N promises game over. It loads scenes of the Ninja sprinting through various maps, dying before beating any of them. It’s like a minimalist’s Valhalla, a showcase of the glorious deaths of your fallen brethren; a reminder that you will join their ranks soon.

The puzzle-platformer by Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns of Metanet Software is a breeze to pick up. You’re a stick figure Ninja collecting gold in grey rooms brimming with things that will kill you. You have to hit a switch to open the door that ends the level upon entry. Sounds simple, but there’s a reason it’s been popular enough to warrant updates for more than a decade and countless user-created maps.

The shining deities of Metanet Software <3

In the heyday of Newgrounds and flash games, I played the original N. It was one of those Internet things that kids just knew about, like where to torrent music or 1337speak. Maybe N is why Dark Souls and other punishing platformers  have been so successful. Kids weaned on N like the slow win, the gradual victory earned from persistent failures.

It also helps that N is so finessed. With monochrome scenery, as well as just directional keys and jumping for controls, focus is reduced. Instead of wasting time marvelling at intricate graphics or scratching their heads at complex storylines, players zone into the little details in motion, becoming adept at the subtle shifts in jumps to change trajectory.

With that adeptness comes relishing the physics Metanet Software implemented. There’s a thrill in the ease of legs picking up speed, the dragging slide of heels slowing down. It’s exhilarating to just run, to bound across danger without planning ahead. Although chances are if you do that, you’ll hit a mine and explode.

After all, that’s the price of recklessness: your limbs exploding, the smack of your body parts against walls, watching the room’s robots ignore your demise and crushing the bits of yourself still whole into smaller bits. It’s also the price of hesitation, of hovering in the air for too long, of forgetting to look behind. You pay a lot for not paying attention. Two-player mode is easier, since only one player has to reach the door to clear the level, but your friend’s corpse lingers, their detached limbs flying past your attached ones, until you avenge or join them.

Many throw around the word unforgiving when describing N, but the game’s far from it. Instead of thrusting you into every level, it pauses until you press jump. This gives players time to assess, plan, and catch a breather from the last deathtrap. There’s a timer, but it can be replenished with gold. Restarts after death load instantaneously, not giving you any time to mope.

The rooms themselves aren’t hostile. Nothing in them possesses sentience or target you out of malice for your gold-swiping ways. The platforms will bob if you jump on them, and the motion sensors will slam into your body, but it’s nothing personal really. Just physics. And like city landscapes, with their harsh unyielding towers and concrete panoramic view, the grey rooms aren’t meant to be dismantled. Only weaved through without colliding into something that’ll kill you.

None of the obstacles or collisions in N seem unfair. Nothing glitches or can be attributed to faulty controls. Every map has a logical path to winning, every fluid twist of the body entirely up to the player. Unlike games where you lose a day’s worth of progress after missing a savepoint, losing doesn’t suck. Dying in N just elicits a wince and another attempt.

I start each level of N expecting to die. It doesn’t bother me too much, since in N, death is just the beginning. Until it’s death again.

N 2.0 is available for free here. N++, the faster younger and more attractive sibling to N 2.0 (which still has a killer personality, if you ask me), is out now. Check out the trailer for N++ if you need an eyeful of incredible graphics before grabbing it up.