You are the player. The island is indie games. You must escape the island.

“If you were to be stuck on a desert island, what items would you take with you?”

It is a question that has festered in the minds of fools for ages; a parlor game of sorts — but one that holds a mirror to reality, and reveals the jagged edges of the human condition.

Where We Remain, is Twofold Secret‘s retelling of that story, though twice removed from the realm of the real via the lens of both Video Games, and Art. It is a story of a young lad stuck on a desert island, searching for “the prettiest girl’s name you know,” as the game puts it. Presented with a text entry field for you to type such a name into, and with well practiced accuracy, you type in “Derek Yu,” as you have done so many times into Facebook’s search bar. And then the mirror is turned — the game is afoot — and reality’s pixellated edges come into focus.

Nearly 30 years after John Carmack invented the independent games scene with his seminal, but largely overlooked indie game, Doom, we, the new blood, the tenants of the Yu-coined “New Wave” of independent gaming, are able to look into the rear view mirror that is Indie Games and see progress that is much smaller than it appears.

For the mainstream, it has been a decade of growth, with many game developers casting away the training wheels of their Game Makers and Multimedia Fusions, and adopting a platform that appeals to a much wider audience of babies, the Nintendo Wii. Mainstream gaming took its first steps as a more adult form of storytelling with the heart-rending death of the the protagonist’s love interest, and one of video game culture’s most endearing female characters, halfway through Japan’s influential game, Cave Story. But what of indie games?

The gameplay of Where We Remain is simple — move your character around a procedurally generated island, avoiding a malevolent whirlwind whose sole purpose is to find you. Sanctuary can be found within the many caves that pockmark the island’s face, though safety from the storm, you soon learn, may be the lesser of two evils.

On this island of independent games, we are trapped.

No one on this island is your friend. Caves mean safety.

An island. A large landmass beset on all sides by deadly blue water — like Japan under Sakoku — a terrifying isolation remedied slightly by the provenance of Akira Toriyama and the invention of the Anime. It is a constantly shifting landscape — a procedurally generated labyrinth from which there are no absolutes. What is Art? What is Fun? Only the random number generator in the sky knows.

The player represents the plight of the everyman. He, who must appeal to “the prettiest girl’s name you know” — Derek Yu — by collecting purple flowers; the decaying remnants of the red flowers that first appeared in Cave Story, a gesture that can be seen both as a perversion of beauty, but more importantly, a comment on temporality. The same rotten flowers; flowers that time forgot. This is all Derek Yu desires.

Surely, it should be no alarm, therefore, that he suggest you find safety in the Caves — after all, many of independent gaming’s greatest successes (including his own) have taken place in those sordid caverns.

But within these caves lie the result of years of inbreeding, the Edmund McMillens and Terry Cavanaughs of the Island of the Indie, the retarded Super Meat Babies, who, having lived within Plato’s Cave for so long, have ironically lost the very thing that once set them apart — their Ind(i)ependence. They move the same. They act the same. When confronted with light opposition — a wall, for instance — they disappear in a cloud of embarrassment and farts. In fact they don’t even attempt to hurt you — rather, they merely steal your rotten flowers in the hope of collecting 100 of them and getting a Life, or at the very least, the acceptance of Lord Yu. “No one on this island is your friend.”

So what should we do? Should we wander this island, collecting these rotting flowers, living amongst the mindless zombies? Surely there is another way.

The whirlwind. Looming and ominous, it chases you around the level with a ferocity unseen even in this islands living inhabitants. Loud and obnoxious — almost Podunkian in nature. Its call is a constant drone, like the ramblings of a Super Joe. What terrible fate lies at its epicenter — what horrible truth does it reveal?

You were found.

It finds you. Unlike Derek Yu, hiding in the house that Saddam built (a cave), waiting for the storm to pass by, hoping to manipulate you into doing his bidding by leaving you ineffectual notes about XBox Live, the whirlwind finds you.

If this is Where We Remain, then let us escape this island of shit.

Let us be found, my indie brothers.

Where We Remain, by Twofold Secret, Browser

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 9:48 am and is filed under Indie As Hell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.