Two heads-up, right at the beginning here:
First, I’m going to be discussing some level of spoilers for games you might not be familiar
with– the video is broken up into chapters, and details of exactly the level of
spoilers per game are in the description.
Second, this video is better on Nebula,
and it’s the only place you can watch a whole exclusive companion video on the
game “The Exit 8.” Now, lights out!
“No one is talking about this game” is the
kind of statement generally said by people who haven’t done their homework. While we live in
a world of ever-more video game releases and decreasing free time, there are also enough
people talking about games– through blogs, through videos, professionally or as a hobby–
that declaring “no one is talking about this” often ignores all the people who, you know, are
talking about it. I won’t claim to have discovered any of the games I’m talking about today, though
I strongly doubt you’ll have heard of all of them. But I will assert that these games, despite
their engaging mechanics and memorable worlds, haven’t been able to culturally reach beyond
their own shadow. They've been released, appreciated by a few, and then disappeared back
into the darkness of so many passed-over titles. And that’s a shame, but it’s also fitting; all of
these games aren’t just culturally overshadowed, but thematically fascinated by what happens
when you’re swallowed by the dark.
That doesn’t mean that they have to be
self-serious though! Greener Grass Awaits joins a grand indie tradition of combining genres in ways
never before thought possible. Musical dungeon crawling, Mayonnaise-based clickers, deck-building
first person speedrunners. And compared to these, “golf horror” might not sound too
radical. But Greener Grass Awaits, released last year by developer yatoimtop, still
caught me totally unprepared with how brilliantly it combines those two disparate genres. The
golf might be easier to explain first.
Greener Grass Awaits begins with your arrival
to the green canyon golf club, a setting that– with help from a gentle lo-fi filter– looks
pulled from the posts of a thousand “liminal space” twitter accounts. The sun is setting and
the door is locked, but you want to golf and so you find somewhere to jump the fence and start
whackin (is that what golf players say when they play golf? I’m just going to assume it is).
The golf gameplay itself is clumsily, charmingly, physical here. Whereas other games basically have
you control the club itself, Greener Grass Awaits takes pains to never lose the sense of your own
body. What do I mean by this? Well, before you can hit the ball, you have to press a button to
set your bag down on the grass, and another button to select which club you want. Then, when you’re
ready to line up your shot, the game doesn’t give the traditional third-person omniscient view
of the scene. The perspective stays resolutely first person– you often can’t look at the ball
and the green at the same time, leading to an awkwardly realistic little shuffle as you look at
the hole, look at your feet, shuffle a little bit, look at the hole again, readjust one more time,
and finally swing the mouse to take your shot. The game rarely makes you feel good at golf– I
was drawn into a spat of furious putting back and forth more than once– but there’s nothing
to unlock and as far as I can tell, no reward for good performance. Like real golf, your score
matters exactly as much as you care about it. Also like real golf, nothing magically teleports to
keep up with you. After you take your shot, you’ve gotta pick up your bag and haul it with you if you
want access to your other clubs. After you sink a putt, you’ve gotta go and retrieve your ball.
Although the shape of the holes aren’t anything to write home about, the “vibes” of the course more
than make up for it. The nostalgic twilight which greets you fades in real time as you walk along
the second fairway. Accompanied by a moody synth, the shadows lengthen and warmth disappears from
the scene. A few more holes in, you’ll be playing in the dark. But not before you have a very
strange conversation with a very normal man.
[“Hey- the course is closed. Well
it is, so you should get going. Uhh, I’m getting out of here.
Don’t break anything.”]
One of the most engaging things about playing
Greener Grass Awaits is the knowledge that this is, somehow, a golf-horror game, but
you don’t quite know when that second part is going to kick in. There’s certainly ominous
foreshadowing– the freeze frame over dialogue choices or the out-of-bounds invisible wall
that tells you “I need to golf, I love to golf, I golf in my dreams, I love the golf ball”. But
in these opening levels, I also wondered how the hell this could segue into full-blown horror.
Not knowing exactly what a game is capable of means it's able to consistently surprise you–
eventually with scares, but first with comedy.
On the fifth hole, basically in the middle of
the night, a warning requests that even though this hole is horseshoe shaped, please don’t cut
corners by hitting your ball over the cliff wall. “For safety reasons.” [hit ball over wall.] After
completely ignoring the sign, I rounded the corner and froze– oh my god, is that a body lying next
to the hole? Who did this, what monster could have– ohh, or maybe…maybe this is why they said
not to hit the ball over the cliff. Oops.
Two holes later, the horror kicks in. There is
nothing too “cerebral” going on in Greener Grass Awaits. It is fundamentally a silly game about
playing a scary round of golf. But that doesn’t mean its horror design isn’t kind of genius.
You tee up on the eighth hole, whack away, and then immediately after your initial drive, a
rustle in the grass and a big musical sting alerts you to the fact that hey there’s a uhh…there’s a
guy standing behind you. The guy, you’ll soon find out, operates on fairly simple scary-guy rules:
When you’re not looking at him he’ll run towards you. But look at him too long and he’ll also start
running towards you. You really don’t want him to reach you. So to progress, you just need to run
away, frequently checking back over your shoulder to make sure he can’t creep too close. Except,
this is still a game where you have to play golf too. And suddenly all the clunky design decisions,
the physical bag you have to set down and pick up, the rigidly first person perspective while lining
up your shot, they all make sense because all of those things are interfering with the one
thing you REALLY NEED TO KEEP AN EYE ON.
I’ve rarely experienced the entire mechanical
energy of a game shift so much with a single addition. Par, the previous motivation, is
completely out the window. Whereas before, I spent ages adjusting my feet and luxuriously feeling out
the angle of each hit, every new interaction with the ball became a frenzied seconds-long attempt to
simply stay ahead of the ever-approaching zombie dudes. It even introduced new strategies to golf
itself– I actively tried to overshoot the hole, because looking back at the course meant I
could more easily keep an eye on my pursuers. It turns out that golf lends itself perfectly to
horror, a meaningless yet detail-oriented task that you will inevitably screw up through
stress. And then halfway through the game, the mechanics of “golf” shift yet again.
The moonlit night sinks into a near-total blackness, a dark that will literally devour you
if you stand in it too long. Your only source of light? The golf ball itself. How fortunate!
Except, naturally, you still have to play golf. Which means that you have to repeatedly
whack your only light source far away from you and then chase after it, sprinting away
from the dark. And don’t forget your bag!
There are some kinds of horror that lurk, reside
in the dim corners of your mind and rear their head as you’re lying in bed or walking down a dark
street. And then there’s horror as almost a sport, where a coach adjusts unseen variables to create
the perfect combination of factors for “fear.” Greener Grass Awaits is the latter. Nothing posed
in the game is too existentially terrifying, none of the imagery has kept me up at night.
But there are so many little ideas in the game that are almost infuriatingly clever.
I found myself shouting “oh fuck you” at my screen multiple times, involuntary outbursts
built through a mix of stress, amusement, and respect. It’s an hour-ish long, thoroughly
entertaining, and dark in a wonderfully silly way. I would love to see more developers smash
lite-horror into other unsuspecting genres, using its inherent tension to accentuate
previously existing gameplay ideas. More games could be pulled, just a little, into the dark.
But of course, there is that other kind of horror. In 2018, I played a short title by developer
Aetheric Games called “Bonbon.” In the time since, I haven’t been able to get it out
of my head. Bonbon is a game about a very small child and a very large rat.
It has virtually none of the gameplay complexity of Greener Grass Awaits, and replaces the novelty
of a golf course with the familiarity of a suburban home. Your gameplay directives, in order,
are: clean up the yard, clean up your room, share your birthday cake, escape, hide. All of them are,
in one way or another, about the giant rat.
Bonbon, the rat, isn’t immediately a malevolent
gameplay presence. He actually helps in the first couple scenarios, albeit in a slightly unnerving
way. As you toddle around the yard, picking up your toys and saying hello to them in a bizarre,
garbled voice, Bonbon smashes through the fence. But not to worry- he’s just holding Mr. Orange,
a ball that he then drops on the grass for you to collect. Inside, it’s the same story. You’ve got
to find 4 tiny people to put back in your toy box and what luck, Bonbon has one of them. Does he
hand it to you? Not really, he kinda drops it, and it bounces so you have to reach uncomfortably
close to his massive feet and furry stomach, but…I mean nothing bad has happened with
the rat yet. Then, Bonbon is at the table with your birthday cake, and, oh he
wants a slice? Well he’s a big rat, that’s only fair. Though the way he throws his
hand out so demandingly is a little frightening, and his squeaks just get louder and louder, and
when you say “no Bonbon” he smashes the table so hard with his fist that all the plates jump up in
the air, and before you know it half the cake is gone and the rat still isn’t happy and he punches
the table over and over, drool dripping from his twitching mouth, and then he just decides he
doesn’t need you to feed him the cake at all.
The question with Bonbon, at least from
an analytical perspective, is going to be about what the big rat represents. Because it
always means something in horror- latent trauma, repressed guilt, societal anxieties.
And if you want to go down that road, I think it’s pretty obvious: Bonbon is the
father. All your nice in-person interactions in the game are with mom. Dad is confined to “voices
yelling,” family strife behind closed doors, and, notably, a tape player recording where
he reads a fairytale about a wretched, scheming rat. Bonbon is also literally a rat, too.
You can find a newspaper clipping advertising a fancy rat up for adoption, the bouncy end credits
play over a little rat in a cage. It’s not hard to follow the child-logic of our protagonist,
combining a scary fairy tale, a new pet, and a family dynamic they’re not equipped to deal
with into one massive, terrifying rodent. But this subtext isn’t what’s made Bonbon stick with me.
Instead, it’s one incredibly specific way the game leverages its setting and its horror.
Forgive me for the short digression, but when I was a kid I had this recurring fear
while laying in bed. I would wake up in the middle of the night and suddenly become aware that, while
I was looking at one half of my bedroom, the other half could contain anything at all, any brand
of evil, any array of monsters. But moreover, I would feel that whatever evil the other half
of the room contained, it would only be realized when I perceived it; that it was waiting until
I rolled over to strike. I would lay there, petrified, unwilling to move for fear of somehow
unlocking the thing I was most afraid of.
Bonbon contains exactly this scene. You nod off
listening to the dark fairytale, have a brief ominous dream, and wake up facing the door, the
outlines from your nightlight circling the room. There’s the sound of your parents yelling outside.
And the scene will stay exactly like that, locked in a nervous stasis until you roll over
and of course on the other side there’s Bonbon, as angry and terrifying as he’s ever been. It is
a viciously mean jumpscare, and also maybe the most effective one I’ve ever experienced.
When I’m reading a short story, I don’t expect the same things as a novel. I don’t need
complex character arcs or comprehensive world building. I basically want it to set
up a funny, or scary, or emotional punchline, deliver that punchline as memorably as possible,
then conclude while I’m still stewing over the ramifications. Bonbon is all setup. This moment
is the punchline. The dark containing exactly the thing you most hope it doesn’t, exactly when
you don’t want to see it. Even though I know it’s coming, it still gets me every time.
Bonbon isn’t the only game centered around reckless child endangerment though (how’s THAT
for a segue?). In fact, the whole conceit of many “cinematic platformers” seems like it could
be described as “bet you didn’t expect that child death, huh?” From early titles like “Heart
of Darkness” to titans like Limbo and INSIDE, the formula of young child plus dark, dangerous
world has become a microgenre of its own. And this niche is where the exceptionally bleak
“Bramble: The Mountain King” makes its home.
It doesn’t start with child death, though. Part
of what’s fun about the game, released in 2023 by Dimfrost Studio, is how variable its tone is.
Based very specifically on Scandinavian folklore, Bramble almost certainly contains the lightest
moments of any game in this video. Herding the berry-headed Rumpnissar, playing hide and seek
with gnomes, riding a hedgehog across a pond– I could edit together footage of this game to
convince you that Bramble: The Mountain King is nothing more than Olle’s silly countryside
romp, a delightful little exploration of the friendliest parts of a mythic countryside. Oh,
and what’s that over there? What’s he doing? That’s…that’s really small for a corpse oh GOD-
Bramble doesn’t just have the lightest moments of any game in this video, it also has by far the
darkest. I am not kidding when I say that the piece of media I most frequently thought of
while playing Bramble was “Come and See,” the 1985 Soviet anti-war film widely considered to
contain some of the most harrowing images ever put on screen. Bramble parallels specific scenes
from Come and See– the awful trek through a bog, the empty villages haunted by the dead, a
young blonde boy’s face contorted by fear and trauma. But just as effectively, the game
parallels the surreal nightmare tone of the film. Short glimpses of happiness and whimsy
are snatched away by unpredictable horror, scenes flow together without clear connecting
points, the world itself bends and breaks instead of allowing us a consistent perspective. I don’t
mean to imply that Bramble holds the same gravity as Come and See, nor tackles subjects nearly as
important. But in a game this dreamlike, tone is the thing I cling to– and tonally, little Olle’s
encounters with the monsters of Scandinavian myth feel like his own personal war.
There’s too much in Bramble to go through beat by beat, and the story isn’t literal enough
for me to sum up quickly, so instead I just want to talk through some of my favorite little pieces
of the game. For instance: the ever-changing sense of scale. We start in a normally-sized child’s
bedroom and climb down into a familiarly imposing forest. But somewhere along the way, the woods
scale up or we scale down. Individual stones become shoulder-high, trickles of water morph
into dangerous rapids, Olle walks between the shadows of individual clovers. And then he somehow
claws his way back, re-emerging into realistically modest huts and houses. Except in his absence, the
structures have each lost their sense of home, far less welcoming than when he first left them.
Bramble, like the Little Nightmares games that came before it, is perfectly willing to cast
scenes into complete blackness and give its protagonist a single handheld light. Bramble, like
Limbo, has bear traps that will separate head from body. But Bramble also has a specificity to its
imagery that separates it from its inspirations. One of the most memorable chapters has a run in
with, not a zombie or a giant, but a…a midwife, and a woman determined to relinquish her infant
to the swamp. There’s a great breakdown by the channel “Swedish Ghost Lovers” of all the
different folklore touchpoints in the game– but there’s only one I absolutely needed to know
about. That Bramble would be bold enough to not only include a “myling” [me-ling], the spirit of
a sacrificed child, but literally have you try and fail to stop the ritual sacrifice…is something
I won’t soon forget. That it follows this up with a boss fight, culminating in a God of War
3-style infinitely bloody quicktime event? I will be thinking about this game for a long time.
Where Bramble: The Mountain King summons its most nightmarish idea from isn’t any single event,
though. Instead, it’s the building feeling that not only are things Not Okay, things will never be
okay again. Olle has so thoroughly passed through the looking glass that it’s hard to imagine a
path through which he could return to everyday life. Even the hedgehog, the gnomes, the magic of
only a few hours ago seems impossibly far away. Towards the end, an eclipse literally blocks out
the sun; all light, all hope, is snuffed out.
Taking a step back, what’s always striking to
me about this “cinematic platformer” genre is that it needs to be throwing new stuff at
you all the time. The mechanics are rarely interesting enough to support the game on their
own– plodding characters, sluggish jumps, simple puzzles. Moreover, the protagonists of these games
almost never even speak! The style demands that the environment, the context of the characters
remain so enthralling throughout that we never have to rely on the limited “fun” provided by
its other elements. Bramble: The Mountain King does this quite well. The last game I want to talk
about attempts the same feat– and somehow pulls it off even more spectacularly, while pointed
in a completely different direction.
If you wanted to summarize White Shadows, released
in 2021 by developer Monokel, as the sum of its influences, it would end up sounding supremely
derivative. Another cinematic platformer, completely in grayscale a la Limbo, starts with
you tumbling out of a pipe just like INSIDE, even has puzzles solved by luring a bunch of
chicks into a big machine like INSIDE, pulls language directly from Animal Farm…subtle with
its inspirations, it is not. And yet, and YET, White Shadows has creative energy exploding out of
it. There is nothing low effort in the decisions made here, and although it’s not my favorite
game I’ve talked about today, White Shadows maybe makes me the saddest I’ve never really
seen it referenced anywhere. Because man is this game trying to do something, and it succeeds
in far more interesting ways than it fails.
The world of White Shadows is a sort of
massive subterranean industrial dystopia, where enormous floodlights replace natural
sunlight and every catwalk dangles above a thousand foot drop. It’s not just an expanse
of black and white but of light and shadow, where everything not explicitly illuminated falls
into the dark. This is, in fact, a central driver of the plot; in-universe advertisements extol
the virtues of artificial light baths. The ads say that the population of…pigs should take
light baths every day to avoid the darkness. That darkness is represented by birds. It is, at
times, extremely on the nose [“all animals are equal…except birds”] [“BECAUSE THIS IS A METAPHOR
FOR RACISM”]. But what the game lacks in nuance, it makes up for in the literal imagery of its
world design, and I almost feel like I’ve been burying the lede here because look at this,
y’all. Look how far back the camera pulls, look at how far the background extends into
the distance. Despite being a three hour game made by like, eight people, White Shadows somehow
communicates the same feelings as Rapture or the city in Mirror’s Edge, that I’m just a speck being
swallowed by the enormity of my surroundings.
The game’s standout setpieces further de-emphasize
the already diminutive player character– you’re running along when suddenly Flight of the
Bumblebees or The Blue Danube kicks up and the focus of the camera becomes the great machines of
the city, scores of simultaneously running trains, fields of egg collecting robots all moving in
perfect harmony. The game traps you between the gears, makes you feel that you’re the
problem in this system otherwise perfectly optimized for mechanical efficiency. The
massive scale of many of the levels further alienate you from the city, stumbling through
a society that’s designed you out of it.
Moreover, the structures of the background,
although they seem hopelessly huge and distant, often make up the actual architecture of levels
you’ve already been through or will soon explore. It captures the same feeling as ICO (or Dark
Souls), that those half-obscured spires in the distance aren’t just fanciful set dressing but
are, in fact, vital parts of the world. Even the bottomless pits aren’t actually bottomless–
one memorable section has you fall for a long, long, time, only to discover that there
is actually something below. And then, of course, you have to climb back up.
There’s also just so much bespoke work present in White Shadows. While I would never call
something like Bramble “low effort,” I do think its graphical style sometimes reads a bit “asset
library”-y, its rocks and foliage easy to imagine slotted into a hundred other games. Because of
White Shadows’ choices in lighting and color, textures never seem too familiar– instead, the
focus goes to the countless unique aspects of the setting. Machines articulate in fascinating ways,
signboards rearrange themselves in real time, giant flying ships soar by, their design
only visible for fractions of a second.
There’s so much going on in the fore and
background that you might miss the even-more brash things White Shadows is doing with its
structure. Let me give you an example. This game, while resolutely two-dimensional from a gameplay
perspective, actually breaks the platformer 180 degree rule with its camera. You’re trapped
by this rat, running to avoid his spotlight, and then the whole perspective swings around
while the rat takes…a phone call, and not only do you see your character from the opposite
side but the whole world from the opposite angle, reinforcing that not only does the city extend
forever one way but both directions, even though you almost never see it. Even in this age of
3D-rendered 2D platformers, I cannot think of a single example of another game doing this. Later
on, White Shadows pulls off an even more ambitious version of this trick, where a moving camera
conceals a transition from stage to factory, a seamless entry to an unexpected flashback.
And for all its overt themes, there are sections of the game that are unexpectedly ambiguous–
repeated phone calls that you never hear the other side of, an injection of “light” halfway through
that separates you from all other birds. Actually there’s– since there’s very little discussion of
this game online, I haven’t really been able to find anyone talking about the ending, and it is
weird, and I kinda want to take this opportunity to ask y’all what the hell is going on here. So
here’s what happens. You’re this little bird, hopelessly shuttled from place to place
within this underground expanse. At one point, you’re forced to perform in a deadly game show
for an audience of jeering pigs, and along the way you enter a machine that makes you glow, probably
similar to the light baths advertised throughout. Then you fall allllll the way down to an
off-the-grid community of birds who tell you their story and give you artificial wings, so you can
fly all the way up to the city again. All of that, fairly straightforward. But THEN. THEN! You get
back to the city and take a ticket at some kind of booth, like the little bird is taking its place
in a deli line or a DMV queue. A38 is your number, and you wait, and you wait, and you wait, but just
before A38 is called, an identical bird holding A39 walks in, and then A38 bird, our protagonist
for the whole game, just exits the scene and we don’t go with it! We instead control A39
for the last literal two minutes of the game. A39 flies up through the ceiling, up to
the roof of the whole city, receives a phone call, and then shuts off the lights. Credits.
What’s goin on here, man?? For the “All animals are equal, except birds” game, this is wildly open
to interpretation. Is it a commentary on like, community-appointed saviors? Our protagonist gets
so hyped up by the bird town at the bottom of the city, flies up to try to make a change, and
then immediately gets caught in the gears of bureaucracy? The final moments, the turning
off of the city’s lights, totally reads like a “burn it all down” ending, a sort of Fight
Club or Cabin in the Woods-esque destruction of the status quo. Is A39 making the call that A38
couldn’t? But A39 also gets their number called, seems embroiled in the same bureaucracy. And
what is the phone call A39 gets just before shutting off the power? Is it some kind of “no
true free will” story, because even A39 is just taking instructions from someone else?
It’s a weird, weird way to end a story, particularly memorable given all the incredibly
specific choices made leading up to it. There are no accidents here, White Shadows is a game
of effort. It, like every other game discussed, is a short story. It, too, ends with a punchline.
That the punchline both literally and figuratively leaves us in the dark is probably a big
part of why the game’s stuck with me.
I am often asked “how do you find these games?” by
people interested in playing more stuff like this. The short answer is it’s both my life’s passion
and my full-time job. I have more time I can commit to this search than most people. The longer
answer is, I found out about these games from, in order: a tweet from Ryan Brown, an article
written by Adam Smith in Rock Paper Shotgun, a random steam recommendation algorithm, and
a game code sent to MinnMax that I decided I was interested in. But the philosophical-leaning
answer to this question is frustratingly simple: you have to seek them out. I do not have a
magical ability to only play good indie games; I play a lot of duds you do not hear me
talk about on this channel! But that search, stepping just outside the mainstream, can be
endlessly rewarding. Because the same shadows that keep these games from commercial success
conceal what they’re truly capable of. Direct your attention outside the spotlight for a little
while– those hundred-million dollar blockbusters will still be there next month. Explore the dark.
And then, please, show me what you found!
–
There is another short game that, instead of using the dark, actually uses an
exceptionally well-lit space for horror. That game is called “The Exit 8,” released last year
by Kotake Create. Because it’s so light, and honestly because it’s been pretty well covered,
it doesn’t really fit in with my whole “games that won’t leave the dark” framing. But I do want to
talk about it, and in fact I did- in an entirely separate essay, only available on Nebula.
[“The Exit 8 creates a very strange feeling, where walking through a normal hallway feels far
more stressful than walking through one that’s noticeably weird. Because if the game has taught
us anything, it’s that normalcy is an illusion, that we’re just missing the fact that
the text on the sign is upside down, or one of the lights is flickering, or
did the security sign just…look at us?”]
Nebula is where I can put any and everything that
wouldn’t quite fit on my YouTube channel– shorter essays like this, exclusive episodes of my podcast
“Something Rotten,” I mean hey, just a couple weeks ago I put up an hour-long conversation
with my partner about what it was like to visit “City,” the enormous sculpture I talked about in
my last video. I can do this because I don’t have to worry about success-determined-by-algorithm
on Nebula– instead every person who signs up just supports me directly. That also means there
are no ads on Nebula. Also, every person who signs up using my link, nebula.tv/jacobgeller,
gets a huge discount, a whole YEAR of Nebula for just 30 bucks. Or, available right
now, a LIFETIME membership, meaning you pay once and get everything on Nebula, forever.
I’m not the only person on the site, of course. You’ve also got exclusive videos from channels
like Big Joel and Razbuten, original series, classes– Patrick Willems is making a new movie, a Nebula-exclusive horror movie about a dinner party! I'm going to be there day one! I mean it’s a streaming service,
it’s not just a Jacob Geller Hosting Device. But even if it was a Jacob Geller Hosting Device,
I kinda still think you should get it. I really like my essay on The Exit 8, and that’s just one
of hours of my original videos you can only see on Nebula. Sign up now at nebula.tv/jacobgeller
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