Oceans, voids, and pixel butts - Thoughts on Indiepocalypse #9
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 #9 from October 2020.
The Zine
After the lush colors of issue #8, Shirley Jackson’s outlined black and white cover is a nice contrast. I love the intensity of the eyes, so much more white space than anywhere else in the frame giving the impression the eyes are glowing an even whiter white. The treatment of Indiepocalypse is the perfect spooky October mood and feels ripe for a back-of-your-laptop sticker.
The full-page covers for each game continue to impress. I particularly love Taylor McCue’s art nouveau panels for Do I Pass and Saving You From Yourself. It’s a wildly different style than the game’s themselves but still conveys their introspective, melancholy tone.
I don’t know where I’d hang it or how I’d explain it to people but I am so into the page for Looking at the Fucked-Up Guy Looking at You. Give me more ominous floating eyes, more WWII propaganda typography, more admonishments for my poor taste in friends.
Novena is a playable poem so of course its cover is also a poem. Without the title this could just as easily be an 8bitfiction post. It’s so lonely, I’m reminded of standing on a beach at night as a kid, wondering why we’d come all this way, feeling terrified and in awe of the waves lapping my feet. I still don’t know if it’s a good memory.
There’s a lot I like about the Is It That Deep, Bro? cover. It includes two paragraphs from the devs about the backstory of the game and their history with the gay cowboy film and struggling with their identities in the 2000s (it’s so easy to forget just how much less open things were not even a decade ago). The colors are lovely, I have a real sense of where this game sits in history. It also has a toned pixel butt. More butts in games, please.
The comics zone is light this issue but both gave me exactly the sort of chuckle I used to crave from the funny pages only to be let down by another joke about cavemen. I really empathize with Todd Tucker the realtor gnome. It’s tough feeling stuck in a job. Comics are better when they can say “shit.”
There are more relationship party (?) games and I am intrigued and a little confused by them. Reno Dakota asks you to send love letters to an unrequited partner which are then discarded after 5 seconds. The asymmetry is unusual for this sort of game and I wonder if it would actually work in practice, but the idea is compelling. I Don’t Want To Get Over You is similar to a game from last issue wherein one player is unable to get over a breakup (as apposed to the other game where they argued to stay in said relationship). With no means of actually transitioning out of breakup nostalgia I’m not sure what the arc of playing this would feel like, but maybe it would help someone trying to get over a real relationship. With both of these I think it would be beneficial to include safety tools as I can imagine them getting pretty intense.
I desperately want to play A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off. The idea of a TTRPG with almost rogue-like levels of insta-death is such a change from the character persistence that personifies most of the genre. I’m struggling to read the font for the instructions so it would be nice if they were copy/paste-able, but at only two pages I imagine the rules will be easy enough to quickly internalize during play.
I feel I’m going to quickly start repeating myself in summarizing these zines, but it should be taken as a complement that they are consistently exciting, surprising, and well produced. It is inspiring to see such an artistic range within this issue, the complete lack of pretensions, and an appreciation for everyone involved. I’ve already gotten a lot of joy out of this issue and I haven’t even touched the games themselves.
Professor Pemda’s Puzzle Pyramid (Bean Borg)
Take a moment to lament all the kids who won’t know the joy of visiting coolmathgames.com on a library computer with a pair of $.99 earbuds. The site is still running - seemingly a survivor of the great Flash purge - but how am I going to convince my niece to checkout B-Cubed when she won’t stop Fortnight dancing in my living room?
Professor Pemda’s Puzzle Pyramid (PPPP) is a Sokoban game in the great Cool Math heritage, wherein block pushing is married to basic math and early 00s polygons-in-space graphics. It’s something I’d likely find on 300 Great Arcade Games from the closest Staples, a prototype with a neat idea that I’m happy to mess around with for 20 minutes.
I’m a bit disappointed the cheeky alliteration from the title doesn’t make its way into level names or descriptions. The charm is thin and I’d have taken a strong dozen levels over recycling layouts with harder solutions. I’m never going to use the built in level editor that runs on ASCII art, but it’s fun that it works and at this scale that’s all I’m here for.
Novena (Cecile Richard)
When I was 9 or 10 my family visited the ocean. Myrtle Beach. A trashy camp-lot with a swimming pool and the smell of Bud Light. Having only ever known the mountains of Tennessee seeing the ocean was terrifying. Exhilarating. I never wanted to get out. But it was dark, the teenagers were beginning to congregate, the beach wasn’t mine anymore.
A few years later - or perhaps it was before, the chronology is all distorted now - we visited another beach. I don’t know which one it was, this trip wasn’t planned. My sister was sick, or that’s what I assumed. Eating cereal in someone else’s home. Being driven strange places by my cousin. It was disorienting, but I was a child, who could say what sense I made of it. The beach stays with me, though. We arrived just before the storm, long enough to stand on the sand as the wind buckled against my tiny body. The waves were enormous. It was dark but I could still make them out, like jaws trying to eat the shoreline. I got back in the car and only remember the rain from that point on.
I hadn’t thought about this in years, but novena pulled the memories back out of me. A playable poem, it personifies the ocean as someone forgotten, taken for granted. The ocean is not granting wishes and the world is sad for the loss of its power. Less for the loss of who the ocean may be.
novena is propelled by repetition, the daily visits to the ocean, listening to them cry, circling through their feelings of alienation and neglect. The poem’s impact is in the act of visiting, of repeating the same keystrokes before hearing the ocean’s refrain. I am continually being interrupted, held at a distance until the ocean is ready to talk. I’m tossed back into my own memories of the ocean, the sense of helplessness I felt before it, the confusion of why we were there but also the desire to remain present.
novena has no precise seam. It technically ends when the title reappears, but it’s written in such a way that it could just as well be continuing linearly. Who is to say we didn’t stop visiting the ocean after initially cheering it up? Can we trust the counter of days we made the trip out to listen to it? There’s no reason to believe novena is more cynical than its conclusion appears, but I am drawn to its cylindrical quality. The ocean will continue to lap at the beach whether I come or not. Apathy comes so easy.
Looking at the Fucked-Up Guy Looking at You (Julian K. Jarboe)
My favorite TTRPGs force me to reckon with parts of my personality I don’t like to admit. Looking at the Fucked-Up Guy Looking at You is a Hegalian solo game chronicling an unhealthy friendship with a shitlord that begins to look a little too much like you. It’s rules-lite and adaptable to just about any scenario, but the prompts are distinct enough I could immediately picture who this fucker was after the first card. What follows is my first playthrough, written out as I find solo games hard to play solely in my mind. It’s fictional so please don’t @ me if this sounds like you. But, if it does, maybe take some time to reflect. Maybe with this game.
///
5 of Diamonds: You resist his fucked-up manners despite how people give him the benefit of the doubt.
Allan leaned across the table. “No, see, you’ve got this one all wrong.” He nudges your hand away, like a parent correcting an ignorant child. “Don’t worry, I aced AP biology, I’ll help you out.” You were studying together, or rather, you were studying and Allan sat himself at your table. He has taken some fascination with you, has repeatedly volunteered himself to tutor you - “pay it forward,” he’d say, though to what destination it was never clear. And sure, biology wasn’t your major (Allan had reminded you of that plenty of times), but you weren’t exactly flunking out the door.
You pull your homework away from Allan’s hungry eyes. “Thanks but I think I should figure it out on my own,” you say, standing up and heading for what you hope is a less well known spot to study. It’s so tiresome, his faux-geniality, the sarcasm under his “concern” and “understanding.” You kick yourself for thanking him at all.
You never turn in the homework. Allan offers his condolences for “whatever you’re going through.”
7 of Hearts: You acquire his fucked-up art because it’s considered entertaining and visionary.
Allan’s in your summer drawing class. Why is he in your summer drawing class?! “I thought it would be fun to take on an art minor,” he says, “you always have this cool distance about you, that visionary artist shit. Everyone in bio is so up their ass about genomes, I’ve no way to express myself.” He continues on like this, monologuing for you and everyone and maybe just himself as you unpack your supplies.
It’s halfway through the semester and Allan has fully taken to his newfound love of graphite. The professor, as well, always has something glowing to say about his pieces, “the subtle emotion in the strokes,” something vague but complimentary. You hate it, but you can’t help yourself. Your sketches start to more and more resemble Allan’s, and suddenly you are being compared to him in front of the class. You try to remember what your art looked like before this class. You look through old notebooks, trawl your Instagram, ask a friend to describe it. But you’re stuck, emulating Allan as if he’s living rent-free in your brain, critiquing every line, suggesting it look more like his own.
You get an A. You never pick up your portfolio.
8 of Diamonds: You resist his fucked-up ideas despite his expert knowledge of their system, subject area, or technology.
“All I’m saying is you need investments early.” Allan is all but climbing over you in the cafeteria, enraptured in his own financial declarations. “My parents bought stock in Netflix when it was being run out a closet - I’m a bit of a movie buff, actually, have you seen Scarface? - and that’s paying my way through school. It’s just good judgement, honestly I thought you’d have something nesting already.” He takes a fry off your plate, nodding to himself like he’s performing an elegant metaphor.
You don’t tell him your family couldn’t invest because they barely had enough to eat. You don’t tell him everything you’re wearing comes from a thrift shop (and not the flashy suburban one that categorizes by brand). You don’t even object as he takes another fry, already imagining the spiel he’d give about “diversifying your portfolio, rates of return, the philosophical implications of interest.” You just say you aren’t feeling well and go back to your room, stopping at the vending machine before realizing you don’t have any cash.
Allan transfers at the end of the semester. He never writes.
Sanguine Oblation (CheezGarlick, Moumita, Vitor Amado, Jammmz)
In Kafka’s “Before the Law,” a man waits and sacrifices his totality before a gate he’s forbidden to pass. We are never taken inside that gate, given hints what it could be, but instead wait with the man, watching him shrivel and die having learned nothing and gone nowhere. It is a striking allegory, as much a repudiation of the arbitrary hurdles insulating the powerful from the helpless as it is a parable for the shortsighted relentlessness of humanity.
Saguine Oblation recalls Kafka in its ambiguous geography, the feeling that the faculties of social interaction have been peeled away for immediate aid. Food, life, consciousness. As the player guides a knight through a misty void, hand clutching the wound in their side, they are constantly affronted by their own fragility. A ticking red bar depletes with each too quick movement, each absent minded release of the hand stopping the blood.
I’m entranced by the harsh violence of Sanguine Oblation. It is an ugly, ugly thing, but so is the entirety of this void. My knight may begin with compulsory pleasantries but will just as quickly con and cut down the people around him if it means living that much longer.
With no checkpoints and a dreadfully slow movement speed failure takes on a heightened urgency. Being killed by rogue guards meant starting from the beginning, crawling back through to the sacrifice demanding idle, once more listening to the incoherent babblings of the other trapped souls around me. Perhaps it would be better to simply lay here and remain dead.
But the same constancy of death that gives the game such an intensity also degrades its impact. The implication of an imminent death is one thing. Having to then begin as if the game is just booting up feels clumsy. I’m growing bored. My eyes wander outside the tiny window of the game, exploring other options. Where Kafka can write linearly and convey every unpleasantry at its proper time, Sanguine Oblation is always at risk of being derailed. As much as this adds in tension it muddies in impact. I am no longer considering this world, I am merely trying to avoid dying in it. Ironic, sure, but the message gets lost in the tedium.
The Light Prince (Christina Nordlander)
Spoilers Ahead
I wish I enjoyed text adventure games. Conceptually they fit alongside Twine games and tabletop improv but in practice I always feel as if I’m roleplaying with the most stubborn of GMs. The story becomes secondary to the actual game of learning to communicate with and to the parser, something which has only ever worked for me when the limitations of language is the theme being explored (__transfer_ by Abyssal Uncreations does this exceptionally well).
The Light Prince isn’t concerned with language. It places you at the top of a tower and asks you to slowly peel back the world to gain freedom. First setting foot on the ground after escaping the tower finds the game at its strongest. You stand in an empty field, the wind buckling your body as it lifts you off the ground. The scene is vividly realized in one of the most concise paragraphs of the game; I could almost feel the barley on my skin.
Sadly what follows is predominately cardinal direction tedium. Too many fantastical elements get introduced without a sense of purpose, and the cave structures are clumsy to navigate. I no longer felt lonely, I was accompanied by so many stray objects. It’s a conceit of the genre, but in a game otherwise so sparse being suddenly loaded down with inexplicably convenient components is tiring. I am reminded of all the ways adventure games cannot make natural something as simple as using a rope.
I am most disappointed by the conclusion. For a story predicated on being ostracized, literally locked away in a tower for fear of a curse, the welcome home comes ever so easily. Your imprisonment is forgotten. Life moves forward as if only halted for an inconvenient outing. The story forgot where it was going and ended up at home as a matter of course. How far this seems from that lonely field, the strands of barely, the wind which could blow me to oblivion. I am so much more compelled by this one scene than anything that comes after. Perhaps if I could go east, things would be different.
BBB: Boost Boom Boots (Darenn Keller, Joan Solroo)
Please allow me to momentarily pontificate at the “game feel” podium: BBB feels frickin’ delicious! I could find a dozen superficially similar mobile games but none would have the crunchy pCHNnk as BBB’s jet boost, the graceful chaos of a split second change of course. It’s one-button delight crammed into 30-second runs.
Dash up a wall, collect point, avoid obstacles, grab the hi-score. You know this game, you were born knowing it. But again and again and again, up the wall we go, smashing R to restart just one more time.
The online leaderboards are a nice surprise for a game jam entry but I do wish there was a personal-best tracker alongside it. The course never changes so there’s a real sense of progression when your score goes up, but that does limit how far I feel I can push myself before accepting I won’t make it onto the leaderboard. I would kill for an expand version with daily challenges. Don’t make me kill for it. BBB already feels like a full experience, it’s just missing the procedural content treadmill to lock me in. I can’t believe I’m asking for a treadmill, I don’t even know who I am anymore.
Door XP (Darenn Keller, Joan Solroo)
Door XP gives me the same feeling as when I’m able to do something on linux and not crash the system. It’s a command-line script-kiddie hacking game that manages to be tense with zero stakes, like a subway simulator stored on 15 blank floppy disks.
As another game jam entry the puzzles are a hectic sample of ideas at once under explored and surprisingly taxing. I love the precision timing required to solve some of the later levels but the ramp in challenge hits like a runaway train. Like BBB the mechanical loop is deftly realized but the structure around it doesn’t go far enough. I’m just starting to internalize the commands when I run out of puzzles to test them on.
Door XP is begging for bits of narrative to come slipping through as you connect to new computers but what’s here is just a straightforward puzzle game. Which is still entertaining but the possibilities seem so obvious I can’t help but feel their absence. I half expected the ending, wherein all the viruses have been removed, to be a trick and to reveal some post disinfectant plot. The door is metaphorically and literally wide open, and I’d love to see where Darren and Joan could take me with some more time.
is it that deep, bro? (moawling, cavegift)
I hope I never grow cynical of stories like is it that deep, bro? (iitdb?). It parallels games like Nicky Case’s Coming Out Simulator 2014 and shows like Glee, earnestly capturing a moment between two characters coming out to themselves and each other. You and Clay go to see the gay cowboy movie, but of course nobody just goes to see the gay cowboy movie.
I appreciate how emphatically the writing sells these two as aggrandizing teenage boys. The fixation on “no homo,” the armchair film criticism, the intensity of every emotion. Not enough credit is given to writing teenagers that sound like actual teens and not tiny adults or Steve Buscemi. I can feel myself sweating in the movie theater trying to look cool to my date-that-doesn’t-know-it’s-a-date, cringing at my bad jokes but appreciating he laughed. I’ve absolutely been here before, but if even one person sees something of themselves in these two that’s reason enough to keep retelling this story.
I’d also like to take a moment to appreciate how much work went into sculpting fake Heath Ledger’s very nice pixel ass. Doing the lord’s work over here.
Perfect Vermin (Maceo bob Mair, Angad Matharoo)
Spoilers ahead
I’m still thinking about this Philadelphia Inquirer headline from earlier this year. “Buildings Matter, Too.” The streets are filled with protesters but Inga Saffron wants to remind us that, ultimately, property and capital is what matters in the US. Fuck the people being murdered by the police, why aren’t we thinking of how the buildings feel? It’s an astoundingly callous and tone-deaf thing to have written, but it also plainly discloses the class hierarchy at the core of this country. If nothing else it was honest in saying just how little Saffron (and everyone involved in letting this be published) really cared about the people putting their lives in danger fighting for a better country.
///
Perfect Vermin gives you a sledge hammer and sends you into an office building to hunt fleshy somethings disguised as furniture. Every object explodes into hefty chunks but the fleshy things explode into bloody lumps. Nothing is said as to what these things are, but, seemingly, you are here to destroy them. Something something, everything looks like a nail…
At first it is just you and the sound of crashing glass and collapsing tables, but then a newscaster joins you. He is irate, screaming at you to go faster, to not mess up, to hunt down each fleshy thing until the building is clear. He gives you a time limit and each level takes on an increasingly surreal geometry. As you begin clearing floors he rapidly disintegrates into a glob of puss and boils, still pushing you forward as he melts onto his desk.
Jump cut and we’re in an examination room. We have cancer. It’s infected everything - our lungs, pancreas, bones. There is no saving this body. Perhaps if we’d acted sooner things would be different, but everyone’s sorry in retrospect.
It’s easy to wake up and wonder how we got to a point where violence seems to engulf us from all sides. The news hurtles through one horrific story after another; thousands are dying from a virus we could have prevented; the streets are filled with bodies trying to prevent another black man getting shot by the cops. But none of this is spontaneous. The cancer has been spreading as long as this country has existed. From the genocide of indigenous peoples to corporations built on slave labor the violence never stopped. All we ever had were hammers.
Perfect Vermin is all of us. It’s when we enable systems of oppression because it’s easy; when we hurt the people around us to ensure we hang on to whatever power we have. The higher-ups are barking at us to work harder so they can insulate themselves that much more before their organs fail. We never see what happens to the person wielding the sledgehammer. This isn’t their story, they’re just the tool by which the newscaster builds a legacy. “Massacre in an office building, more at 11.” Who’s death are we really mourning?
There is no sympathy here. How could there be? People are liabilities, objects are useful. So we keep pushing until the people look like things and the things look unnecessary and we create an industry to remove them because the one thing we can’t have is for this machine to slow down long enough for us to question what the fuck we’re doing.
I Was Always Filled With Anger (Raphaël Dely, Axel Rannou, Max Romain)
I’ve been sending game poems to my undergrad poetry professor as a way to hang on to the academic part of me that’s rapidly atrophying. I’m extremely interested in how the medium might be adopted as its own poetic form. Is it easier for people to engage with than written poetry? Or does the abstraction make it something distinct altogether that needs its own space to properly unpack? Game poems are still too young to have much written about their efficacy and particulars but it seems inevitable they will eventually be adopted alongside other experimental forms.
To that end, I Was Always Filled With Anger (IWAFWA) is something of a half-note between written poetry and more explicitly game-like works such as novena (written about above). The player walks from right to left and in doing so words appear within the environment, sometimes static sometimes shifting positions alongside the player. The game is a digital sheet of paper, allowing visual effects and movement prohibited by printed words but not to the degree the player is actively involved in the work itself. I don’t mean to get hung up on the question of what is and isn’t a game, but I think it’s self-evident that there are degrees to which a game is played versus experienced.
Poetry is always preoccupied with form and there is a novelty to IWAFWA being read in reverse (moving left brings the last word onto the screen first). But I’m not sure it enhances the poem so much as distracts from it. Each line reads as a distinct abstract thought, dramatic but lacking context. The gaps and direction of text causes a whiplash effect where your eyes are moving one way but the line order runs opposite.
I struggled to read the poem as a complete work and enjoyed it more as a blunt sensory stimulant; the sounds of running water, a deep bass growl, the lighting off parallax mountains. Which is a sort of poetry in itself but the impact is incomplete. I feel as if I have only passed through the poem, catchy glimpses but missing the broader page. I want to lay each line out in front of me but it’s impossible to separate a poem from its structure. I’d be making something else, so I guess I’m wondering if that thing would resonate more for me than this, or if this tension is in fact how I should feel. I’ve never been great at knowing the difference.
Eat-It-All (arya, nestgoblin)
Quarantine is making it hard to facilitate tabletop games, so I’ve not yet played Eat-It-All. I didn’t want to not include it in this roundup though as there’s a lot I like about it that I’ve not seen in other TTRPGs. The use of a shared prop (fortune cookies) seems like a great entryway for people unfamiliar with improve storytelling, and having it be diegetic within the narrative would presumably help collapse the player/character boundary that seems to impede new players.
The character creation hits all the points I’d want to know for a story about a bunch of friends on a food odyssey, particularly foregrounding having everyone introduce how they know each other (which would seem like a given in most TTRPGs but in my experience is frequently ignored). I do wish there were example sessions included with the rules to help new players understand how to expand a fortune into a story. It’s intentionally open-ended but some guidance wouldn’t go unappreciated for a game that is so rules-lite.
Games like Eat-It-All fit in my mind alongside party games more so than traditional TTRPGs, so I could see myself playing around with this as post-dinner entertainment. Something for when we’re too tired for rules but want a structure for our conversations. I’ve no idea when I’ll feel safe enough to share a bowl of fortune cookies with a group again, but if nothing else it’s nice to imagine.
Do I Pass? (Taylor McCue)
Do I Pass? invokes the ever intoxicating desire to know what people really think about you, from the perspective of a trans woman uncertain if she presently convincingly as a woman. The Game Boy graphics and cutesy ghost premise cloak the anxiety surrounding passing as something hurtful but broadly unsaid, allowing the trans protagonist an ending wherein nobody comments on her being trans and are more preoccupied with her cute crop top.
Do I Pass? is charming and hopeful in a space almost universally filled with stories of trans violence and abuse. It posits a world wherein the worst transphobia is someone trying too hard to prove they aren’t transphobic, and trans women can use a bus without being openly harassed. Abuse is abuse is abuse, but what exists in Do I Pass? is exponentially less damaging than so much of what trans folx experience on a daily basis. We need more trans stories that do not primarily focus on the trauma of existing as trans in a transphobic world, and Do I Pass? is a warm example.
I write all of this as a cis man, operating from a perspective of empathy but far from any real-world experience. I don’t want to fall in the trap of so many cis people equating trans experiences to consistently far more trivial aspects of cis life, so any understanding I have is only what I’ve read and been told. My only apprehension about Do I Pass? is that cis people will play it and misunderstand the degree to which it downgrades the dehumanizing things frequently thrown at trans folx. That is not a problem for Do I Pass? to solve so much as for cis people to not get self-righteous about. A Game Boy game cannot stand-in for the work required to undo internalized transphobia even if it might help on the way there.
But thinking about media from marginalized folx as primarily pedagogical is patronizing and diminishes the artistic statement of these works to “trying to make cis/het/white/male people less shitty.” Do I Pass? succeeds not because it moves me a little further towards good allyship, but because its a well realized game that softly explores a human experience. It can and does exist outside of its empathetic utility, even if our society requires every piece of trans art to be political statement. I’m much more interested in how trans folx respond to a game like this than I am its capacity to teach cis people not to take the wrong lesson from pronouns. Not every piece of art is made for us.
Saving You From Yourself (Taylor McCue)
This is the one game of the issue I’d actually played and written about before. I don’t have much more to add but much of what I said about Do I Pass? applies here as well. McCue’s games communicate so well the simultaneous hope and anxiety that seems to underpin transitioning - the feeling of finally becoming yourself even as you are uncertain how the world will respond.
Saving You From Yourself is not nearly as cutesy as Do I Pass? but is till predominately optimistic, something that seems to divide trans media made by trans folx and that which is not (unsurprisingly, cis people often fixate on the most horrific elements). I am so thankful McCue’s games exist to help make video games a less embarrassing, self-serious medium.
You can find this issue of Indiepocalpyse, as well as all past issues, on itch.io.
Kritiqal is made possible through the support of my wonderful Patreon supporters. If you enjoyed this post it would mean a ton if you shared it with a friend and considered becoming a supporter yourself.