my mind looks a lot like a_: a Video Game Playlist

Whether in an abandoned mall or an opulent estate, this playlist is all about embarking on a surreal architectural journey of the psyche. Investigate and explore these vaporwave-influended spaces, witness two speculations on technology of the future, and interrogate your digital reality. It’s Holovista’s mega-mansion house tour internship and the liminal awakening personality profile of Self-Checkout: Unlimited – step on inside.

Holovista

Previously covered, Holovista follows Carmen Razo on her newly acquired and direly needed job working for the innovative high class architectural firm Mesmer & Braid. The first task given to her, however, is a strange one – a field assignment to inhabit the firm’s mysterious new project, the autohaus, and to document her experiences by relaying them to her not-Instagram following. In game, this is achieved by taking photos of a number of requested items in a 360˚ scene, and then match appropriate photos to a caption in order to post them, chatting with your friends over DM (and whatever intern is running the Mesmer & Braid account) along the way. The latter gets only more important, as the autohaus’s design, and Carmen’s own mental state, gets more questionable as her residence goes on.

Fine attention to detail in order to spark immersion is the real crux of Holovista – the rendered scenes that you experience strike a delicate balance between striking realistic fidelity and the dreamlike opulence of the game’s low Sci-Fi future. The environments (at least, the non-creepy ones) are something you’d want to just exist in, partially because they feel so believable and possible. The Social Media interface has comments on every post, and profiles for every commenter, and most important of all, top notch Internet writing. Everybody talks like actual internet users, and several conversations between Carmen and her friends that could have come out of me and my friends. Even the basic gameplay loop puts you directly in Carmen’s shoes – you turn around (or swipe on your screen) to take photos of stuff and then post them just as she does.

This immersion is all put to good use in the story itself then, which reflects that immersion back (though I’ll not elaborate, to avoid spoilers), culminating in a game that’s not really like anything else I’ve ever played.

Specifications

• iPhone
• $4.99
• ~2 hrs

Self-Checkout: Unlimited

Self-Checkout: Unlimited, on the other hand, hits upon the environment of slightly oldish an abandoned mall. Starting out with a horror-esque tone as the player character finds themselves in a barely lit hall on a bench, forced to navigate a store housing a terribly unnerving teddy bear before the mall opens up, you are then invited via disembodied intercom to explore various sections and stores of the mall, all with… unusual set-ups focused on psychology. Between children’s rides based off of a fictitious children’s show structured around personality profiles and a clothing store rack with jackets labelled with things like ‘parents’, ‘significant other’, and ‘friends’ on a scale from most to least important, the mall is less a real space to engage in commerce and more a loci for an examination of the self. The surreality is only increased in scenes when the mall fades away in favor of environments with strong vaporwave aesthetics often reflecting other elements of commerce all whilst the interrogation of the self continues on, like a Psych 101 professor giving a lecture over a lo-fi, echoic beat.

Compared to the DM conversations between friends in Holovista, the only form of communication is always faceless – either via seemingly pre-recorded intercom announcements, or by a narrator seemingly talking both to the player character and the player themselves. As the mall is explored further, the unique specifics of the self-examination build towards the context of the mall’s liminality – which I’ll hold back in face of spoilers. The details towards this context are thought-through, perhaps to the point of maybe giving the game away, but in the end it’s a cohesive build that helps take the weight of the philosophizing off a bit.

Specifications

• Windows, Mac, Linux
• $7.99
• ~1.5 hrs

Sum Specifications

• iOS & Windows/Mac/Linux
• $12.98
• ~3.5 hrs

Now Look Here: A Video Game Playlist

The Playlist

Comprised of the high profile mobile game classic Monument Valley series and the lesser-known Vignettes, Now Look Here is a playlist all about the wonder of perception. Explore the Escher-based but otherwise concrete and beautiful world of architecture in Monument Valley I and II, and dive into the free-flowing associations of a dream world through transforming objects in Vignettes.

Monument Valley I & II

Previously featured on TBTG in a proto-issue, the Monument Valley series (if you haven’t heard of it already) is about a journey through the titular Monument Valley – a collection of impossible architecture in the vein of M.C. Escher that you manipulate in order to build a path from place to place. The first game follows a disgraced princess trying to make amends over ruins, and the second game is about a daughter’s coming of age. Both have relatively simple puzzling – there’s no state you can get in where you’d have to restart a puzzle, and for almost all the puzzles the way to proceed is quickly discovered – but that’s alright. There’s only so complex you can get with a short game that’s fucking around with something so fundamental as perspective, and the games are built more on the beauty of discovery in the world.

And the world is very much worth discovering. Despite the surreal premise, there’s a specific slice of imaginative realism going on with Monument Valley. Each monument is a work of art that firmly follows a logic based in reality – the mechanical forces powering them are always highlighted through the animation and the controls. The result is that though the world of Monument Valley is definitely not ours, you have a feeling that it couldn’t be too far off, if only.

Specifications

• iOS, Android, Windows
• $6.99 USD – $9.97 USD (iPhone, Android), $13.58 USD (Panoramic Collection)
• ~4 hours

Vignettes

In comparison, Vignettes (previously showcased in the first installment of Rapid-fire Recs) goes beyond surreal into a mostly-abstracted dreamlike web of associations in a neon funhouse limited color palette. You’re given an object, and by twirling it around and changing the perspective so the colors often add up in a flat image, it shifts and changes into a different object, usually related to the theme of the first object – though there are other themes that you stumble into by interacting with objects in different ways, accompanied by a change in palette.

Along the way as you double over associations and worm your way around the various objects (like the circular logic of a dream) in order to complete each theme for the main goal of the game, you’ll also stumble upon various components for the ‘secrets’ in the game. Each secret has a hint in the form of a picture, most of which are require at least two different objects. So when you see one part (like a fan), you take note, and then when you stumble upon the second, you’ve got to then backtrack through the objects to bring it back to the first. The various webs of connections throughout get worn in your mind, to the point where you no longer need to open up the map of transformations and instead just jump from transition to transition. The game has the feeling of “what in the goddamn?” that comes with the wonderful, weirdest dreams.

Specifications

• iOS, Mac, Windows
• $2.99 USD (iPhone), $7.99 USD (Mac, PC)
• ~3 hours

Sum Specifications

• iOS, Windows, (Mac), (Android)
• $9.98 –  $17.96 USD
• ~7 hours

Contraption: a Video Game Playlist

Video Game Playlists are a new style of game recommendation I’m experimenting with – in a similar yet more purposeful fashion to my double feature of NUTS and Alba: a Wildlife Adventure, a playlist will feature recommendations of some games I think complement each other well played consecutively and/or concurrently based on intersections of aesthetic, mechanics, genre, subject matter, and theme. Each playlist will start with a rundown of the games as a set, and then get into each’s individual quirks. With that out of the way, here’s the very first playlist, featuring two games in an oddly specific genre I wish there were more examples of.

The Playlist

Tactile and fiddly, these two games are based around the joy of having a some sort of contraption to mess about with in your hands. Featuring strong sound design that makes interaction pop, vibrant, playful aesthetics, and gameplay that centers discovery, the two games take the idea of a puzzle box and run with it in their own unique directions. GNOG has a fantastical and sometimes silly spin with themed lightly-narrative dioramas, while Automatoys works like a 12 set of interactive steel ball labyrinths that wouldn’t be too out of place in the real world.

GNOG

First off, GNOG is an adventure game (fight me over that assessment!) centered around exploring what are essentially exceptionally fanciful lunchbox dioramas in order to forward their narratives. Oh, also, each diorama is a head, and when you complete what you need to do, they sing. Surreal. They all have various themes – one is based around finding treasure deep in the sea using a submarine, another is themed around a candy shop. The aesthetic is vibrant, though often employing neon hues in order to underpin the weird dimensions each box exists in. In that way, it’s more like what toys looked like in one’s imagination as a child.

Like any good game based around recreating the tactility of physical objects, the sound design is intimate and bountiful – outside of the interactive mechanisms, a good lot of other things you can mouse over to make pleasant sounds, like shaking a rain stick. Admittedly, this can make figuring out which parts are actually important for progressing – GNOG, like many games,can sometimes fall into the difficulties of any game based around nonverbal communication. But it’s mostly sublimated by the simple joy of poking and prodding until you figure out what comes next.

Specifications

• Mac, Windows
• $9.99 USD
• ~2 hours

Automatoys

Though also puzzlebox-like and accompanied by a colorful aesthetic, Automatoys takes a kinetic spin, in the style of those spherical metal ball mazes you might have seen in a toy store somewhere. You’re presented with a contraption of mechanisms and automated parts, a happy little ball, and a single task: get it to the goal. Your method of doing this is via tapping (and sometimes touching-and-holding) the screen, which affects every mechanism in the level. Pegs jump, mazes tilt, hammers cock, the relative elevation of a segmented zig-zag path switches – simple. In terms of design, brilliantly so, in terms of gameplay, not a chance after the first few levels have eased you into the gist. For one, since there’s no instruction whatsoever as to how any of the mechanisms work, and you’ve got your eyes on the ball, you’ll usually find out what one does just as you’re approaching it – though you can always approximate a guess – many of the mechanism designs are things in real life, like mazes, or are iterated further in later levels, so you’re rarely completely in the dark. One can, of course, experiment with all the mechanisms before inserting the coin to drop the ball, but aside from ruining the delight in high-pressure discovery, it’s only half the picture without something moving through the level, and as things progress there are a great more things to memorize.

If you cock it up, your ball might be gently rolled back to an earlier part of the level, or it might fall off of the level entirely, obliging you to start from the beginning – though, no worries, your number of tries is infinite. But failure is never punishing or frustrating, partly because when you fail you can try again immediately, and mostly because it never stops being absolutely hilarious how much you can screw up in a game where the only mode of interaction is ‘tap the screen’. It keeps up the playful atmosphere well. And you will cock it up, because though the game has a cute, friendly aesthetic, and is marked as casual, that doesn’t mean it’s not challenging. In level 5, in the middle of fare following the lead of the four levels before is a section where you have to shoot the ball into a hole in plastic tube right when the bottom part of a spinning corkscrew passes by, and it is not easy. There’s a sharp upward incline to the shooting ramp, so you have to release the shot in advance, and the only real clue as to when the corkscrew path is coming around is seeing it around the bend, and by then it’s too late, so the way you time it is by feeling, by instinct, when enough time has passed. Having 100% completed Automatoys, I still fail this shot multiple times when replaying. Playing the first time, however, this is a message from the game: haha, okay, time to stop fucking around.

It’s not a difficulty spike, but after this point, you do have to be a lot more active when playing the game – there are easier ways to fail if you grow complacent, mechanisms and automation become more fine-grained, more intertwined. Often, in addition to having to mentally re-assign what tapping the screen does from section-to-section, what was needed in the preceding the section (tapping the screen, not tapping the screen) is what will fuck you up in the section you’re rolling into. As you get further and further into the game, going through a level becomes more and more of a mental-finger fumble, even when you’ve replayed a level several times.

Because, oh yeah, this game is so very replayable. It’s got a star system: one star for completing a level, two stars for completing it under a brisk timeframe, three stars for completing it under one even more stringent than that. Keeping with the tactile stylings, the timer is built onto the automatoy, too, and it’ll click once you’ve run out of time for a three or two star rating. But that’s only a fraction of the picture. Because while I did put in the work to get a three star rating for every level (except for #7, which, I realize I must have, but I only remembering failing to get above two stars many, many times), I have completed every level at least four or five times minimum simply for the fun of completing them. Replaying a level you know how to run (especially once you’ve gotten good enough to get three stars) feels like an interactive version of one of those ‘so satisfying’ videos that go viral. There were a great many times I procrastinated on writing this issue specifically to go play the game, or where my writing was cut short for the same.

This satisfaction is definitely helped by the game’s sound design, obviously. The rest of the game’s aesthetic, too. The matte-textured, vaguely* Monument Valley-inspired aesthetic in video games is getting pretty oversaturated in a certain stripe of indie game, but here it’s perfect, calling to mind a specific style of colorful plastic. And those colors, aside from (generally) being very full and eye-pleasing, serve a function, too. The main color is the static body of the level, and the two accent colors delineate the controllable mechanisms and the cycling automated parts.

*I say vaguely because the twice-mentioned comparison feels pretty spurious outside of Monument Valley being a famous indie game to compare to for the sake of prestige and/or because nobody’s played anything else that could be relevant.

(Also, it shouldn’t require spotlighting, but it’s one of the only mobile games I’ve seen that does in-app purchases ethically. It can be downloaded for free, which gives you the first three levels to play, and then you pay $2.99 to unlock the full game. How shockingly straightforward and non-insidious is that.)

It’s easy to say with most of the year behind me that Automatoys is was one of the best games I played this year, if not the best, but it is so good, I would’ve had the confidence to say that in January. It’s a game that won me over by being something both incredibly up my alley, and completely out of my way.

Specifications

• iOS, Android
• Free - $2.99 USD
• ~1.5 hours
  

Sum Specifications

• Mac/Windows & iOS/Android
• $9.99 USD - $12.98 USD
• ~3.5 hrs