Rituals [oleomingus]

Rituals is a first person adventure game by oleomingus.

It's promise is that it is a standalone build of a larger, forthcoming game, in which the player will wander through environments set in colonial India, searching for the city of Kayamgadh. That there will be a unique stealth mechanic that allows the player to possess other non-player characters, in order to alter the interactions; and that there will be mechanics for walking into paintings or drawings, which is one way to take advantage of the representation of space that manages to both adhere to best practices regarding communication and leverage the reality of the spacelessness of videogames.

What Rituals itself is, of course, is hardly any of this. Mostly, it's a short walk through a series of dialogues, set in a modest Magritte. That's hardly a knock, of course, and it isn't even necessarily obvious that that's a direct influence; Carroll's Alice is obviously more immediately present. Though there is something of a sanitized L'Age d'or, with an inventive colorist, to its look as well.

All that is to say that there is a certain amount of weight (or, we'll hedge our bets, a peculiar kind of weightlessness) that is well reflected in the playfulness of the proportions of the objects. Because even if loading it up and interacting with it is playing with the absence of a game, that particular absence is one of object relations, and better those be playful than the alternatives.

[10/17/2014]