Art games! :C

“Art games.” The very name makes me break out into an angry sweat! For some reason calling it art means a person is allowed to put less effort into making a game fun. “Oh, it’s frustrating on purpose! It’s a comment on the futility of existence!” Well great, then I’ll leave you a zero as a comment on the futility of your design efforts.

What brought on this tirade? PixEvo. It’s a game that, seemingly, was designed to be as horrible as possible. The game is full of mandatory collectibles, most of which you can only reach with pixel perfect jumps. Top that off with eye-grinding visuals and ear-puncturing music and you’ve got the worst game you could possibly make.

Here’s another example: Covetous. This one is even more pointless, and you can hardly call it a game. You collect dots (this seems to be an art game theme) and after a few “levels” the game ends. Is it supposed to be a game about diseases? Alien infestation? Do I even care? No, not really. I’m just left with a vague sense of having wasted my time.

Of course, this isn’t a new thing. Art games have been around since 8-bit was outdated. It’s like modernist painting, “I paint like a child so I can better express inner feeling.” What inner feeling is that, your immaturity?

Now, don’t get me wrong, experimentation is good, and I can understand not spending a great deal of time on a new idea in case it’s a bad one. However, most of these so called art games are carbon copies of each other, or stripped down versions of proven genres, like the aforementioned platformer from hell. There’s no creativity involved.

Then there’s Gregory Weir. His game Looming threw me for a loop. It’s just as ugly a PixEvo (perhaps more so because the “graphics” flash at you causing mild seizures) and just as pointless (you go around collecting dots; like I said, it’s a theme) but the somewhat poetic nature of the storyline brought me somewhere, so I can’t abuse it completely. It isn’t fun by any distorted meaning of the word so I don’t think I can say it’s worth playing, but at least he has the right idea.

I’ll end with an example of my typical art game review.