Gallergy by Swolf

[clyde]

I found this game via Warpdoor and I really enjoyed it. Headphones are required, but make sure they are at a low volume because there are sudden changes in sound and some of them are very abrasive. It has a very slow pace and exploration is the main mechanic. It took me about 15-30 minutes to have an experience I was satisfied with. 

 

Gallergy

[clyde]

I was vague about the game because the sense of discovery was a big part of what I enjoyed. Unfortunately, saying so could raise expectations far beyond where they were for me when I played.

I don't think I'll spoiler-tag my thoughts because that might discourage people from appreciating the simple things this game does well by creating an expectation that Gallergy pays off with something incredibly surprising. It doesn't.

Here is why I like this game so much. I've been playing small games on Warpdoor every once in a while. When I started playing small games like Porpentine's offerings and selections from Freeindiegam.es I had to confront my ideas of what makes a game worthwhile for me. I will always put far more hours into large games like Titanfall and Civilization 5, but I find these smaller games can offer some things that the larger titles do not. One of these things is a sense of creative agency and accessibility. Now that I'm experimenting in Unity, I've gained a new dimension of appreciation for computer-games. I find myself looking at the seams and enjoying solutions to simple design problems that could have been dealt with in infinite ways, approached with specific choices and priorities. These ambitions, challenges, solutions, and priorities take much less time to circumspect in small games where you can quickly permute through the system within the first 10-minute playthrough. When the ambition is just to mimic a genre to have made a game, it doesn't usually interest me. There are a lot of 2d platformers or sliding-puzzle games that don't offer me much novelty besides unique art-assets. Warpdoor's curation is especially good at finding small games that feel distinct to me. The games aren't usually fun, but they often chose something different to try or try an established form with content which is divergent from what is typically associated with the mechanical framework. The ability to feel like I've been able to see the entiriety of what these experiments have to offer in less than half and hour is a huge boon. I often compare it to music. Sometimes I want to lay on the floor and listen to an album, sometimes I just want to watch a single music-video.

Here is what Gallergy offered me and why I felt it is especially successful. When. I first went into the game, I saw myself in what appeared to be an infinite hall of minimalist paintings displayed on simple rows of simple columns. Even though it was a small game, I assumed that there would be more. I began walking the halls and started asking myself if the paintings were procedurally generated or if they just repeated. Either way, I found myself dismissing them as decoration unworthy of examination; I was blind to them. I had read a description on Warpdoor that you could jump into the paintings so I just jumped into one near me.

The texture of the gallery changes dramatically and a simplistic ambient track replaces silence. It is somewhat jarring. I walked around looking for an exit, nothing about this impressed me. I eventually found a sentry of some sort that transported me back into the gallery space. I wasn't sure if I was doing it right. I jumped into another painting and noticed two things almost immediately. The texture was completely different than last time and the soundtrack seemed a bit different too. I found another sentry and teleported back into the gallery.

This is when the game began to impress me. Before I jumped into a third painting, I walked the gallery a bit. I wanted to chose a good painting to jump into. I picked one that was drastically different from the two I had jumped into before so I could test my hypothesis that the texture would he based on the the image I jumped into. It was and I noticed that the soundtrack was even more different than last time. I found a sentry and left. I then began asking myself what makes a good painting to jump into and as I walked around the gallery, I started having opinions about which paintings I wanted to participate with. This is where the game succeeds; I started looking at the art. There wasn't enough information to come up with any objective optimization, but there was enough resemblance between the paintings and the world they teleported me into to make me picky. It was at this point that I examined minimalist art in a computer-game and started wondering why I liked some rather than others. That is something valuable to me that I've never seen a computer-game attempt to accomplish. Even with Super Mario 64, I didn't examine the paintings in such a subjective way.