| COSMIC MAHER | Maher Sagrillo’s game art and analysis. |
I think I digested the game a bit more. I like the fatalism* shown, gathering all these things, accomplishments, only to cease to exist at the minute something else is born. Interesting ideas as I said, but it remains poorly delivered in my eyes. It’s weird to see so many people rating it very highly on flash game websites. Perhaps it is just the kind of game where it either touches you or does not.
*Perhaps existentialism.
It is no mystery to myself or immediate friends that I am a fan of Gregory Weir’s works. He’s a nice guy, his art is great, he has cool ideas for games and game design. Babies Dream of Dead Worlds is his latest, and the idea is very interesting: If babies have no perception of reality before being born, what do they dream about? It’s an interesting question, and equally interesting that he chose to make a game out of a question like that. However, I didn’t think this game was very well made. It has some really interesting stuff in it, but I didn’t find the bulk of the game interesting or engaging.
The game revolves around some…creatures? Aliens I will assume, with wings, that exist in a strange reality where logic and physics can turn on its head . For example, the player can swing up and down as gravity reverses, making for a very unique style of platforming that made me think in different ways about how to spatially maneuver myself. It’s a platformer, a racing game, and a collection game. The player starts in one baby and moves to other babies as he progresses the individual alien storylines.
Babies Dream of Dead Worlds is a game I found very frustrating to play for a number of reasons. The collecting is very obnoxious, and doesn’t really flow at all with the rest of the game. The game makes a point of explaining that the journey is more or less what counts, but I found this heavy-handed. Wouldn’t it perhaps be better to make me feel and think that naturally then just telling me that collecting is symbolic for a journey? The collecting itself is tedious because there are a whole lot of coins, though this is not a huge issue since the player does not need to collect a specific amount (that I noticed) to progress. I think the main issue is that the game is trying to use coins as a symbol for the purpose of making a journey, but provides nothing on that journey. The areas are very dull, full of pretty lifeless colors, and there is very little reason to want to explore any area. The actual platforming was sometimes enjoyable and sometimes very annoying, due mainly to very poor collision on the edges of the tiles. I would get easily stopped by the tiniest little corner of a tile, which is all kinds of obnoxious, having rounded tiles might have been a better idea for a game where the player is sling-shotting around.
I really do not feel like I got enough into the game to understand most of the artistic subtext. It’s clearly a game about family and journeys and so on, but what else? It was hard to discern, my attention was being split by what exactly I was being led to understand. The game was not pushing me anywhere interesting to go, and thus forming a message, but allowing me to have a space to explore. The problem as I said is that the space is not interesting, there’s little there for the player to bask in or explore in a meaningful manner.
The music is really atonal, and instead of being tracks (from what I noticed), it is just snippets of music that fade in and out*. Interesting in a way, but grinding on the ears, and as a guy who listens to Sunn O))) on a regular basis, there’s a way to do atonal without it being a bad thing. But perhaps to others it sounded good, I dunno, there’s no specific reason it sounds bad to me, but it does. The visuals are also not very good. It’s not really a matter of being advanced for visuals to be good, they should be fitting and aesthetically pleasing typically, but the colors here are not. Lots of very dull earthy colors in places that don’t really seem to have any purpose in making any sort of composition. Is this to show how odd and chaotic a place like this would be? Maybe, but it sure looks yucky. Animation is not very smooth, and the centerpiece of the game’s visuals, the player, is not very interesting to look at. I was unaware it even had wing and not just red spaghetti for a bit until the game told me.
My last complaint is the title. It’s such a badass and interesting idea, but this game seems to have no relation. Sure this is an unconventional world, but these aliens talk and act mostly like humans, they have faces, they are representing human things. That’s all fine but it seems like there should be some sort of divide. Majesty of Colors had an alien doing a very human thing, but it still felt somewhat alien, it alienated humanity to your agency, and vice versa. This game not so much, I felt pretty much just like a human being who could use gravity differently. The title is also just confusing in relation to the game. How is this what babies dream of? How is this really what evokes a “dead world”? It would have been much more engaging if the setting and characters were a bit more alien. Not so alien we cannot relate of course, but more than this would perhaps be nice. A bit of a Sorites’ Paradox, but whatever, so is everything to some level.
I’m hesistant to call this a bad game, it’s not, but either I am at a great misunderstanding as to its nature and function by my own analysis, or it is not up to par with Mr. Weir’s previous artistic works. It’s just very strange to even review. Why are the graphics such low quality and such dull colors? Is it a metaphor to a child’s lack of understanding of what a color is while in the womb? Why the snippets of music instead of a track*? Why a racing game? Why coin collecting if the thing that it is typically used for, provoking the player to explore the game, is not very interesting to explore? I’m not sure.
*EDIT: I was a bit hasty on the audio, there are some full tracks, atonal as they are, they are not too shabby. I didn’t notice them my first time fully completing the game.
