Oops! All Minute Mysteries (Steam Next Fest Edition)

The most recent Steam Next Fest took place at the end of last month. This is the first time I sunk more than an hour or two into the titles that piqued my curiosity. I played around with most titles that seemed to have a Weird Mystery Afoot. Maybe it was just taking more time this spring that settled me into a mosaic theme of dreams, memory consumption/manipulation, and reconnecting people across fractured reality. These aren’t uncommon themes for experimental games, but it’s the interpersonal emphasis in many of these games, I think, that explores our ongoing reckoning with contemporary fragmented sociality.

Last month I wrote a little about the mostly enjoyable difficulties of finding a cosmic mystery. The truth is, games are the easiest medium for finding cosmic mysteries in right now. The mystery genre has always been one of the more ‘interactive’ genres for fiction, and the gulf between player and game is always fertile ground for exploring possibility and impossibility. But games just aren’t as accessible as other media. I’m not even speaking of the ambient skill level required that I personally take for granted. Without getting into the current worker- and audience-unfriendly state of the industry, games are a complicated, vulnerable medium with a high level of equipment buy-in compared to other visual-heavy media. 

(It’s fine to be a writer with a MacBook, but my laptop just doesn’t run many of the stranger games I want to play. The goal is to upgrade to a gaming PC, but with AI killing that option from all angles, for now I have to be content with getting some of my first looks secondhand.)

Since these are demos, I don’t know where these games are going. But of the games I played, these were the ones that had me asking the same questions I ask of cosmic mysteries.

Burden Street Station sends a homunculus celestial librarian into the terrestrial world to investigate the mystery of a missing god. Here the emotionally-charged moments of an individual’s life are compiled by such librarians for the gods’ entertainment. A reflection on what parts of stories get told, but also a remark on the ways our knowledge of other people is affected by consumption-style social media. The game looks like this—

—which I can foresee being a barrier to some. But I think the digital collage concept works so well with what this game is trying to explore, and the melancholic, understated soundtrack kept this occasionally maximalist aesthetic grounded. Judging from the demo, Burden Street Station seems to mostly be about exploring surreal spaces and conversing with their inhabitants. The demo is focused on familiarizing the player with the game’s core mechanic—shapeshifting— while interacting with two characters whose lives are intertwined.

The developer IODINE’s other game Pillory features mood-based RPG combat, so it’s fitting this game is all about empathy and reading the room, deducing what the ‘right thing to say’ is based on your understanding of various characters’ emotional states. The player character, the homunculus, begins with a limited emotional range. By interacting with people, it learns how to physically change its body, have more complicated thoughts, and express itself in more complex ways. There doesn’t seem to be more than one way to ‘solve’ a conversation—an interesting comment on unauthored characters and the way players deviate from role-playing to get what they want. To the extent that you may or may not believe in a constant or ‘true’ self, I enjoyed this examination of the ways we change by acting outside of how we would consciously define ourselves, even when it makes us uncomfortable. To this point, I appreciated the mini-game that plays when the homunculus rests: you can’t recover your social energy until you’ve resolved, at least for the night, all the conflicts that arise from all these absorbed snippets of emotion. This shapeshifting system wouldn’t suit many scenarios, but this is a great example of how a cosmic setting is able to play with deeper questions, and the mechanic is a refreshing alternative to long lists of dialogue options in choice-driven games.

(I watched Subway Circuit’s playthrough of the demo.)

I saw a few games based on or at least referencing HP Lovecraft’s story ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,’ and this one caught my eye. (‘Dream-Quest’ does sound like a game genre from a neighboring dimension with a different approach to marketing.) Contemporary interpretations like Kij Johnson’s The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe have done far more to endear me to the concept than the Lovecraft original, which makes me all the more eager to seeing people run wild with it. In HYPNOS, a man named Choron travels to the Nameless City at the foot of the holy mountain Kadath to solve the mystery of the boy who haunts his dreams. I enjoyed the game’s two artistic styles: colorful psychedelic illustrations for key conversations, and a more realistic 3D style I’ve only ever been able to describe as ‘prog rock planet’ for exploration. I look forward to seeing how they meld with each other as the game progresses.

This is another game of exploring surreal environs and conversing with denizens that I couldn’t play myself. (But, it looks like the player can fling Choron off increasingly eldritch heights without major consequence, which as I learned from Paradise Killer, is apparently something I really love in a game.)

Still I found HYPNOS hypnotic enthralling. Roger Luckhurst’s Gothic: An Illustrated History describes ruins, in the Gothic sense, as structures that ‘allow for bittersweet contemplation of the transience of all things’, while engaging the mind ‘to actively complete the ruin, stimulating the highest speculative faculties.’ Eldritch ruins, bastions of cosmic horror, lean into that speculative stimulation. Even in dream-lands with their own logic, a question haunts: What untold horror could make these people who preceded you—exceeded you—fall to such ruin?

But there’s comfort to be found in ruins, too. Maybe I just want to be told that an old street light likes me.

(I watched WildGamerSK’s and ALPHA’s playthroughs of the demo.)

In Nocturne for Cyl-Hestia, cybernetically modified human Silas has recently been hired by a newspaper as a Memorialist: a person with the ability to tap into the collective memory. After the election of a would-be tyrant, the inhabitants of Cyl-Hestia seem to be short on power and memory. From appearances, the game seems to be a cyber-noir, but it’s stranger than that. Life in Cyl-Hestia is kindled by Cerulyn, a sentient Flame of godly power passed down by Prometheus. Cerulyn simultaneously devours and preserves all memories in a process that relates somehow to the production of the city’s energy source, Cerulium. Thus Cyl-Hestia’s problem—and Memorialist Silas’ unique ability to investigate its source.

The player makes connections between Memory Records in a hex grid minigame, creating a ‘Mnemosyne Effect’ that reveals the city’s hidden or forgotten memories to Silas. In the demo, the player discovers this ability long before any dialogue expands on who Silas is, what he thinks and feels. His neutral-to-chirpy demeanor feels at odds with the noir vibes of the Memory Records—to the extent that I felt encouraged to consider what all is missing from his memory.

Sometimes, the unquiet pleasure of a cosmic mystery comes from the answers that are withheld. Too many explanations tip things into the solid ground of genre convention—definitively science fiction or fantasy or horror—and with that comes a certain kind of flatness. While I became a little disenchanted with the city of Cyl-Hestia after one too many back-and-forthings through samey districts, every detail I learned about the city surprised and delighted me, drove me to go back to talk to our sources one more time, explore one more new area, ask one more question.

Going by its description and trailer, Woodrot follows an aging maintenance man whose apartment building is transported to the middle of the sea. The demo, a prologue subtitled Oswald’s Dream, involves restoring the memories of a woman with a face like a school of fish. This point-and-click adventure looks gorgeous, with dreamy pixel art graphics in rich palettes and intimate writing. It’s the game I tried hardest to experience in any way possible, but for me, for now, Woodrot is adrift in the dream-sea.

I’m not saying that a Match 3 game in which you, a person of the Earthly realm, is proclaimed Queen Titania and forced to steer a postmodern fae court through mercurial time-tides while various plots are afoot is specifically a cosmic mystery. But this was pure absurd fun, and I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point in the full release I find myself doing an Ace Attorney somehow using Match 3 mechanics.