Another theme of this year's Sessions was "obfuscation," which, if you don't have the dictionary memorized, means "to obscure" or "hide." The idea with games that obfuscate was to either obfuscate the environment, the characters, the story or the point. Most of the games demonstrated here achieved all of the above.
Like Lost in the Static a game in which everything is made of different layers of static. Pause the game and you can't see anything - just static. But when it's playing, you can just barely discern the shapes you need to navigate around and over to play the game.
An innovative platformer, Lost in the Static is nevertheless unplayable and awful due to what the creator calls "physiological challenges." Again, for the vocabulary-challenged, that means people get nauseous after playing. Or watching. I had to close my eyes.
The two truly excellent games demonstrated this year, were, interestingly enough, both created by Matt Korba. If someone doesn't send this boy a Town Car to get him out of Soho soon, I'll do it myself.
The first game he showcased was up for Best Student Game at the Independent Game Festival Awards last night. It's called The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and it oozes style out of every pore.
Matt, clearly a film fan, created a game based on old silent films. You control Mr. Winterbottom as he adventures his way through various puzzles. You can also create more Winterbottoms by recording your game and the replaying it. When you replay, there are two of you, who tell two friends and so on. You can create Winterbottom towers, whack Winterbottoms with your umbrella to send them flying, or let them whack you to send you flying. It's good fun, and too good for this part of town.
Transparentor, Matt's other game, takes a page from the bad sci-fi movies of the 1950s. He says the goal was to create a game as bad as the bad films of that era, and with Transparentor, he both succeeded and failed.
In the game, you are Transparentor, an invisible monster. Meaning you can't see yourself. At all. You can catch glimpses of your shape by looking at the occasional shadow, or tell where you are by stepping in pools of liquid and watching for footsteps, but for the most part you have no idea what you're doing or where you are. And yet, this only adds to the fun.
With flying saucers on strings and a boss battle (against another invisible monster), Transparentor is easily the most crazy cool game I've seen all year. I look forward to enjoying it in a fine gallery showing uptown.
