this space intentionally left blank

September 18, 2012

Filed under: gaming»software»blendo

Nuevos Aires, 1960

When I bought a new computer a little while back, I figured it would be a chance to play some of the Steam/GOG.com games that I bought while they were on sale, knowing that my laptop couldn't handle them. And in one or two cases, it is. But for the most part, I spent last week's small amount of gaming time buried back in a trio of titles from Blendo--a one-man shop that's becoming my favorite indie developer.

Blendo (AKA Brendon Chung) is best known right now for Thirty Flights of Loving, sequel to his absurdist spy short Gravity Bone. It's a funny, cinematic little nugget of first-person narrative. It's also about seven minutes long. I'm not sure it was worth the $5 asking price, but Chung's definitely playing with some ideas here that are worth rewarding.

Besides, he had my good will starting from my first minutes playing Flotilla last year. This was a game that I'd wanted, but somehow had not been able to find: full 3D space tactics within a randomly-generated campaign. The missions themselves are tense, slow-moving affairs set to classical piano pieces, while the overworld screens are Blendo's typically jazzy blend of surrealism (rastafarian pirate cats, defanged space yeti, and wandering Greek goddesses appear along your journey) and procedural storytelling (decisions along the way are assembled into an illustrated ship's log). The combination of the two should be dissonant, but instead the funny bits serve as a nice break between the tense turn-by-turn bits.

And then there's Atom Zombie Smasher, which is the most unbalanced and most compelling of the three. It's basically a tower defense game, which means I should hate it, and yet somehow I really don't. It's ridiculously unfair--sometimes you get an overwhelming mix of units for a stage, and sometimes you just get barricades and mines, meaning that I tend to win or lose the whole game depending on which two units are randomly assigned in the first stages--and yet tremendously addictive. Maybe that's just the surf guitar talking.

Ultimately, I think what charms the most about these is that they almost remind me of board games in their approach to design and replayability. Even though they're radically different genres, Blendo's stuff shares a common sensibility in the way that they construct stories out of small vignettes and procedural generation. Each takes, at most, an evening to play completely through, and yet there's plenty of detail and reward for digging in. They continue to surprise players outside of all proportion to their actual size. There aren't a lot of people making games in this space--it's all either bite-sized casual fare or sprawling epics. Chung's genius is making the former feel, if only for a little while, like the latter.

Past - Present