can i talk about two of my favorite video games NaissanceE and Manifold Garden. the way that they are about the same concept of huge scales and geometry but in two opposing ways, a bleak industrial monolith and a colorful expansive garden. the way that NaissanceE
This is a first-person puzzle game set in a mysterious, infinitely looping realm. It owes a lot to Portal in that the basic gameplay mostly involves doing weird physics stuff to get cubes onto buttons.
In this case, instead of having a portal gun, you can face walls and shift gravity toward them. This effectively rotates the entire space that you're in and makes the walls the new floor. Do it again and you can be walking on the ceiling. It should be extremely disorienting, but the game does a fantastic job with colour and sound cues to help you out.
It also helps that none of the puzzles are too terribly taxing. I'm used to puzzle games introducing a new mechanic and then taking it to its furthest extremes, but this one was much gentler and tended to move on to the next new thing quite often. The endgame sections combined mechanics and did make me furrow my brow for a minute or two, but usually the solution presented itself before long.
This game has been on my radar for a while because I'm fascinated by physically impossible spaces. I devoured this game and loved just looking around in its world, being tickled by the fact that each structure I could see repeating all around me were also the same structure that I was standing on. Like I mentioned, the world loops in every direction, and the art takes advantage of that, presenting some remarkably beautiful and fascinating vistas. And often, the quickest way to the top of the structure you're standing on is to fall off the bottom.
Play this!! Unless you're easily disoriented and prone to motion sickness like my wife :(
welcome to carrie's fucked head, where he invents a self insert OC to live through every singe one of her favorite puzzle adventure games in a bizarre sequence of events. OC applies as a test subject at Aperture to make some quick cash, plays through the events of Portal 1, goes comatose. Then they play through Manifold Garden in their coma, and wake up back in Aperture. He plays through the events of Portal 2 and escapes and finds society. They decide they need therapy, go to Somnasculpt and enter ANOTHER coma, then play through the story of Superliminal. I was gonna put her through the Stanlely Parable too but I honestly haven't "finished(?)" that game and I don't think I can bring myself to do that to her.
I can’t be the only one who thinks that those weird surreal worlds like ENA, Manifold Garden, Viewfinder and Superliminal are kinda like, the modern-day equivalent of the Fae, right?
Strange, alien landscapes; arbitrary rules and mysterious internal logic; a general defiance of everyday laws of physics?
An additional point ENA is nostalgia: Just look at the aesthetics wiki for old-school internet cottagecore: nostalgia for the wild and unsanitized internet/forest, an era where people in the internet forest could just do shit without corporations cutting down every tree and blocking every swear word online
hell, the old internet kinda is like a wild, untamed forest, old web design being as hard to navigate as the untouched woods
If this were a video essay I’d call it something like “The Internet is a dying Fairy Forest” or something like that
a garden of infinity, wherein fractals merely decorate the walls, staircases built to ascend past the event horizon, and descend below the depths of the human imagination, whose architecture repeats after repetition, endlessly beautiful.
prisons expanding to the right, to the left, before and before, holding captives not of crime, but holding dearly the hands of those trapped inside, themselves unidentified, voiceless, shadowless; and they wander spaces meant for giants, for beings to whom giants are specs, and do not ask the reason they exist.
a library of possibilities incomprehensible, jargon of the mind to the eyes and perception, in which luck is nigh but a factor; hexagons to wonder at and wander in, paper to touch and to hold as close as family, burials falling from one sky and into another, until something carrying sense is found; and then, it is discarded, until another page holding a name may be carried like a lost limb, like by a servant of the flesh, a child of the senses.