Have you ever noticed how small a TV screen or a computer monitor actually is?
Let alone the dinky grotto skylights of a Game Boy or a Vita.
But when the right game comes along, the rest of the world just irises out.
You don’t see the border of the screen.
You don’t even really get a meaningful sense of its flatness anymore.
A good game draws you deep inside.
Bahnsen Knights review
This is what William Gibson called cyberspace, I gather.
But it doesn’t feel like cyberspace here very often.
Some games don’t replace the world around them in a delicate manner so much as absolutely flood it.
Bahnsen Knights is one of these games.
The Pixel Pulp games are a glittering oddity.
As the names suggest these are all horror stories, weird stories.
Mothmen 1966 is about everyone’s favourite cryptid.
There are characters who crop up in each game.
Oh yes, and each game offers its own Solitaire variant too, buried deep in the narrative.
And yet that’s not half of what these games are.
Because the Pixel Pulps also tie into another tradition - CGA games from the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Down by the bottom of the stairs?
An awkward nook in the kitchen?
Did you want to punch in?
Select verbs from a list?
Learn to read and interpret runes?
Even before the Pixel Pulps came along this was gloriously cursed territory, crackling with strange potential.
Players are thick-lined with middle-age.
Art-wise, I’m tempted to say that this is a high point for the series.
Here’s the important thing, though.
But through all that, strange opportunity blossoms.
This is the thing I got wrong.
When I first played Mothmen 1966, I thought it was all elbows.
They are a doorway into a weird space in which you should never be entirely comfortable.
Everything is tentative, speculative, likely to turn into a fumble.
Every conversation must be inched through unnaturally.
Next draw, open, close, next draw…
It takes you deep.
It’s something to do with the fact that its worlds are so encompassing but also so self-contained.
And now I think about it, this love doesn’t begin where I assumed it did.
In the expectant shadows, a vision blinked into view.
It was a hot air balloon, brightly coloured, hanging above a desert.
A view with a sense of perfect, almost heightened stillness.
Bahnsen Knights accessibility options
Options to change speed of messages and auto delay.
This was something new to me - fabricated and mechanical but utterly transporting.
How could that be?
I almost suspected that if I had taken another look a minute later, the balloon would have gone.
A copy of Bahnsen Knights was provided for review by Chorus Worldwide.
