Mechanical minimalism is much more successful here than in other similar games. The point isn’t to make your game completely bare, but to populate it with pointless stuff. Truly leisurely empty “strolling” needs to have places to stop your trip, aimless landmarks. The feeling of a slow vastness needs to be evoked by the colourful emptiness reflected in elements, not in the absence of such objects. You evoke the soft candid drowsiness through the opaqueness of colourful materials. Animal Crossing, and, of course, studio Skip’s other works like Chibi-Robo and GIFTPIA excel at this (haven’t played the latter. A translation is completed but hacking needs to be done to make it a patch you can apply to ISOs).
A kind of sleepy pleasure, a game that kidnaps you into its rhythm. It’s hard to not become frustrated at its leisurely pace sometimes, but I wonder how much of that difficulty lies with how turbulent and lost most days spent in the digital non-places have become. Nowadays I often start a game to "get it off the checklist" (and sites like backloggd have gamified the exhaustion with which I play these days). A strategized plan made schedule, a ready-made bullet point formatter for what gaming should be. I check how long it takes before starting, I multitask and listen to podcasts while playing. All of this has made me increasingly impatient, and harder to curate a more intentional experience where I just sit down with a game for a couple of hours. It was seemingly impossible to not have every game be a haze of multimedia engagement, with different things going on in the background and at the ready, the procedural downloads of things outside the experience. Not that any experience is pure, but that it should be curated, intentionally embarked on, instead of a hallucinatory daze of "getting it over with". I haven't played a game normally in a while now, not like I used to anyways. Media consumption overdrive: tab out, check your phone, start a download, open up a stream - the game muddled irreparably on ghost copy presences, wireless gunk installs and mounts greyness. Lost in digital deep time. Suffocating electric mist is the norm, buzzing foam of static – sleepy vague executions of tired eyes, causing the game to bleed steadfast into a thousand simultaneous "goings-on".
Of course, games today encourage this fluidity, this "muddling". It’s worse to have a game that truly ends, instead of seamlessly merging in the grey gunk of the digital. A game gains much more in becoming a passive element than a contained experience. It's better to have people starting up the game to do their dailies, get their log-in bonuses, and finish the battle pass than having a more consistent but shorter game. Ultimately it gains in becoming a grey part of your life (even if this is particularly the case for multiplayer competitive games, and the features I listed are pretty much restricted to those, singleplayer games have also succumbed to the pressure of maximizing interconnectivity. Constantly platforms logging in your achievements, little quests for completing tutorials, etc etc. The game doesn’t trust you to go 5 seconds without a fresh notification going off. And some of these “connectivity features” while harmless and fun, like seeing that your friends are online, seeing the percentage of players that have completed a certain task, sharing screenshots and art or something; I nonetheless feel like it becomes harder for a game to sit by itself, to just be, for a second).
Captain Rainbow makes you slow down. A comfy boredom that manually reset my media consumption habits. The development of the game’s pace is clearly intentional: there is no way to run (you have a charge button but it makes your character trip and fall), you routinely stop to eat, and at some point you get a car but the only thing you can do is push it, which is just as slow (the developers are personally reprimanding the player for wanting the game to go faster, so they give you a van you can push, but not ride). Characters are also on a day and night cycle making you take your time. All this culminates in a gaming experience that is extremely effective at making its slowness enjoyable. Washed-up classic characters from Nintendo’s past provide a relaxing and familiar (although purposefully uncanny, like the cursing Birdo and Fat Little Mac) landscape. Also, you fish and catch bugs. Maybe bug catching is the aesthetic figure that represents a perfect middle ground between minimalism and action. Bug catching as rhythmic concept, as genre, with or without bugs.
If it seems like this review spent more time talking about other games it’s because I felt the negative work of the game, of “taking out the mental trash”, was one of its greatest strengths. It’s also a game that is not interesting to describe. Described clearly the game is boring and empty. And yet it’s none of those things. I can’t bring myself to write about how wacky the characters are and how funny the dialogue is or whatever because, honestly, it’s a mediocre game and the characters are hit or miss. But it successfully achieves a slow pace that is hard to execute, and for trying that, I’m thankful to it.
While other game might cultivate a certain emptiness to give rise to uneasy feelings (walking simulators like Firewatch, Everybody’s Gone to The Rapture, The Stanley Parable), I don’t think there are many like Captain Rainbow. There’s plenty of “cosy chill games”, but most of them are crafting games with pleasant art styles, none of them are truly about mostly aimless interaction.
A kind of sleepy pleasure, a game that kidnaps you into its rhythm. It’s hard to not become frustrated at its leisurely pace sometimes, but I wonder how much of that difficulty lies with how turbulent and lost most days spent in the digital non-places have become. Nowadays I often start a game to "get it off the checklist" (and sites like backloggd have gamified the exhaustion with which I play these days). A strategized plan made schedule, a ready-made bullet point formatter for what gaming should be. I check how long it takes before starting, I multitask and listen to podcasts while playing. All of this has made me increasingly impatient, and harder to curate a more intentional experience where I just sit down with a game for a couple of hours. It was seemingly impossible to not have every game be a haze of multimedia engagement, with different things going on in the background and at the ready, the procedural downloads of things outside the experience. Not that any experience is pure, but that it should be curated, intentionally embarked on, instead of a hallucinatory daze of "getting it over with". I haven't played a game normally in a while now, not like I used to anyways. Media consumption overdrive: tab out, check your phone, start a download, open up a stream - the game muddled irreparably on ghost copy presences, wireless gunk installs and mounts greyness. Lost in digital deep time. Suffocating electric mist is the norm, buzzing foam of static – sleepy vague executions of tired eyes, causing the game to bleed steadfast into a thousand simultaneous "goings-on".
Of course, games today encourage this fluidity, this "muddling". It’s worse to have a game that truly ends, instead of seamlessly merging in the grey gunk of the digital. A game gains much more in becoming a passive element than a contained experience. It's better to have people starting up the game to do their dailies, get their log-in bonuses, and finish the battle pass than having a more consistent but shorter game. Ultimately it gains in becoming a grey part of your life (even if this is particularly the case for multiplayer competitive games, and the features I listed are pretty much restricted to those, singleplayer games have also succumbed to the pressure of maximizing interconnectivity. Constantly platforms logging in your achievements, little quests for completing tutorials, etc etc. The game doesn’t trust you to go 5 seconds without a fresh notification going off. And some of these “connectivity features” while harmless and fun, like seeing that your friends are online, seeing the percentage of players that have completed a certain task, sharing screenshots and art or something; I nonetheless feel like it becomes harder for a game to sit by itself, to just be, for a second).
Captain Rainbow makes you slow down. A comfy boredom that manually reset my media consumption habits. The development of the game’s pace is clearly intentional: there is no way to run (you have a charge button but it makes your character trip and fall), you routinely stop to eat, and at some point you get a car but the only thing you can do is push it, which is just as slow (the developers are personally reprimanding the player for wanting the game to go faster, so they give you a van you can push, but not ride). Characters are also on a day and night cycle making you take your time. All this culminates in a gaming experience that is extremely effective at making its slowness enjoyable. Washed-up classic characters from Nintendo’s past provide a relaxing and familiar (although purposefully uncanny, like the cursing Birdo and Fat Little Mac) landscape. Also, you fish and catch bugs. Maybe bug catching is the aesthetic figure that represents a perfect middle ground between minimalism and action. Bug catching as rhythmic concept, as genre, with or without bugs.
If it seems like this review spent more time talking about other games it’s because I felt the negative work of the game, of “taking out the mental trash”, was one of its greatest strengths. It’s also a game that is not interesting to describe. Described clearly the game is boring and empty. And yet it’s none of those things. I can’t bring myself to write about how wacky the characters are and how funny the dialogue is or whatever because, honestly, it’s a mediocre game and the characters are hit or miss. But it successfully achieves a slow pace that is hard to execute, and for trying that, I’m thankful to it.
While other game might cultivate a certain emptiness to give rise to uneasy feelings (walking simulators like Firewatch, Everybody’s Gone to The Rapture, The Stanley Parable), I don’t think there are many like Captain Rainbow. There’s plenty of “cosy chill games”, but most of them are crafting games with pleasant art styles, none of them are truly about mostly aimless interaction.