Ratings and Reviews by CMG

Faithful, that is, to how Ryan Veeder remembered Poe’s only novel one month after listening to the audiobook, and without consulting the novel again. Events are skimmed. Characters are combined. Context is discarded. Forgotten plot beats are swept overboard. The game plunges on. It doesn’t matter.

I’m tempted to call the resulting game a parody, but that doesn’t sit right. This is simply Poe filtered through Veeder’s head. A bizarre story about shipwreck and cannibalism becomes a bizarre story about shipwreck and cannibalism. A dog appears. Pickles are eaten. We visit Antarctica. There is a dead polar bear.

I’m not sure how much anyone will appreciate this game without having read Poe’s original novel. I’m also not sure how much anyone will appreciate it without having played Veeder’s other games. But if you do have that background, this game is surprisingly illuminating, both in relation to Poe and Veeder. It puts a spotlight on certain elements in Poe, clearing away everything else so that you can see just how weird these elements really are. And since that spotlight is Veeder’s interpretation, you also see how he’s personally digesting the material.

This all becomes even more interesting when you consider that Winter Storm Draco (one of Veeder’s best games, in my opinion) was built with Arthur Gordon Pym as its thematic foundation. The references to Pym are so central in Draco that if you extracted them, Draco would vanish.

Finally, I’ll take this opportunity to point out that the cry “Tekeli-li!” did not originate with Lovecraft. It’s from Arthur Gordon Pym, to which Lovecraft owes a great debt when it comes to Antarctic exploration, ancient polar civilizations, and unfathomable creatures dwelling below the ice.

When I hear the word “utopia,” I think about what regulations are required to sustain societies, and what would be required to sustain an “ideal” society. Many games written for the Tiny Utopias Jam have taken a different approach to the theme, imagining utopia as nothing more or less than a small moment set aside for decompression from daily life. Caelyn Sandel’s Tiny Beach probably exemplifies this best.

What’s interesting about the morning after is that it also presents a small moment for decompression, but rather than eliding the more difficult reality surrounding this moment, the game dwells on that reality’s harshness. We have an abandoned station, deserted desks, and nocturnal things that leave “blood and ichor” behind when they’re slain. This is post-apocalypse territory, where people must fight monsters to survive. Nothing utopian about it. The story’s society has failed, is still failing, has achieved a nightmarish stasis.

But despite that, the morning after a monster encounter is a tiny utopia, where the characters can bathe and relax and drink tea and eat cake. This utopia isn’t achieved by ignoring the world and focusing inward. The reverse: it depends on that imperfect world. Without monsters to hunt, there would be no morning after the hunt. A dangerous outside must exist for a safe inside to matter.

You have the alphabet on a refrigerator. You can take letters and drop them in a new order to spell anything you want. You also have another refrigerator with more letters that allows for more diversity in word creation. Spelling words is the entire game.

This was a small coding exercise made for the Tiny Utopias Jam. By itself, it wouldn’t be much more than a small coding exercise, but positioned as a “utopia” it invites more interpretation. Inkblot tests come to mind here. Whatever meaning you take from Fridgetopia is likely to be meaning you also put into it, but then, that is the game: rearranging what it provides to create your own message.

As a utopia, however, it actually strikes me as more solid than other utopias in the jam. That’s not a criticism against those other games, just a statement about what Fridgetopia does differently. It’s not about a moment of escape, or a dream about how life might be better. Instead Fridgetopia creates a working system. Rearranging letters on its virtual fridge is more complicated than rearranging magnetic letters on a real fridge would be. In order to create this experience for the player, the game had to be mechanically implemented. There are rules at work behind the scenes. This control engenders freedom of expression, but not freedom to spell more than the letters on the fridge can support.

Fridgetopia doesn’t last long, but as an experimental art piece, it gives you a lot to consider... if you want to consider it. Much like the letters on its fridge. Fiddle with them or leave them alone. It’s all up to you.

A game about words in the B Minus Seven tradition. Words are not used here to tell a story. Instead the words are the story; or rather, their sounds are the story, and the story is how those sounds flow through your thoughts as you read.

B Minus Seven’s games are always razor-sharp when it comes to wordplay and rhythm. In Powers of Two, everything else has been pared back to allow the game’s words a chance to exist as pure sensations, unencumbered even by their definitions.

As so many things do, because Edward Gorey is such a large reference point for me, this game reminds me of Edward Gorey, whose little books were sometimes nothing more than lists and alphabets. For example, consider this passage from The Unstrung Harp:

Mr Earbrass stands on the terrace at twilight. It is bleak; it is cold; and the virtue has gone out of everything. Words drift through his mind: anguish turnips conjunctions illness defeat string parties no parties urns desuetude disaffection claws loss Trebizond napkins shame stones distance fever Antipodes mush glaciers incoherence labels miasma amputation tides deceit mourning elsewards…

Gorey’s words are unmoored, but their cloud forms a mood.

B Minus Seven’s words, on the other hand, aren’t quite as lacking in context. In Powers of Two, they represent a utopia. A utopia, perhaps, where meanings aren’t necessary, where explanations aren’t demanded, where language is free to simply play in the space between the author’s and the reader’s minds. There’s no pressure. Only pleasure at the language’s cadence. A small ritual to create a tiny utopia in your day, and to suggest a larger utopia where people are emancipated rather than constrained by what they can say.