EUREKA!
It is of astonishing import that Sluggish Morss refuses to satisfy its audience with any form of linearity. Even as the player finds their barely tangible entity passing through corridors towards what is an assumed form of progression, time remains delicate, as promised. Puzzles solve themselves for you, robotic voices dissipate any minute essence of humanity, Beyonce is given a mechanical tribute -- in the game’s most brazenly comical moment, no doubt.
Yet through it all, Jack King-Spooner’s remarkable release steps beyond the boundaries of what constitutes a traditional “game.” Is it even a game? The title more serves as an examination of human control, or rather its lack of definition. Whereas Playdead’s INSIDE forces players down a strict path, poetically contradicting its three-dimensional design, Sluggish Morss paints a wrecked, immaterial canvas of vibrant polygons and distorted images.
The future is now is the past is forever; time is ripping apart at the seams; delicate, indeed. A galaxy’s history itself is vividly assembled into wicked collages, prompting many questions from its numerous, nameless individuals who ethereally wander the halls of this cavernous ship (a visually stunning evocation of ‘ghosts in the machine’). But one remains steadfast in its earnest unattainability: Where do we go from here?
In a cyclical sort of irony, the id has raced backwards into the future to contaminate and dissolve centuries of progress; it has all been written in the numbers. A mathematical philosophy governs the game’s prime scenario, in which everything boils down to a predictable science. Emotion is erased, of course, without room for moral inquiry, as in the case of NieR: Automata.
And perhaps this is what makes Sluggish Morss the most provocative philosophical release of the 2010s. It is the very lack of a determined philosophy which prompts such a fascinating and haunting portrayal of human development. The game illustrates a damned future for mankind through the notion that we are gradually erasing the very fabrics of our being one century at a time, and the end lies in an eternity which looks like data exploding off a screen.
It is of astonishing import that Sluggish Morss refuses to satisfy its audience with any form of linearity. Even as the player finds their barely tangible entity passing through corridors towards what is an assumed form of progression, time remains delicate, as promised. Puzzles solve themselves for you, robotic voices dissipate any minute essence of humanity, Beyonce is given a mechanical tribute -- in the game’s most brazenly comical moment, no doubt.
Yet through it all, Jack King-Spooner’s remarkable release steps beyond the boundaries of what constitutes a traditional “game.” Is it even a game? The title more serves as an examination of human control, or rather its lack of definition. Whereas Playdead’s INSIDE forces players down a strict path, poetically contradicting its three-dimensional design, Sluggish Morss paints a wrecked, immaterial canvas of vibrant polygons and distorted images.
The future is now is the past is forever; time is ripping apart at the seams; delicate, indeed. A galaxy’s history itself is vividly assembled into wicked collages, prompting many questions from its numerous, nameless individuals who ethereally wander the halls of this cavernous ship (a visually stunning evocation of ‘ghosts in the machine’). But one remains steadfast in its earnest unattainability: Where do we go from here?
In a cyclical sort of irony, the id has raced backwards into the future to contaminate and dissolve centuries of progress; it has all been written in the numbers. A mathematical philosophy governs the game’s prime scenario, in which everything boils down to a predictable science. Emotion is erased, of course, without room for moral inquiry, as in the case of NieR: Automata.
And perhaps this is what makes Sluggish Morss the most provocative philosophical release of the 2010s. It is the very lack of a determined philosophy which prompts such a fascinating and haunting portrayal of human development. The game illustrates a damned future for mankind through the notion that we are gradually erasing the very fabrics of our being one century at a time, and the end lies in an eternity which looks like data exploding off a screen.