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Browsing category: Indienoculars
Rise and Shine, it’s time for the Daily Grind.
It’s a very bleak metaphor for the daily life of commuters when you think about it, why must our ambitions demolish our stamina into a fine powdered mash by which we brew our dreams using our hot scalding tears? No time for big questions, no time for even longer answers, YOU have places to be, people to meet, and Coffee Gets You There.
A cracking sound penetrates the calm atmosphere and gentle darkness, a ray of hazy blue light breaks through the shell’s newformed gaps. Your fledgling eyes adjust to an ancient world, and a wise elder gazes on in sympathy with a small word of advice.
With no bearings, only an inner yearning to explore the horizon, you embark on your blurry-eyed journey. It will be tiresome, a test of your patience, but worry not young and weary traveler: life is both harder and easier than it seems.
You hear something out of the ordinary from the hallway, or rather, you hear nothing – definitely not ordinary. Thank God you were in the kitchen when you didn’t hear it; with a blade fast at hand and a veritable lifetime of experience chopping vegetables, you head out into the mansion to see what’s making all that silence
These are the first few tentative steps into the beautiful nightmare that is Phantom Rose, a procedural turn-based adventure card game by developer makaroll. If my flawless riffle shuffle and love of Lisa: The Painful are any indication, there are two easy ways to win my heart: card games and complicated but rewarding status effect systems, both of which Phantom Rose provides in droves.
Often in life we become trapped by the things important to us, our love, our careers, our ambitions. Painted into a corner, our desires and commitments turn into the very cages we fear, only gilded with gold.
Like a Good Canary, we must sing to please our benefactors, employers, loved ones, audiences, and friends. Will we remain frozen in place by our machinations, or is there a way out of here and towards a life past the confines?
The relaxing radio music cuts to a report of a Russian Attack Submarine off course in the pacific. You’re sitting in your living room as the muddy audio of the TV drones on, and now anxiety starkly washes over you.
Is it just another false alarm? Will anything come out of it this time?
(Content Warning: Doomsday scenarios and the associated nihilistic topics.)
Bryce Bucher & Ayden Machajewski‘s “1Boss1Battle1Button” came out of nowhere, a visually striking reminder of a long lost era in once cutting edge graphic design. Built for the Game Maker’s Toolkit 2019 Jam, the dynamic duo set out to put a fresh rhythm twist on the competition’s theme of “Only One”.
The result is a passionately clever minimalist platformer that stirs the imagination and demands a reflection on the bold stylings of a design trend known as “Factory Pomo“.
To the northwest of France is a peculiar island, inextricably with a history linked to Europe yet somehow insistently apart from it. It’s a land known for it’s modest social sensibilities while being driven by imperial ambition ever since the Romans receded from its sandy shores. This desire to be recognized, to be known and respected, to be tame without being tamed is deeply entrenched within the culture of Britain.
And while the invaders may have left, it seems the Empire never did. The wounds inflicted by Julius Caesar’s violent invasion continued to fester underneath the land, infecting the course of British history from that point on. Long before colonizing the world, England needed to unify and consolidate its own back yard in order to power it’s conquest of the globe.
Moshe Linke‘s latest entry into interactive media is the sort of thing that level design zine Heterotopias was made for. A euphoric cavalcade of harsh lines and the gentled nuanced pores of concrete drench the senses in pure joy. In many ways, it’s a digital museum, in others, an icon to aspire to.
It’s always a strange moment when a new customer shows up at your bar and asks for a recommendation. You get a read of their personality, the sort of food they ordered, then finally ask them their preferences, a question inevitably followed by the old familiar phrase: “I don’t drink much coffee, what would you recommend?”
After offering a few options, they pick one or simply ask you to, and you get to work. There’s a certain mixture of emotional high and terror as you slide the drink across the counter and wait to see if their capricious tastes find it satisfactory. In that second, the only thoughts running through your mind are, inevitably, “Did they like it? Did I mess this one up?”
It’s a feeling unique to tending any kind of bar, whether coffee or liquor, that Toge Production‘s Coffee Talk recreates with vivid authenticity and elegant simplicity.
Amongst the loping slopes of the valley resides a message. Scrolling over it reveals microprose, a small story wrapped up in atmosphere and emotion lasting maybe 120 characters. It’s the kind of fragmented storytelling native to Twitter, jumping into an interaction or story far removed from most of its context. Things are quiet, a lull between songs. You ruminate a bit and begin scrolling on to another place, another mood.