Iketsuki

released on Nov 01, 2019

An atmospheric platformer set in a dying world.


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This left such a lasting impression on me the first time I played it.

The quiet comfort and faint familiar warmth of endless oblivion. A game about a long dead almost entirely empty world dragging on long past it's own time. There are only 2 inhabitants of this world who aren't the player character, they both have problems you need to solve, one of them seems kinda impossible and the other wants some special colored fish. You start helping one assuming it will eventually lead to you being able to help the other.

A game of half formed systems and places that creates a simultaneous sense of unknowable dread and a hazy yet familiar feeling of comfort. Like half-remembering a strange uneasy dream you had as an extremely young child. Probably a little odd as a comparison, but I'm reminded of the original Quake in it's atmosphere. A world of abandoned concepts, none of which are fully formed enough to feel like a dominantly voiced aesthetic, and instead form together to create a uniquely moody and muted sense of gloom and emptiness I don't think is achievable otherwise.

Also like the original Quake, this games strongest asset in that aesthetic is it's sound. The sound design in this game absolutely wrecks me, it ties together the whole of this world as something that once brimmed with life, as something worth holding dear, that was left lifeless and barren long long ago. It's the sound of a million save files for a dozens dozen 90s adventure and RPG games, all left untouched for years to come. Worlds left static and dead. You do platforming and collecting, but it feels like empty husks of worlds designed for these systems that no longer serve their intended purpose. You can fall off, but cannot die, you simply reappear where you started. The few systems at play here are so slow and archaic they don't really allow for their seemingly intended gamification of the world to ever amount to anything other than a hushed suggestion of a game that used to be, but no longer is.

As the game goes on you come to realize the only two inhabitants of this world represent equally opposing and incompatible perspectives on it's own existence. It came off to be a game about two different conceptualizations of hopelessness. One voices a want to find beauty, comfort, and familiar joys in a world long devoid of any such things. Content to float out into infinity as an empty husk so long as there are things to remind you of the way things once were, and taking solace that the world itself, despite being an empty facsimile of what it used to be, will always be familiar enough to be beautiful in it's own way. The other voices a more direct want, to cut hopelessness at the source, even if it costs everything. If there is nothing left for this world, letting it drift on sparsely alive for an eternity is a far crueler existence than letting it die with finality.

Despite being a game of emptiness, of half formed systems, a game of quiet dread, I grew a strange fondness and comfort existing in it. It convinces you this really was a world of beauty and meaning a long long time ago. But all that's left of it is a shell. Quietly drifting off into oblivion.

fantastic sound design in a game oozing with atmosphere. simple platformer set in a decaying world, one of the best short games i've played so far.