Thoughts on Indiepocalypse 8
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Indiepocalypse is a monthly zine and collection of indie games featuring weird, quirky, and creative explorations of the medium. Here are some thoughts on issue 8, featuring: 1980s interfaces, angels, and a computer making friends with bumblebees.
The Zine
The cover art by supernovaleslie is astounding. I want to open my printer's ink cartridges and swim in these colors. Blues and purples and bright cyan. I would pick this zine off a table. I would frame it on my wall. If I had a printer that didn't chug like it was faxing itself to me from 1998 I would make myself a physical edition just to hold. Lovely work, and you can see that much for free.
Inside there are more comics this month. They didn't all hit with me, but as someone currently shopping for a dehumidifier I had a great laugh over KC Green's panel absolutely making me feel even older than I am. The page itself is a little low-rent compared to other parts of the zine, so I wouldn't mind seeing the comics zone get more flair in future issues.
The game corner is an interesting assortment this time. The word search is too large to work well for me and I crapped out on the anagrams after the first couple (just a personal struggle of mine), but the social games are quite intriguing. I haven't had a chance to test them out yet due to having neither the occasion nor right friend group, but the pairing of a game about bad relationships with one of writing sappy love poems is excellent. I'd have devoured both of these in undergrad, and think the poetry game would make for a entertaining writing exercise even if done over text.
It's been great fun watching Indiepocalypse grow alongside the popularity of Electric Zine Maker (again bundled here as a bonus item), and issue 8 includes another secret zine that can be printed out on an 8x11. And wow, what a delight. It's a mini monster manual and I can't do it justice in text form, but these linguistic abominations are both adorable and awful and I love all of them. While Pokemon was busy making creatures out of key chains they could have hired Sam Pender to design a grasp-hopper. Whatever you're thinking, it's worse.
This issue's capsule review is by Kurt Kalata on the obscure Vannilaware joint, Kumatanchi. I would have liked to know more about why this game stuck with them over the years to be worth writing about now, but it's an inoffensive articulation of how the game works as a life sim (a genre I'm not very familiar with). I always feel a bit strange about games where you take care of a woman as a pet but we'll get more into that later with T-Gotchi.
The last few bits here are the full page overviews for each of the included games. These are always a delight as a more flexible way to feature a game than most digital stores allow. Ceefax's page stood out for elaborating on the history of the game, a side of British culture I wasn't aware of but am now fascinated by.
It's a charming zine with a few outstanding entries, and I continue to be impressed at how unique each edition is while still feeling very much a part of the larger run. Someday I'll be able to print these out or afford a physical edition, but even on my screen it's exciting to turn the next page.
Textreme 2 (Ash K, Amber Fiddlemouth, Maks Loboda)
It's a little known fact about me - secret to anyone who wasn't in that one Fibbage game - that I have a moderate obsession with text editors. I've messed around with all the big names, cycled through a couple obscure picks, and currently have a lot of fun with Typora as my editor of choice.
I also love playful digital tools, which is closer to what Textreme 2 is than an alternative to MS Office. Textreme 2 is whimsical. It has birds using dynamite. You can make your text rainbow or have the whole window shake like you're typing in an avalanche. All absolutely essential elements to the writing process.
I've found that anytime I come across a tool like Textreme 2 I need to reformat my mind to understand it. The priorities are completely different from corporate office software but I have bad capitalism brain that still struggles not to view things in terms of productivity. Textreme 2 won't replace your Google Docs or Word, but it might inspire you to write a bunch of nonsense just to have an excuse to play in the space.
I do wish Textreme 2 didn't use a proprietary file format and could just spit out a markdown doc. Even if I’m just using it for low-risk files, needing to copy and paste into a different editor if I want to, say, share what I've been writing or upload it somewhere is an extra step that puts me off using Textreme 2 for anything I'm planning to publish. It would also be fun to be able to import existing files and watch them come to life, but that's more my personal narcissism wanting to do something with these big stacks of words sitting on my hard drive.
Things I could see myself writing with Textreme 2:
- This article
- Impulse poetry and other assorted vent boxes
- More emo songs I will later deny
- A todo list I can happily ignore
T-Gotchi (Ilia Sushchin)
It doesn't take a degree in women's studios to recognize the woman-as-a-pet genre of games is kind of fucked. These mostly exist on the fringes of internet culture but elements of them often pop up in RPGs and life-sims. I want to be clear I'm talking about a very particular type of player/pet relationship, usually infantilizing, often sexually exploitative, and typically providing some form of validation to the player that what they're doing is harmless. Which, maybe materially, but socially I would argue these games further legitimize beliefs that women are objects to be cared for and which exist for the gratification of others.
T-Gotchi attempts to explore this relationship through a perverse and violent subversion of the pocket pet genre. You are tasked with taking care of an anime girl - a T-Gotchi - by feeding, washing, and talking to them. Inevitably, though, you are unable to fulfill their needs and must watch them die through your negligence. Even with the opening content warning prepping me for something vile, it was hard to play.
But the initial revulsion was undone the longer I played as recognized the limits of what the game was trying to say. I am broadly disinterested in meta games as I find the explicit deconstruction of genre tropes often less compelling and developed than essays written about the tropes themselves which can draw from a variety of subjects. T-Gotchi wants to get at how selfish and violent our relationships to digital pets often are, but undermines that reading by telling you that none of this matters. That your T-Gotchi isn't a real person and we should relieve ourselves of any guilt about letting them die.
Which is strange. The entire purpose of the game is being undone by itself, so what message am I meant to come away from T-Gotchi having heard? That I shouldn't feel guilty for torturing this woman? That actually there is nothing wrong with player/pet relationships because they are not materially hurting anyone? It's a more shallow genre critique than the game opens with, a very strange conclusion to a game that otherwise very deliberately denies the player relief for their actions. I don't feel better because the game told me I should. It's as if I'm being chided for caring at all.
I Am Brewing You Alive But You Can Leave At Any Time If You Really Want To (Autumn Rain)
This is a silly little experience. It's all about existing in a 3D space and choosing when the game ends. I both want a bit more and recognize the game is meant to be nothing but exactly what it is. Perhaps it's just the ending that feels too abrupt? It's a hard cut, but also, I'm being boiled alive, so what am I really asking for? Always enjoy seeing alternative takes on the Haunted PS1 vibe. Worth a few minutes of your time, certainly.
CEEFAX: IN THE TIME OF PLAGUE (Ian Bousher)
I'm telling all my friends about this. I told a date about it. Vintage digital interfaces are everything I enjoy studying and engaging with, and CEEFAX is so exceptionally executed. Bonus points for being a technology I had no prior knowledge of (nothing similar existed in the US, as far as I know).
CEEFAX is functionally a twine game but instead of navigating through sentences you dial numbers into an on-screen menu. Read the headlines, check the news, learn that sports are still cancelled. It's very 2020 but also seems to exist somewhere else, disconnected from linear time. The juxtaposition of cheap elevator music and tragic developments works with the interface to pull itself into a sort of void space. Yes, these could be real headlines. But we don't actually have to engage with them. They're just on the TV, it's fine. Come eat the neighbors.
The Machine's Garden (Jon Miller, Michael Schmitt)
I should play more pure-puzzle games. They're low-impact, they give me a nice fuzzy brain feel. More often than not they're inexplicably beautiful.
The Machine's Garden walks softly as it disperses micro-fiction and just-complex-enough hex mazes. You are playing as a decommissioned war machine, but the mood is quiet. There's no music, just the appealing thud and clunk of machinery clicking into place. Even playing with a mouse there is a great physicality to each move.
I didn't expect to get caught up in the restrained prose. The Machine's Garden draws with a lot of blank space and is stronger for it. Something like the interstitial messages on Friends at the Table, or the original version of A Dark Room. The intention is clear, I don't need every proper noun defined.
I'm really taken by The Machine's Garden. It's short enough I actually completed every puzzle, but by the end each idea was well explored and I was only just beginning to feel like the puzzles were too complex for me. It's comforting knowing there's only ever one solution. It may seem alchemical staring at blank geometry but I as often fell into solutions as deduced them. I find that's the sort of puzzle I enjoy the most. When solving it feels almost accidental.
This Is The Way (Kyriakos Chalkopoulos)
This Is The Way has a distinct affect. It's brooding, akin to the moments between dreaming and waking when everything is especially unseated. The ambiguity of this room, this immovable door, the strangers who come to escort you away, it could be analogous to any number of experiences - being unable to come out as yourself; the false restrictions imposed by authority; the never-ending wait at the DMV.
I feel like I'm reaching a bit, though, with any deep reading. I don't doubt that this means something very particular to the creator but the game is opaque. It gestures at a mood, builds it up through strange letters passed under the door, but it's difficult to get a footing.
The blurry visuals and incongruous UI heighten the dreamlike otherness, but like so many dreams it is compelling in the moment but insubstantial. Definitely a creator to watch, the ideas are already here, just wrestling for the right voice to express them.
A Hundred Thousand Places (Maria Mison)
Maria Mison writes like the letters on the page can barely keep up. Their prose is like hot water on a teabag; the too-hot-comfort of a pair of socks straight out of the dryer; baking in dry heat under a pine tree. It lifts me up and urges me towards some ambiguous destination, but I'm happy to move, happy to meander in the company of these assorted ephemera. Friends for a moment but no less sincerely.
A Hundred Thousand Places is a game and not a game, more a guided tour through your introspection. It can be harsh - reflection is only half nostalgia, the other half some mix of shame and trauma - but never cruel. I feel safe here, circling back in on myself, on the words, on the streams of half thoughts half provocations that litter the pages. A dictionary thrown individual page by individual page from the roof of your apartment, inviting me to figure out how to reassemble it.
I adore the fearlessness of A Hundred Thousand Places. It reassures me that the rules carved under my skin by so many textbooks, professors, the linguistic police of the internet's dullest edge - need not take priority if the feeling I'm looking for could better be understood by something less academically sound. Not that this is sloppy, it merely charges forward with an aggression and lack of compunction I am envious of. To be along for that ride, even briefly, is a joy.
Prism Song (Lowsun)
It's wild that Prism Song works. A non-linear platformer played in a command prompt, it's a tools-based minimalism that is exciting for functioning at all, like watching Doom played on a pregnancy test. The game itself is rather frustrating and frontloads instructions before they make sense. Love the flavor, could not explain how it’s played.
I couldn't get to the end but the story of a vengeful god tasking you with eradicating dubiously wrongful deviants is well realized despite limitations in presentation. I kind of adore having to open VLC and queue up each music track based on the name of the room I'm in. It's excessive, an entirely imposed upon limitation by the tools used, but I am charmed by it. I didn't enjoy playing Prism Song, but I adore that it is something I can play.
Distortion Nation (TangledVirus)
I don't know if I've ever fallen for visual novel backgrounds before. I love the chunky lines and flat colors Distortion Nation uses. The lack of texture makes every scene feel cozy, like a paper diorama or a smiley face sticker. I want to know the names of the different plushies on the couch.
The writing is harder to ingest. Distortion Nation is primarily about trauma and the people that help us through it. I appreciate the warmth in its writing, the sentiment that you are valuable and your pain is not a burden to those around you, but I don't feel any investment in the particulars of this story. The characters are proxies for ideas, moods, a fun moment without the buildup. I can't see below the surface.
There is a similarity here to Wattpad and other storytelling platforms that cater to new writers. It is all emotion all the time, coming from a very real place of wanting to be heard but spilling out in fits and starts. The stiffness feels endemic to the form but not for lack of the author caring. I'm eager to see TangledVirus grow as a writer, there are some wild ideas here even if they aren't yet so eloquently expressed.
It’s A Beautiful Day (Yllogique)
This was a game jam entry back in 2016 but feels entirely of our current quarantined moment. Wake up. Make the bed. Take a shower. Have some tea. Repeat. Ignore the door. The door doesn’t exist right now.
Every task is disconnected but they’re linked by the sense that time isn’t really moving. The room is the same. We’re just making small changes to stay busy. As someone with a dozen or so types of tea in the cupboard I appreciate how many options are given here. It only matters to me what flavor I’m drinking, but when every day feels the same the tiny choices start to mean a lot more.
It’s A Beautiful Day isn’t a somber game, not intentionally at least. I do finish it with a longing for how it might have felt in 2016, when leaving your home could still be scary but wasn’t nigh apocalyptic. But the room is comforting, I feel safe vacuuming and messing with books. I’m happy to disappear momentarily into another enclosed space. The door will open. I can go outside.
You can find this issue of Indiepocalpyse, as well as all past issues, on itch.io.
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