Still reading his website, that "Off the Waffle" project sounds interesting
― Nhex, Sunday, 31 March 2013 00:15 (twelve years ago)
Spent a few hours tonight playing Cart Life. And I thought Actual Sunlight was depressing! The visuals and vibe are really cool - like you're stuck in a nightmarish Daft Punk video. The gameplay... well, it's hard to tell where it's supposed to be frustrating as a point and where it's just buggy - for example, is my character so tired that the cashier drawer won't open and he can't calculate change, or is that on purpose?
Yeah, I realize how ridiculous that sounds, but I wouldn't put it past this game. It's really interesting, but pretty draining to do everything, between exploring the city for the right stores for ingredients and food, typing tutor action to make coffee, figuring out where you're supposed to go and what to do - this lack of direction and time to do everything, I'm pretty sure is intentional. I'm really impressed by how much content there is in this game, between all the patrons and their stories, the shopkeepers, buildings, the sad walks home through Georgetown filled with 8-bit versions of wallpaper ads and dilapidated storefronts....
I played as a Russian immigrant whose cat is all he has left of his life, and he has surreal dreams about his dead wife and their unborn child. Yeah, it's that kind of game. Let me spare you the hours of monotony of playing this to tell you that when I couldn't make enough money to pay the rent at the end of the week, I felt really damn attached to that cat, and decided to stab the landlord. Then I killed myself. It's all pretty exhausting.
― Nhex, Sunday, 31 March 2013 06:19 (twelve years ago)
Blood of the Ortolan, if it flows in Cart Life's vein, will be about food only on the surface, while the true tale unfolds within the interpersonal relationships and emotional, introspective tensions of real life."Money is of concern to everyone, much more so than, say, ammunition or military fundamentals or the vocabulary of racing," Hofmeier said. "We all worry about money. Also we all have to eat and we all confront the neuroses of food. It's one of those things that mainly when we're alone we feel that we are especially perverse in our relationship to food and then we find, maybe through catharsis, through art, that other people have these experiences too and maybe we have more in common than we might have thought otherwise."
Don't expect Blood of the Ortolan to take it easy after Cart Life's positive public reception.
"If people put up with Cart Life, I feel like I've gotta try harder to upset them," Hofmeier said.
oh no
― Nhex, Wednesday, 3 April 2013 20:08 (twelve years ago)