Love — oft cited, never attained. A theoretical phenomenon, never directly observed by a single indie game designer — though often scrutinized and conjectured towards. Love — the quantum physics of the art world — that which will never be understood by the very obese chimps who are most vocal about it.
It is that which drives man to commit unspeakable acts — to forgo the metaphorical treasure chests of life for the the base, animalistic pleasures of a girl’s tender touch.
Yet never has the theme been so misrepresented in Art as in Andrew Brophyand Andy Wolff’s latest gamepiece, SEWERS, a game that, in keeping with its namesake, conveys little more than human excrement, travelling endlessly through the tired pipelines of the minimalistic 2D platformer, eventually dumping its ineffectual payload into a sea of shit, where it will continue to fester until it is consumed by the primitive, single celled ghouls that lurk a million fathoms beneath the intellectual stratosphere inhabited by pondscum.
In a word, it’s shit.
It is the sort of game that can only be described through other games — it is a more reticent Cave Story; a more vocal Knytt. Too many ways to die to be Passage, yet too few to be Karoshi. Its resolution is far too high to be taken seriously as an independent game, yet its art assets are far too pixelated to be accepted by the mainstream. It is the socially retarded middle child of the indie gaming family.
The game is self described by its authors as “very deep” — as a game about the “raw emotions of humans really showing” — a statement that is somehow made without a shred of irony. In fact, within the first few seconds of the game, the raw emotion of humans is really shown when in a strange subversion of traditional storytelling techniques, the character emits, of all things, a single pink heart to express the emotion of love.
Of course, this love is met with immediate rejection, as the object of the protagonist’s affections — a young girl in a hat, runs off the screen. Perhaps the complexities of the really showing human emotion are what cause her to flee — though, if the game is any indication of reality (and again, this is debatable), she is probably aware of her sexuality and is using it to beguile the protagonist into doing irrational things.
There is not much that can be said about SEWERS that cannot also be said about sewers in real life.
Ultimately, you can achieve one of five endings. It is a mechanic that was seen in Rete’s Don’t Shit Your Pants, a game about shit, that somehow manages to be a lot less shitty.
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