It's dangerous in the river, but you cover a lot of territory if you can learn to read and then exploit the bucking of the waves beneath you. Flotsam, eh? Water has all the best words. Then you can punt down river a spell, fighting the sudden rapids and dodging anything from tree limbs to chewed-up cars. What takes it from a nice example of something I've played before and into the realms of the pleasantly disorienting, though, is that you have a raft, and that you can opt to leave whichever miserable spar of land you're currently exploring once you have drunk all the rainwater and pillaged all the shacks. So far, there's more than enough to orient you, and it's helped along by wonderfully evocative art, all rusting golden-browns and rotting blues and greens, and by the judicious use of procedural elements. There's crafting and there's metre-management, as you're always just itching to drop dead from hunger, from thirst, from the damp, from an encounter with the local wildlife. You play as a young girl - and her dog, which is always money in the bank - who's picking a path through a backwoods, post-collapse wasteland of some kind, pillaging from old refrigerators, drinking from water barrels and collecting herbs wherever they grow. In this case, and based on a very limited playtime, it's the survival genre and - to a certain extent - the endless runner. Whatever: the Hinglish element comes from the approach taken to genre, of a spiky and sprightly portmanteau emerging from the unlikely welding of two existing things. I think I see something of Hinglish at work here, too, although that glorious title gives the whole thing the peculiar sodden austerity of a lost Faulkner novel, and although the most obvious touchstone is The Road, or perhaps more accurately Huckleberry Finn. Oh, and Halo, Guitar Hero and Rock Band veterans. This is the kind of Americana you rarely get to see in games, bucolic, sad and untamed.Īt the same time as I've been thinking about all this, I've also been playing very early code for The Flame in the Flood, a recent Kickstarter success from - stop me if you've heard this one - BioShock veterans. Yes, they must be useful, but they must also be fun to say. What's brilliant about Hinglish is that you sense its words must pass two hurdles rather than one. Every year or so a newspaper does a piece on the latest neologisms to enter the OED, and they're generally so wretched. "What do you do for timepass?" You are unambiguously better off with these words in your life. Air-dash, right? Verb: to travel by air at short notice. On and off, I've been reading Baljinder Mahal's brilliant book The Queen's Hinglish, which is all about the wonderfully evocative things that happen when South Asia starts to riff on the English language. ![]() This happened to me this week, through the inevitable happy accident. Equally, every now and then it will occur to you that, whoa, there is another thing that games are a bit like. A 6 year old will suddenly, and very briefly, look like a long-dead relative, when eating a sandwich perhaps, or getting annoyed about Frozen. They trail off, and can burst back to life at strange moments. Its destiny is to be irreplaceable.Įven so, these conversations never entirely go away. Its fate is to be unique, as the great Oliver Sacks has written. ![]() Eventually - hopefully relatively quickly, in fact (and no pun intended) - you set the family tree to one side. It feels a bit like the process new parents often go through in the early months of getting to know their baby: there's a bit of your dad in the way he chews, say, or she gets that temper from her uncle. It's worth having had this discussion, I suspect, just to arrive at that notion: that games are their own thing. How could they be? Games are like games, and the thrill of them is that no other category captures the same strange richness and blend of ideas. Games are like poetry, games are like architecture - all of these connections are interesting and shed a certain light on a specific aspect of what games can be, but they aren't the whole story. I'm as bored as everyone else is when it comes to the old games are like x debate.
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