CHENNAI: An experience that ceaselessly surprises me every time I try it, is when I go discount hunting on itch.io — the website for independent game developers. This time, a game called ‘Oikospiel’ caught my eye when I noticed an announcement that the game was on sale for FREE till April 1. I should have been suspicious then, and dismissed it by believing it to be a sort of April Fools joke.
The beginning of Oikospiel was... confusing to say the least. I thought I might have unknowingly ingested some hallucinogens earlier in the day because my computer mouse seemed to be distorting the parts of the screen it moved across. If the beginning was confusing, then the subsequent Act 1 of the game was perhaps the most bizarre visual journeys I had ever experienced. I remembered a very unique Amar Chitra Katha story which I had read as a child, of a saint shifting his consciousness through the bodies of different creatures in a jungle. A very surreal version of this children’s story seemed to have been manifested into this game. I start as a chicken in a coop, getting eaten by a fox, becoming the fox who turns into snakes, which suddenly turns into a spider, who gets shot at and suddenly becomes a rabbit with wings. Did you not follow that? I didn’t either. Comprehension of this game clearly, looks like it needs more superbrain characteristics than required for reading Amar Chitra Katha.
Into Act 2 of the game, and I was still waiting for the portion where the game’s background music would transition from a broken, heavily distorted Celine Dion song to an actual dog opera. The game is called ‘Oikospiel, the dog opera’! Where are the promised dog songs, developers? It was about this time is when I started suspecting that the game may not be as good as it was advertised to the outside world, and understood why it was in fact, free. Oikospiel falls into the ‘surreal’ genre and is supposed to mimic the likes of Proteus, another ambient exploration game. The biggest learning of this experience was that I should’ve rather written about Apple’s ‘Arcade’, for which I have more questions to ask than of Google’s Stadia.
Anusha Ganapathi
Twitter: @quaffle_waffle
(This economics graduate spends her leisure time preparing for the zombie apocalypse)