Through simple observations, Lord Winklebottom solves various issues for local citizens – things like reaching his giraffe neck up to the second story of a locked-in pub to obtain the keys, or sawing up a barrel to get wood to patch a seaward ship. As reductive as that might be, Lord Winklebottom is an eloquent giraffe of high society with a hippopotamus deuteragonist. Lord Winklebottom Investigates is a point-and-click adventure game that might be summarized as a giraffe detective simulator. It reminded me of a childhood quirk where I would close one eye, squint through the other, and pinch my fingers over someone’s space, as if the hand of a giant was crushing them. BOOM! Your pawn just took on the size that you would expect a pawn at that distance to have the size of – in other words, this game enlarges and shrinks objects based on physical perspective. Pick up a pawn – something about the size of a thumb or larger – raise it towards the ceiling, and let it drop. In one of the opening rooms, for example, a table in the corner has a few pawns on it. Unlike Moncage, which fixes your perspective on a circular camera dolly, forcing you to navigate within tight confines of a cube, Superliminal invites you to place physical objects in varying perspectives, causing them to differently impact your relationship to the environment. Like Moncage, Superlimina lis a challenge of player perspective. The topics and language in this game are more mature than I was expecting, including a word or two that I wasn’t quite comfortable reading aloud, but I respect the game for dealing with such complicated issues. The visual identity of this game might initially come off as something from RPG Maker but quickly complicates any such naive assumptions through an idiosyncratic color pallete and art style. She Dreams Elsewhere touches on themes of identity, diversity, self-hatred, social anxiety, delusions, and other themes that many games dare not touch. But I was not prepared for how drawn in I would be in the hour-long experience I spent with the game. I have been following this game for many months on Twitter, drawn in by the art style and focus on experiences unconventional to most video games. She Dreams Elsewhere made the biggest impact on me of any game I was able to demo through the Steam Game Festival. But my time with the game was quite brilliant, encouraging me to think in ways I wouldn’t normally be required to by a video game. I didn’t find Moncage to be terribly easy – in fact, I got impossibly stuck a few times before making incremental progress once more. The beautiful geometry of this game is not to be missed, as well as the heartfelt narrative that can be assembled through the collection of splotchy photographs that, as collected, hang displayed in the room around this cubed box. The next game is known as Moncage, a visual puzzler centered around a cubic device – a framed camera within a glass box – which slowly reveals layers and interactive methods to open up unorthodox solutions to obscure puzzles. Through the abundant animations for Tove and the troll, as well as the other handful of barely introduced characters throughout this demo, I fell in love with the polish already present in this game. By assisting this troll in yanking out an embedded sword left in its shoulder by an aggressive human, Tove makes friends with this troll, opening the way through. Over the course of this short demo, Tove makes friends with a troll who blocks her path under a bridge. This team has assembled a game rich in Scandanavian setting and lore, championing the wide-eyed protagonist named Tove, searching for her little brother who has gone missing. The first demo that I’ve been following for about a year on Twitter comes from a game known as Röki, a project led by former Playstation art directors who have formed their own studio known as Polygon Treehouse. After sifting through these demos, there are eight games that I’d like to share for people like me who get excited about upcoming indie games. In the limited window that these game demos were available, I played a handful of titles that piqued my interest from an art and storytelling perspective. In this spring’s Steam Game Festival – an event featuring dozens of demos mostly from smaller indie games – I found some incredible gems that have a plethora of potential and are worth paying attention to on the road to release.
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