And it turns out it’s a great co-op game.
In my early teens I went to see a big Magritte exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London.
I went with my older brother Paul who loved Magritte.
It was an incredible experience, so much Magritte in one space: bowler hats, apples, pipes.
I was delighted and unnerved, both at once, both sensation feeding the other.
It remains one of my primal experiences of art.
I alway bring that heightened combination of emotions to Vectorpark, whose classic puzzle-adventure-thingyWindosill has just landed on Switch.
Vectorpark, also known as Patrick Smith, makes playfully unsettling toys.
Vectorpark’s stuff is always a surprise, but somehow it’s always coherent too.
I play it and through my bedazzlement I still find myself saying: of course!
If you asked me that question today, I might say something a bit different.
That’s because I didn’t play it alone.
I should go back a bit.
Windosill was originally a Flash game.
It’s a series of puzzle rooms, if you really want to reduce it to basics.
Each room, though, is a reminder that a game like this cannot be reduced to basics.
In one room an ocean may churn away with strange items being offered up by the waves.
In another a bowling ball might hang in the sky, orbited by a smaller bowling ball.
I played through it the other night with my daughter, who is nine.
Co-op Windosill, particularly with someone you know well, becomes a knockabout thing of triumph and accident.
We’d spend whole minutes planning complicated moves and then see them frustrated by clumsiness or poor communication.
Reader, it is marvelous.
She cheered when we got the door to a room open, but she cheered when we didn’t.
I never feel like I’ve done it properly.
But there’s a moment at the end of Windosill which makes me want to work harder.
I wonder what my daughter made of it yesterday.
