Dust City [Kitty Horrorshow]

Dust City by Kitty Horrorshow is a pay what you want game for computers.

It's a strange mix of genres; the Quickstart Guide bundled with the download is a pleasant little infodump, while the opening landscape is very Lavastorm Mountains or certain parts of Neriak. It's low-poly millennial-turn dark fantasy with science fictional overtones, in other words.

The play is wandering through a series of abstracted spaces, (dis)connected by doors. The doors are, like King's The Drawing of the Three, communications through other than space. And, similarly, in each is a thing to be found, and saved, and taken out of its context.

In Dust City, this means exiting the game itself, and returning to those password protected files in the download folder. For each door completed, one subfolder can be unlocked; two have mp3s, one a twine game, and one some writings.

The twine game in particular is phenomenal, and really underscores how much Horrorshow is able to do with a conditional sense of space. The idea that things do things to things, and that things do things to a person's perception of things, seems to be a sort of necessary precondition, often erased, in videogames. Dust City is, among other things, a reminder.

[09/28/2014]