In its struggle to understand and make sense of life, art has a way of remaining relevant even when, in chaotic times as ours, it might feel more useful to march in the streets than plug into a video game’s digital distractions. Yet these worlds do contain value. Each of these games bears a specificity that draws from contexts both present and past, showing us novel ways of looking at both.
Artis Impact
The beautifully rendered pixel art world was made, along with every other part of this role-playing game, by a single Malaysian developer. It follows the abbreviated journey of a magical girl hero and her sardonic robot sidekick through a dystopian landscape wrecked by a war between humans and bestial “AI” who roar in distorted static before they are struck down by balletic sword strikes. She also cooks herbal soup, takes naps and sweeps the floors of her neighbourhood corner store.
A brash, sketchy approach, using comic book cells and snappy animation for more dialogue-heavy moments, allows Artis Impact to be bold in its storytelling. It can evoke grand ideas like alienation and despair for the future, and in the next beat fire off joke-a-minute dialogue poking fun at itself and the role-playing genres it is riffing on.
Platform: PC
Baby Steps
This is about the absurdity of video games. Most make it feel sublimely easy to run a little character around a three-dimensional world. Baby Steps forces players to stop and question this basic assumption. Every step you take is painful and deliberate, as you control each leg separately and must manoeuvre them in such a way that your character doesn’t trip or stumble.
No matter how carefully you play, your avatar will fall countless times, in comically painful-looking ways. The others you meet along the way — sneering would-be guides, alpha-male donkey men with giant dangling members — paint a world of distorted, vicious masculinity that pokes fun at the classic video game power fantasy.
Platform: PC, PlayStation 5
Consume Me
Though it’s ostensibly a game about dieting, Consume Me quickly reveals itself to be a touching autobiographical exploration of the anxieties of teenage girlhood. Using an inventive roster of interactions like mealtime Tetris, folding laundry and stretching a gangly figure into various positions as “exercise”, the game shows the character progressing through the final years of high school and into college, struggling all the while to balance the pressures placed on her by parents, school, crushes and, most powerfully of all, herself.
Consume Me tells a compelling tale of belief systems, of finding and losing and finding again some container for all those messy feelings that bubble up from within.
Platform: PC
Despelote
Another autobiographical story, Despelote focuses on the years surrounding Ecuador’s unlikely entry into the 2002 World Cup and is presented through the first-person perspective of a young boy obsessed, like everyone else in his city, with soccer. Its dithered halftone art style casts everything in a dreamlike haze, perfectly fitting the game’s narrative framing: a half-remembered dream of a childhood that may or may not have happened.
Within this dream, your character fights with his sister over TV time, plays soccer in the streets with friends and gets dressed down by his aggrieved mother. It’s a beautiful meditation on how we tend to remember growing up and the pleasures of childhood, encroached upon always by the values and pressures of the adult world.
Platform: PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox
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Keep Driving
This is a nostalgia-fuelled-road-trip simulator, a staring-at-the-clouds simulator and a scarfing-up-the-last-bite-of-pizza simulator, all at once.
Keep Driving’s charm is in its systematisation of vibes. Power-ups come in the form of freecycled CDs, air fresheners and car decals. Instead of enemies, you’re squared off against potholes and drowsiness. Set in an impossibly vibrant millennial fantasy, Keep Driving isn’t just a love letter to the car as a mode of transportation, but to the youthful, unconstrained freedom it represents.
Platform: PC
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