“Inexplicably soothing”
A review I would ordinarily page right past because I just don’t play computer games. In fact, I hate them. In that way you hate things without bothering to learn anything about them. But “inexplicably soothing” is what the review said, and I was in great need of inexplicable soothing, and it was free, and the URL was right there, so why not give it a shot?
If you want to take that sledgehammer from the snail to use to wake up the gate-keeping robot, consider
brewing up some opium-tea from those poppies…
This is how I came to spend a lot more of one of my May Day holidays than I would have thought possible playing Samorost, a Czech computer game that is eerily adorable. The little galaxy you enter feels like a fusion of Hieronymus Bosch, Terry Gilliam’s collage-animation, and a Sigur Ros album (the soundtrack of the game has a lot to do with explicating that soothingness, it turns out). Your mission is to recover your dog, kidnapped from your grassy front yard by aliens who need his slave labor to run a treadmill-powered fan to keep their leader cool as he watches the game on a gourd-shaped TV deep in the bowels of his trippy planet. In order to do this you need to negotiate your way through various problem-solving exercises that are part Alice in Wonderland, part Rube Goldberg. The game’s genius is that while it is utterly simple to play, the world in which it’s set is so consistently imagined that after a while there is nothing unusual in your wife sitting next to you saying things like, “You wasted that entire bag of farts? Now we’ll need to go back and harvest more farts!” In Samorost’s universe, watching Magda’s preternatural skill at painstakingly gathering space-manatee farts to power a moss-covered taxi seems perfectly normal.
As a non-computer-game-playing person, I can highly recommend wasting a little time exploring this particular computer game. What with the farts and all.
Hm, I’ll have to try this one…
Comment by Loxias — Friday 5 May 06 @ 09.24 MDT+2.00
Something about the juxtaposition of “soothing” and “farts” compels me to try this game.
Comment by Jagosaurus — Friday 5 May 06 @ 16.10 MDT+2.00
I cannot properly synchronize the whole tea brewing thing, which has effectively erased the heretofore accurately advertised soothing properties of this game. Curses!
Comment by Jane — Saturday 6 May 06 @ 23.20 MDT+2.00