It doesn’t take long in a conversation with the people behind LCB Game Studio for them to start recommending books. The two-person team is based in Argentina where they make the Pixel Pulp games, ingenious and quietly literary visual novels with that splinter of shock and spooky sensationalism that would have made Walter Gibson very happy. Writer and game designer Nico Saraintaris tells me he is proud of Argentina’s literary heritage. So, have I read Mariana Enriquez? I haven’t! Are the translations good? Where should I start? In return, I recommend Maria Gainza, another Argentinian writer, whose Optic Nerve is a dazzling book about memory and art and life in Buenos Aires. I’ve read it once and I’m already itching to read it again. Pretty soon we’re busy writing down recommendations while the Zoom call transmits nothing but images of heads bowed over notepads and the brisk scratch of pens and paper. It feels, I have to admit, exactly as I had imagined this conversation going.
I’ve wanted to talk to Saraintaris and his colleague Fernando Martinez Ruppel (Instagram bio: “Illustration, pixel art, music and paranormal activity.” Perfection.) after being completely beguiled by their game, Mothmen 1966. Pixel Pulp to its core, Mothmen isn’t just a videogame about the best of all cryptids. It’s a piece of interactive fiction that presents itself as part otherworld mystery novel and part long-lost CGA adventure game, right down to the gloriously lurid four-colour art and the text-selection interface with its chunky throwback fonts. It’s a game to go into knowing as little as possible. Wait until night. Make some really, really bad instant coffee, preferably burning it in the process, dim the lights until the room is lit only by the Pentium monitor and the sickly sodium glow of streetlamps and lose yourself in this weird and brilliant thing.
Oh, and I wanted to apologise, too, because while I knew I liked Mothmen when I wrote about it last year, I did not yet realise how much I truly loved it. I did not know how much, over the months to come, it would return to me at the strangest moments and nudge all other games aside in my imagination. The harmony of it! It’s a game about a haunting, and it’s haunted me. It’s a game about living with old soft-edged paperbacks, and it lived with me. It’s heartfelt and so clever, so carefully made. It feels like a game – this is the only way I can put this – that breathes out into our world. It’s like going to bed on a still night with incense burning and having all manner of intriguing, troubling dreams.
Source – eurogamer.net
All content and images belong to their respected owners. This article is aggregated for informational purposes only with full credit to the source.
