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/////// SOVIET UNTERZOEGERSDORF
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///// SECTOR II
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/// The Adventure Game
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An adventure marches on!

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/// http://www.monochrom.at/suz-game/
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/

Soviet Unterzoegersdorf (pronounced «oon-taa-tsee-gars-doorf») is the last existing client republic of the USSR. The soviet enclave maintains no diplomatic relationship with the surrounding so-called “Republic of Austria” or with the capitalist fortress “European Union”. The downfall of the people’s motherland — the Soviet Union — in the early 1990s had a devastating effect on the country’s intra-economic situation. External reactionary forces threatened the last remaining proletarian paradise.
Party secretary Wladislav Gomulka has been kidnapped and is being held in US-Oberzoegersdorf. We must save comrade Gomulka! Because communism isn’t an opinion. It’s a promise.

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// Special Non Player Guest Characters:
/ Jello Biafra, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Emmanuel Goldstein, Mitch Altman, Bre Pettis, David ‘DaddyD’ Dempsey, Kyle Machulis, MC Frontalot, Eddie Codel, Irina Slutsky, Christian ‘plomlompom’ Heller, Jason Scott Sadofsky, Hans Bernhard, Robert Stachel (maschek) — and many more.

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// Voice Acting by:
/ Jevgeni Beliaikin, Sergey Teterin, Mikhail A. Crest, Daria Prawda, Bre Pettis — and many more.

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// Soundtrack features:
/ The Fat Man/George Alistair Sanger, Q-Burns Abstract Message, Zoe Keating, Neil Landstrumm, Jonathan Mann aka GameJew, Blockwerk, The Extra Action Marching Band, The Lazy, antivolk – Torsun feat. classless Kulla, Jan Klesse & Felix Knoke (left), Savant Trigger, Rioteer, MC Orgelmueller, Magic Jordan, Schaua, Horace, The Vladivostoks, Limpopo, Eric Skiff, Prometheus X, Kertal (feat. sunsetfactory), Bolschewistische Kurkapelle Schwarz-Rot, Farmer’s Market, Attention, Cosmonauts!, Woodn Earf, Trishes, Krach the Robot, Prosperity Denied, Arteom Denissov, Dan Oberbauer aka DJ Chronos, LFO DEMON — and more.

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// Operating systems:
/ Available for Windows, Linux and OSX! And many thanks to the fabulous comrades at CodeWeavers (http://www.codeweavers.com) for Linux/OSX versions. And also bloshevik geetings to the folks at Silver Server (http://www.sil.at) for bandwith sponsoring.

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/// http://www.monochrom.at/suz-game/
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// For IBM PC and Non-Compatible
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//// A true tour-de-red-force
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////// Russian with English or German subtitles
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//// Appealing graphical game interface
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// Creative Commons License
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Other projects:

http://monochrom.at/english

The article is Butchering Pathologic, by Quintin Smith, over on the excellent Rock Paper Shotgun. It starts with:

I’m going to explain, right now, why a Russian FPS/RPG called Pathologic is the single best and most important game that you’ve never played.

Intrigued yet? Go read the article. It’s in three parts, so it may take a while.

So why am I getting so excited about a Russian game from 2004? Because somewhere, in an obscure little notebook, I keep a list of Things I Want To Do In Videogames. And Pathologic happens to contain an astounding number of those things.

Things such as ‘unfun’: tragedy, horror, despair, negative consequences, ruin. We’re not using the full spectrum of emotions in games, and there’s no good reason for it.

Or playing with the medium. I looooove playing with the medium. A lot of my designs use it.

Or a living world that changes significantly during the game and reacts to the player’s actions. John Walker, in his review of Pathologic over at Eurogamer, correctly points out how shallow most so-called “living cities” in games are. Pedestrians walk around, but nothing ever changes. Pathologic apparently goes a lot further. And why not? I think people don’t do this for wrong reasons.

Or what I call ‘plastic reality’. In Pathologic, even the buildings become sick.

Or plain old weirdness, of course. I am a David Lynch fan after all. Things don’t have to make sense. Or at least, not in an ordinary way.

And finally, Ice-Pick Lodge, the developers of Pathologic, seem to take storytelling very seriously. And that is also something to be applauded.

Ironically, all of this happens in a game that is apparently very hard to play – in other words, the kind of game I would normally delete within 5 minutes, and then spend 30 minutes ranting about. Will I ever play it? Who knows. I’ve seen it online for 10-15 Euros, well within impulse-buy range.

I think what is most inspiring about reading about Pathologic is the fact that a group of people managed to cram this many non-mainstream elements into one game. That someone managed to make a game, to quote Quintin Smith:

[...] as daring and unique as one of those 15 minute indie games that everyone raves about (and rightly so!), only blown up into a 40 hour epic.

That warms the cockles of my heart. And it makes me wonder, once again, if I am not making games like this because of the constraints of “The System”, or because I don’t have the courage to do it. I console myself by the thought that I don’t know enough crazy people to make something like this with. Well, crazy and available people.

Contemplating why wildly ambitious games like these often seem to come from non-core games industry countries is worth a blog post of it’s own.

I realize, of course, that the game I am imagining based on the articles I have read is likely quite different from the real thing. But the excitement is real.

Update: Corrected the developer’s name.

trees full of apples. unassuming, you stride under one, and an apple falls from the tree and crushes you, sending you back to the start of the screen. you approach again, this time cautiously poking your nose out under the tree in an attempt to goad the apple into falling before you pass. you don’t jump back in time, you get crushed. this time it works, and you begin carefully making your way across a screen full of apple trees. some apples only fall in pairs, and you have to dodge between the two. sometimes you can jump at an apple to spook it into falling early. about halfway across, you notice an apple low enough you can jump over it. tired of the tedious apple-teasing, you graciously accept the respite of an apple you won’t have to dodge mid-fall. you jump over the apple, and the apple falls up and kills you. the apple falls up and kills you.

Very interesting. I am noticing a stronger tendency to play with the medium’s conventions, but I don’t know if that is because I am paying more attention to indie games these days or because there are more indie games or people actually are playing more the medium’s conventions… or all three. Yes, I know people have been doing this for a while – I am talking about a perceived increase. In any case, I think it’s a good thing.

Is this a Zelda-style game where I get new abilities as the game progresses, allowing me to access inaccessible areas in earlier levels? Or does this game consist of really hard puzzles?

Because I hate puzzles. Hate hate hate! Maybe I should peek at the official walkthrough.

Update: … the walkthrough doesn’t contain any spoilers… Damn.

Update: Right, ‘traversed’ worlds 2 to 6. I am not feeling cool and smart, I am feeling angry and frustrated. I don’t think this is the game for me. Ah well, only 10 euros gone.

Braid has filled my head with so many ideas, so many opinions, so many emotions that wrestling them all into a coherent critique is like trying to strangle a swan made of jelly.

And then also:

Braid is beautiful, entertaining and inspiring. It stretches both intellect and emotion, and these elements dovetail beautifully rather than chafing against each other. Still wondering if games can be art? Here’s your answer.

Impressive. Not the only review like that. It’s live on XBLA now, allegedly.

(Copied verbatim except for that last line from Braid.)

According to this interview over at Wired it was just a logical extrapolation of the way they do things. They control the distribution of their comic, so why not of their game?

No mention anywhere of that other indie game digital distributor, Manifesto Games.

(Via Boing Boing.)

The game itself, dubbed Love (as in For The Love Of Game Development), is an exploration-based moderately-multiplayer FPS with astounding impressionistic visuals and a procedurally generated universe. Since Steenberg is a one man show, he’s relying on clever maths to build the world for him and then clever gamers to come in and help him figure out where to take it, and what to do with it.

It sounds like an amazing effort. Great look too!

It has a great look:

Great use of production restrictions. Gameplay is interesting, but I feel the level design could be better (that’s code for: I couldn’t beat the game within 10 minutes :P). It even runs on a Mac!

Pac-Man was a junkie, eyes oozing pus, haunted by the ghosts of those he’d killed.

They called him Pac-Man because he was always packing heat, lightning-quick on the draw with a personal arsenal second to none. But today he woke up in an alley, all weapons missing but his mouth, an animal, starving hysterical naked, trapped in an unfamiliar maze of mean streets. Needing a fix. Needing a fix like nothing else.

And the ghosts are coming.

You can guess the rest, but it’s well done.