Talkin' 'Bout Tiny Games

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