SOFT MUTATIONS

HI RES HI BROW

A personal choice register of videogames that would probs appeal to a MFA graduate who'd likely attempt to save a 1st edition copy of Thomas Pynchons novel Against The Day in a housefire rather than their own asthma inhaler. It is spoiler free.

ZA/UM (2019)

Disco Elysium
The ubiquitous art game standard bearer, which may be less of a "game" and more of an interactive novel that proceeds through conversations and somewhat awkwardly designed 'dice rolls' for action/dialogue options. The fall from grace of developer ZA/UM post-release is well documented and not without a wry sense of eventuality when you figure ZA/UM was an art collective before it was a game developer. The game was available in February 2025 to download in its entirety on the internet achive, amusingly uploaded by the lead writer and designer Robert Kurvitz himself. As for the game itself, you play it like a classic point-and-click investigation game broadly in the mechanical arena of Monkey Island. The standout aspects of it are of course the haunting watercolour art style, the nihilistic writing and the detailed world-building. An
idiosyncratic mix of subject matter that brushes with alcoholism, personal redemption, trade union politics, cultural fascism and more on the fictional island of Revochol, a post-empire post-communist occupied territory of a global coalition of nations. You play as Harry, a police detective on a murder case who has gotten so blackout drunk that he's lost pretty much all his memories. The myriad of themes are interrogated by sardonic and self-aware dialogue from a wonderfully cranky rogues gallery of characters as you pick the case back up, including Harrys own compartmentalised psyche with its withering insights into your choices, motivations and past shame. As you progress, you can develop certain parts of your psyche to aid your investigative prowess and dialogue options, remoulding the character of Harry. The intellectual tone of Disco Elysium flirts so closely with toxic chemical spill level insufferable, but reins it in just enough to remain likeable - and deuteragonist Kim is a videogame character has iconic status.

Sorath (2022)

Hyper Demon
While this list primarily has the criteria of "videogame must have a distinctive visual language" and "videogame must have a good story delivered with ingenuity exclusive to an interactive medium" Hyper Demon has no narrative at all. Yet it is a great example of flow state, a sense of concentration and immersion in a videogame where you feel like you start to perform at a kind of optimised level of conciousness. This dorky nirvana is the key appeal to videogames that hitch their mechanics to twitch reactions and responsiveness to often overwhelming visual information, a hallmark of the 'bullet hell' genre. Imagine Space Invaders or Asteroids with a nauseating and impossible amount of instant-death giving adversaries. Where Hyper Demon particularly excels is in its futuristic eldritch aesthetics, 'demons' appearing as golden holographic skeletal entities that fill a void-like arena, whomst you vanquish with your single outstretched sigil-marked hand firing beams or daggers. Constant movement is non-negotiable, indiviudal tactics are needed to kill each particular type of demon as they spawn into the battleground. A single hit from a demon will end your 'run' but this
fragility is mitigated by a gameplay mechanic that morphs the speed/time of the game as well as your visual perspective, bowing out like a fisheye lens as you bounce off demons as the action intensifies. A clip of gameplay illustrates this better. If you get frisson when watching the psychedelic sequences from 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Lawnmover Man and the fast-cuts of gnostic symbology in the Neon Genesis Evangelion opening sequence, Hyper Demon is bound to touch that lizard brain ocular
pleasure centre.

Rose Engine (2022)

SIGNALIS
Sci-fi surival horror game with puzzle elements, an incredibly rote template even beyond videogames. But with this you've got a sapphic love story delivered in a Charlie Kaufman-esque fragmented narrative, rife with tragedy and despair. The initial setup of android stranded on a mysterious planet starts to unmoor itself and your explorations of this place and its environs are curiously peppered with literary references and bifurcations in reality that will invoke a reaction meme if you've
enjoyed True Detective (2014) and True Detective: Night Country (2024). Beyond the doomed romance plot there are ruminations on totalitarianism and the literal and not-so-literal nightmares it inflicts. A great credit to this narrative is how it handles mystery, you as the player are not given all the requistite pieces to cobble together a complete story but the 'holes' are intentional and in fact part of it. The classic example in my view of a good plothole is the 'space jockey' in Alien (1979), whose presence is never explained but forms part of this terrifying unknown - terrifying in part because it very likely is beyond human comprehension. SIGNALIS plays like a combination of the original Resident Evil and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, controlling your character from an isometric perspective as well as having inventories and information logs to manage. The game is rather unforgiving in its difficulty as well as the obliqueness of some of the puzzles you need to solve to progress, but that's a deliberate feature, a design throwback to an earlier era of videogames where in-game instructions and guiding assistance were (sometimes frustratingly) sparse and the de-mystifaction of the framework was part of the process of playing.

Geography of Robots (2022)

Norco
A magical realist point-and-click adventure game about a niche of American history that, unlike Kentucky Route Zero (2013), isn't a boring Plato's Cave with Lynchian wallpaper. Norco is set in a spectualtive future version of the real place (the CDP of Norco, Louisiana) where you take up the detatched mantle of Kay, returning to Norco after news of her mothers passing. Kays estranged mother was an academic with a fugitive robot and Kays brother is missing, thus begins your quest. Like genre bedfellow Disco Elysium, Norcos systems involve information gathering and decision making with player curiosity being the chief technique to progress. There are also
minigames that go beyond the pointing and the clicking, with their own simple mechanics. Chasing up leads and filling in the backstory leads to hints of a grander conspiracy, one suffused with technology and religion. Norco does make the amibitious choice of having a dystopian sci-fi story include magical realism/spiritual elements, all coated in Southern Gothic, but they manage to intersect with eachother well, not becoming an overstuffed pot of have-it-all maximalist rhetorical
devices. The writing is generally serious-coded and the tonal commitments can make the experience quite weighty, that can be at odds sometimes with the 'videogames should be fun!' mantra, but perseverance is rewarded. You're faced with the plight of the working class in a future where the environment has degraded, religion in a future where human(like) intelligence can be digitally emulated, people finding meaning in extreme belief structures and there is also an alien orb.

Frictional Games (2015)

SOMA
Swedish games developer Frictional probably gained most renown with the 2010 installment of their Amnesia series, The Dark Descent. The logic of most videogames of this ilk involves a player being able to attack/defend themselves from threats, you know, like in Doom (1993) you shoot the demons that want to chase you and murder you. Even in Alien: Isolation (2014) you eventually have access to rudimentary tools to defend yourself from your aggressor(s). However with the Amnesia series, you're
fully defenceless. All you can do when faced with a monster is run, hide and try to figure out a way to progreess futher by avoiding it. Even looking at the monsters causes your in-game character pain. SOMA takes this structure and wraps around it a multi-layered story that puruses multiple gambits of regret, perseverance, apocalyptic disaster and technological menace in a crumbling research station at the bottom of the ocean. You experience the story through the protagonist Simon, who wakes up in the aforementioned place with his last memory being a trip for a medical brain scan in non-futuristic Toronto, Canada after a car accident. That jarring shift is later explained with a sci-fi conceit that, without spoiling it, feels actually kind of plausible and leads to a few novel disources about the nature and authenticity/validity of conciousness of which your character of Simon acts as a sounding board. It also nails a classic brand of 'hard sci-fi' ending which is sweet seeming at first but perhaps actually a major bummer.

Obsidian Entertainment (2022)

Pentiment
Wow it's odd how so many of these were released in 2022. I wonder what could have been happening in the world in the years prior during these games development cycles. Hmm!Pentiment is a point-and-click adventure game where you start by inhabiting the role of a journeyman artist working on an illuminated manuscript in 16th century Bavaria. The obvious standout aspect of this game is its commitment to a bit of looking like those European medieval illustrations everyone loves. I mean who doesn't vibe with Der Naturen Bloeme or Aberdeen Bestiary with all the fucked up animals that were drawn by an artist who... definitelyknew what animals looked like. The game begins by gentle immersion into its time/place, rife with esoterica and historical drama that sits within the late middle ages. There is no way to fail at this game, the nuances of the story can alter on many decisions taken/not taken and dialogue choices of your character (like what is his opinion of the protestant reformation?). The ulimate outcome remains fixed but your actions can have impacts on the various characters you encounter. The story itself is an Umberto Eco-esque murder conspiracy that you are pulled into over three acts, involving the Catholic church and buried secrets in the fictional village of Tassing, which is given such decent lore you'd be tempted to believe it is/was a real place. Within the tale are many reflections on creative purpose and the power of art and who controls it, which resonates well beyond the 1500s.

Bloober Team (2017)

Observer
This one just about makes the cut because despite the aesthetic surfiet and lack of subtext, there is a certain quality when a piece of media, especially in a field as populous as cyberpunk, hits all the right notes. Like how the first 2 Dead Space games (and subsequent remaster of Dead Space 1) took the dumbass sounding premise of 'zombies in space' and just made a brutally competent horror. The world of Observer presents itself as a post-pandemic post-WW3 corporate controlled dystopia, standard, but as you explore the game world and piece together little slice-of-life insights of this fictional society the narrative material builds itself up to a buffet of despair - police state, lack of social contract, addiction, disease and fear are all exascerbated by technological advance. Nobody in the future is trying to make life
better for the working class, what a surprise. You are Daniel, a beleagured police detective and an Observer, which essentially means you have a cybernetic augmentation that allows you to hack into peoples brains, even those of corpses. The mind incursion sequences are sci-fi horror environments that you mostly walk through and 'enjoy' the fucked up scenery of. The remainder of the game is mostly wandering around scanning objects for clues and talking to people through their front door intercoms. It is perhaps not the most gratifying to 'play' but the collage of micro-narratives you glean from the apartment complex and the murder victims dying nightmares all piece together to make an impressivly bleak picture. The grander story takes the classic 'uploaded conciousness' angle but in a way that is much more grim than, say, fellow Polish game studio CD Projekt Reds Cyberpunk 2077. In Observer, the cyberpunk future of Krakow has basically no glimmers of hope, just the soporific glare of a holographic veill covering up the dead pigeons and the rotting cables.