Browsing category: Indienoculars
For Give, recently released by Thana Orchard, is an imaginative exploration of the undercurrents that often carry many of us away in the ebb and flow of our day to day lives.
It’s a humble meditation on the destructive nature of thoughtless clumsiness, a reflective analysis of what it means to grow self-aware of one’s flaws and how to come to terms with the unintentional disruption we visit upon our environment.
Theaters are a strange place, with more trace amounts of bodily fluids than you’d care to imagine and an extensive residue of human suffering from years of poor treatment of staffers. If psychic impressions were a petri dish for the metaphysical, then it makes one wonder what grows on the sugary, artificial butter-coated sticky floors and cracked plaster behind the foggy glass of the popcorn machine.
Throw in the high intensity of the countless emotions felt across the entire spectrum during showings, and theaters turn into a putrid spiritual cauldron of the psyche, the perfect place to manifest something from another world; a portal into the realm of the subconscious.
Be warned, we’re getting into spoiler territory here from the outset. Turn back now if you’ve yet to finish the game.
For you can tie me up if you wish,
but there is nothing more useless than an organ.
When you will have him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom
To Have Done with the Judgment of God, Antonin Artaud
LUCAH: Born of a Dream, from gamedev collective melessthanthree, thrusts you head-first into a world beyond any sense of logic or understanding. Everything around you coalesces into an undulating mass of incomprehensible action; the only thing that makes sense anymore is fighting. Some of the first words that greet you in this world: ”You can’t help but feel you’ve been here before. You can’t help but feel they only want to hurt you. But you know you must move forward. You must fight.” And fight you do, pushing back against the ever encroaching Darkness that blankets the land.
This Darkness exists as an extension of the world, to a degree, leading you to press ever-forward, unable to turn back. In it, we move toward a cyclical process in which this place eventually dies, destroyed one way or another, only to return once again to its original state of being. It’s an endless feedback loop; one that seemingly betrays no signs of stopping. You find yourself trapped in this place, fighting through loop after loop, attempting to enact change to no fruition. LUCAH’s world is one destined to fall, only to rise from the ashes again and again, a dark, undying phoenix. Decay holds no permanence here.
The yawning void stares at you. An infinite murk, resting beneath a cloud-tumbled sky. In the distance, a tower reaches out into the heavens above, a light atop it blinking. You sit beside Christian, another soul lost in the ether, like you. You call yourself Lucah, at least, now you do. The Marked One. A cursed child tossed into this realm of madness, damned to fight a Sisyphean battle against the twisting horrors that await your ever deeper plunge into this beckoning unknown.
Christian decides time is up for this moment of peace. Your heart-to-heart finishes abruptly, and they demand a fight from you. Death is the only true peace in this world, so far as they can tell. And they desperately want to be at rest, finally, entirely; to find an escape from this world is to find hope and love once again.
Dissolving (known in Russian as Исчезая) is a pleasant little bilingual visual novel by studio Flying Whale. Inspired by internet folk tales and post-digital-utopian cyber fiction of the early 2000s, Dissolving is a healthy dose of metaphysical skepticism.
As our zeitgeist trends towards cynicism of, and disbelief in, technological progress as a shared social project, more and more people begin to question if anyone, or anything, is at the wheel of this thing; Dissolving plants its thesis firmly in this knowledge gap, enticing you to learn more, at horrific cost.
The crunch of autumn leaves underfoot, a campfire, a lonely tent- it’s the makings of either a good time or a horrific experience depending on where one dares to make camp.
Created for the PS1 Haunted Halloween Game Jam of 2018 (known for the infamous Siren Head tribute piece by Modus Interactive, who we’ve covered before here and here) by Breogán Hackett, Perennial is a deep dive into an open world forest that holds many secrets close to its naturalistic bosom, beckoning you to cautiously explore and discover them.
Chile is known for many things, great wine, great food, being extremely and ridiculously long, and a thriving indie developer scene. After ACE Team put them on the map with Rock Of Ages, new-indie-on-the-block Octeto Studios comes up with a unique take on the squad management genre through a self-described tech-noir lens: CyberOps
Delightfully wearing it’s influences on it’s sleeves,
CyberOps takes heavy inspiration from Yoji Shinkawa’s work in the late 90s playstation era. Octeto has done great work in characterizing a near-future scenario, injecting it with plenty of virtual reality (as we knew it in the 90s) flavor, such as the gorgeous overworld map that evokes the design of beloved doomsday simulator Defcon and other influential PC titles.
To engage with art is one matter, but to make yourself the centerpiece is another one entirely. Exhibitionism is an experience by Dja that ruminates on how we often find ourselves, as opposed to the art that we create, at the center of attention of others.
Art galleries have a strange aura to them, as if they’re a sort of banquet or feast which begs the question, what exactly is on the menu? Exhibitionism tackles the strange masquerade of guarding your intentions while flagrantly expressing your desires; ruminating upon the cacophony of the unusual, unique lengths people go to in order to seek recognition, even at the cost of those around them.
EA girl sits alone in a room, her door locked. She glances toward her bed, but isn’t tired enough to sleep. Instead, her focus turns to the TV and her game console. As she boots it up, time dissolves and gives way to a series of vignettes exploring the continually deteriorating state of the village she lives in. Death begins to form an iron grip around the village’s throat, piling bodies higher and higher as the townspeople work tirelessly through the night to fill the graveyard with the corpses. An entity haunts the woods, creeping, stalking. Dust falls eternal and chokes the air. Unknowable horror lurks beneath the dark eaves of a thatched cottage.
