About a week ago, I finished my semester. Only one left to go, before I graduate, having to face adulthood and make adult decisions.
The end of a semester is always busy for me, so I did not have much time to play video games, or write blog posts. I planned to participate in HowLongToBeat's 12 (actually 15) Games of Itchmas, as those were supposed to be quick and fun little adventures, but lack of time & energy combined with the lack of interest meant that I had not played a single one...
I did nominate two games for this event, neither of which got enough votes, but in the end, those were the only games that I actually finished this month.
https://pantagruel.itch.io/water-womb-world
A short (about 15 minutes) horror game. Explore the sea floor, catch fish, sift through silt to find objects, study in your lab, try to find Eden.
I've previously recommended another one of Yames' games, Discover My Body. This one has a very similar vibe: Lo-Fi + cosmic horror is a very effective combination, in my opinion. The low fidelity by itself adds to the creepiness factor, while also allowing the developer to avoid realistic graphics and put more effort into creative content.
Water Womb World is slightly longer than Discover My Body, sadly it gets a teeny-tiny bit repetitive, even in its short 15 minutes. It also doesn't really have a message behind it, unlike Discover My Body, this one is just trying to be scary and vague, and nothing else. Still, I think both games are really interesting, I'd give this one a *7/10* (while Discover My Body gets a 910 from me, looking forward to its sequel!).
Discover Our Bodies - an upcoming sequel
There is only a Windows and macOS version, however the Windows version worked perfectly well on my Linux laptop with Wine. The game is nice, simple, and light on system resources.
https://sodaraptor.itch.io/hypnagogia
So, there was this event called the LSDJam.
The 22nd of October 1998 marked the release of LSD: Dream Emulator, the cult-classic PS1 game.
LSD is an exploration game where the player explores surreal dreamscapes without any objectives. The dreams in the game are based on a dream diary that was kept for ten years. Originally created by Japanese artist Osamu Sato, the game was intended to be unlike any other game available at the time.
In celebration of the original game's release, let's make some games in the same style to show our love for it!
And so, out of this game jam came Hypnagogia.
Hypnagogia is an exploration in themes involving deep dreams, liminal spaces, sleep paralysis demons, and much more.
Can you collect all 8 dream crystals and finally wake up?
It later got a full-fledged sequel titled *Hypnagogia: Boundless Dreams*, but for now I just wanted to play the free game jam version.
Yes, it was fun! Plenty of unique little worlds to explore, ranging from cute to nightmare-ish, with a very fun kind of surrealism. The game comes with a file called "dev_commentary.txt", which talks about inspirations behind each world. Apparently, every world was inspired by an actual dream that the developer had at some point.
My most recent experience was mostly the inspiration for the prison world. I vaguely remember having a dream about something pleasant, something involving hanging out with my friends in a park of some kind. For some reason the sky got really dark and my friends disappeared. I got a tingling sort of jolt that woke me up, but I couldn't move and it was still pitch-black in my room. I DISTINCTLY remember a very raspy, hoarse voice next to my bed giving out a long, exasperated groan (something like the girl from the ring). I immediately bolted my body upwards to get out of my paralysis and turned the light on, but nothing was there. I was covered in sweat and couldn't sleep for the rest of the night.
I've never had sleep paralysis, sounds like fun.
I also really like the low-poly PS1 look. The ogre looks so cute!
There are a few clunky platforming segments, and also the game annoyingly doesn't support saving and loading, so that lowers the score to another *7/10*. Need to check out the full Steam version at some point.
Again, no Linux version, but the Windows version runs fine under Linux. Sadly, this being a short game jam project, it does have a bug: for some reason the game sometimes launches in really high resolution (bigger than my laptop screen), which breaks the "4:3" aspect ratio as well as makes the game extremely laggy. I posted a solution in the comments on the itch.io page, but basically I had to run the game with command-line arguments:
hypnagogia.exe -screen-width 640 -screen-height 480
Other people reported the same issue, so I assume this is not a problem with Linux in particular.
-- gardenappl 2021-12-28
