To Explore Planets

I think this game captures the feeling of being on a Garry’s mod server, or a public Second Life sandbox, with a bunch of people who don’t really know what they’re doing. Everyone’s on this big, featureless planet, making vague structures with disjointed, ripped pixel art sprites slapped on the side. And then you fly around spewing out shrek cubes. I love the way the cubes make you fly around as you’re spewing them out, and also stay there forever, Zang Zurfers style.

I was also reminded of one of Lily Zone’s unfinished games in which you drive this spaceship around an archipellago, destroying the native’s huts and building your own resource extractors. You keep on building and building and watching your numbers go up, as you fill the space with your resource extractors. Conquest is of course a common theme in games but there’s something about these ones that makes it more conspicuous, I think. In the Lily Zone game the natives are portrayed in a really neutral way. They aren’t beastly savages like they’d be in w/e AAA game, and they aren’t the weepy victims they’d be in a more didactic game. They walk around and look weird, and they’re kind of annoying to talk to ‘cause you’ve got to get out this cumbersome translator. Mostly you can just take their stuff and shoot them if you want, and then go on resource extracting. And I think that indifference kind of turns them into the elephant in the room.