gamesthatexist

I sympathize with this view. I played Cart Life while working closing shift at a Starbucks and partly for this reason found it very affecting, but at this point I feel I have gotten what I can out of key-pressing my way through workday alienation. Though I would argue that Cart Life is good because it emphasizes the ways that you connect with people both because of and despite simulated work activity. The industrial sounds in Space Mouse are definitely grating. I like that you can jump through walls and that you can just keep reentering the same mouse hole over and over again. And collision detection or whatever it's called doesn’t completely work. The whole thing feels pretty sloppy, so there isn’t that same sense of deliberate, calculated mundane like you get in something like Cart Life, Papers Please, or Always Sometimes Monsters. I also like how you can just leave with your ride without having done any work. So this is kind of a fake gray scale work simulator because all of the exploration underneath the hub world is entirely optional. So the game actually ends up being funny, but still feeling somewhat alienated. The font in the title screen is quite nice. Also, this mouse should be more grateful because it seems to work in some kind of cheese cave. I see this game as the author trying to see some comedy that perhaps can help us transcend the experience of working some mind-numbing job only to go home and dream about it because it really does occupy that much space in your time and consciousness, even though it isn't at all challenging or interesting to think about. 66 Stars.

Magnificent Planet, incredibly, really made me reexamine my feelings about snakes. I think this game is a good place to start because it introduces several tropes that will reappear throughout 50 short games. You have amoeba stuffed-animal protagonist with name that sounds like children’s cartoon character. You have bright marker aesthetic. You have text strewn across the landscape. I also think Magnificent Planet is a good introduction of the idea that thecatamites describes in the author's notes for 50SG as “oscillating kitsch,” a sensation that others in this thread have already hinted at where your reaction to the game is already being simulated by the game, but this reaction is not clarified to enough of an extent so that you can identify what your reaction is supposed to be, which gives you this inscrutable cocktail of alienation, wonder and amusement (I highly recommend reading the notes; they are very good). The experience of watching advertisements, especially ones that target a demographic that is not your own, can be similar in that an ad is very inviting, yet almost always absurdly self-reflexive and insular in some way. The difference between my experience of advertisements and my experience of these games is that watching ads makes me feel empty and kind of sad, even when I sort of like the ad in question, while I find playing these games very rewarding. Especially this game is so clearly amused with itself for presuming to exist but at the same time is sincerely enthusiastic about what it is. Meanwhile, here you are, the player, visiting this thing, but maybe intruding a little bit as well. The game is probably a bit surprised to have you but also glad, I think. I like the screen where the snake is trapped in a prison of bricks that you don’t have access to. The AI makes the snake move back and forth even though there is no purpose to it. It reminds me of a room in one of the Metroid games. Your experience of the player is being closed off from the thing you are supposed to be interacting with, and you recognize that this other fragment of the world doesn’t need you to be there. AND YET! Then you realize that you can be thrown into prison with the snake, who helps you escape yet stoically resigns to remain in prison, and then you are returned to snake village where the line “this is incredible. I really need to reexamine my feelings about snakes” is completely recontextualized, and both snake village and snake prison become foreshadowing (that is, if you happened to explore the right side of the map first). And you realize that this entire ecosystem sort of exists just to refer to other parts of itself and that is enough. Some of the areas seem unfinished so that the author left in the text upon realizing that it is endearing (“some kind of quarry. rock land?”). Also the 3D area (!!!) combined with the deep foreboding chromatic scales is perfect game design. 88 Stars.