Surrealist Games with Mind-Expanding Aims
by Nathan Schmidt, Contributing Editor
“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.” André Breton couldn’t have been thinking about video games in his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism…except, maybe he was? Today, calling something “surreal” has about as much meaning as saying it’s “weird,” but if dream and reality mesh together anywhere, isn’t it somewhere on that plane we used to unironically call “cyberspace,” or in the in-between world of video games that Jesper Juul calls “half-real?”
Here are some games to help you get back in touch with surreality. Just as Surrealism challenged the notions of what art could be and do, part of the fun here is reconsidering what really makes a “game.” As with Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered dishware, the defamiliarization or “making strange” of everyday things can open up new possibilities for seeing the world. This concept, developed by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky and influential for artists like Bertolt Brecht, suggests that art can employ the element of surprise to shock us out of the formulaic way that everyday life tends to be lived. Sometimes video games are treasured aspects of a comforting routine—I enjoy an hour or so of Skyrim before I go to bed. But for those times when, instead, you find yourself craving something to wake you up from the endless familiar march of days that the pandemic’s forced on so many of us, I offer you:
Strawberry Cubes, by Loren Schmidt; https://lorenschmidt.itch.io/strawberrycubes.
The internet has plenty of Weird Indie Games to Plumb Your Subconscious. A lot of them are great. But the world that Loren Schmidt has conjured in Strawberry Cubes is truly surreal, synthesizing dream and reality into something that actually feels like a journey through the subconscious. Also, if you know the right button, you can make a bird. Strawberry Cubes is all about experimentation and exploration as you guide your little ghostly avatar through the haunted corridors of a pixelated dream-labyrinth, gathering seeds and growing flowers along the way. But Strawberry Cubes, like the best surrealist art, isn’t infatuated with its own strangeness. The game might feel like a randomly generated string of weird rooms at first, but it actually holds a deep interior logic. Whenever I come back to the game and spend some real time with it, I find my patience rewarded with deeper sense of the game’s story and new abilities that span the entire keyboard. Strawberry Cubes encourages play over mastery, or as the game’s “read me” file says, “For an optimal experience, get a cup of tea, play in full screen, and draw a map.”
SURREALISTa, by Gigoia Studios, https://gigoiastudios.itch.io/surrealista.
Here at Gamers with Glasses, we strive to be your home for video game journalism that includes sentences like, “Technically speaking, the early art of Giorgio de Chirico is of the pittura metafisica school of Italian painting—an influential forerunner to be sure, but hardly full-blown surrealism.” Caveat emptor: This is a game where you walk around in paintings, which I guess makes it a “walking simulator.” Surprisingly, SURREALISTa feels nothing like being in an art gallery. Maybe this is because it completely inverts the relationship between observer and observed: I think I am supposed to feel like I am inside the painting, but I really feel more like an intruder from a different dimension, or like the painting is watching me. It feels almost like a mod for another game that somehow got possessed by the angular ghost of a lonely architect. (Incidentally, remember that really bonkers Oblivion quest where you had to go inside a painting? That was weird.) That’s not to say that the game isn’t artful. It’s just that this kind of exploration is a different experience altogether, neither inside nor outside, but suspended between different kinds of worlds. The game definitely captures the isolation and loneliness of de Chirico’s paintings, which if I’m honest freaked me the hell out. But that’s a good thing, because like the art it represents, this atmospheric game is mostly about what you bring into it.
Taboo: The Sixth Sense, by Rare; Nintendo Entertainment System.
Oh, the creepypastas. Oh, the package warnings. Oh, the velvet slipcase, “should any psychic vibrations try to operate on your cartridge when not in use.” Rare’s 1989 NES tarot card reader promised the convergence “of an ancient miracle together with the modern miracle of science and technology, to serve you, as a high priest would an emperor.” Just put in your name, sex, and date of birth, and answers to your deepest questions await. Now, they may not have had the Nintendo Entertainment System in mind, but tarot meant something special to the Surrealists. For one thing, they made their own tarot deck that featured Jarry’s Ubu Roi as the joker and Hegel as the “genius of locks.” Occult practices like tarot were also closely linked to the Surrealist concept of automatism, that the dreams of the subconscious are more important than conscious, rational expression. As far as I know, nobody has produced any paintings or poetry inspired directly by Taboo: The Sixth Sense—which means, of course, that the universe is practically begging for you to be the first.
Pro Chess Simulator 300, by stevedroid; https://stevedroid.itch.io/pro-chess-simulator-300?download.
Remember what I said earlier about challenging your preconceived definition of a “game?” Meet Pro Chess Simulator 300, the cloven-hoofed demonchild of computer chess and vaporwave. I really do not know what this thing is. That’s why it’s on the list. You move the turquoise hand with your mouse as if you are about to play chess against an AI, but I found out when the computer took its first turn that you can put your pieces anywhere you want to. The thing your hand seems to do most effectively is knock the pieces over, which sometimes causes the Wilhelm scream to play over the anxiously skittery solo drum soundtrack. If you knock the other king over, no matter how or when you do it, well, “You Win.” The point, such as it is, is to aggressively spoof machine intelligence in favor of slapstick absurdity. But here’s the thing: Man Ray saw Duchamp’s dictum that “chess is art, art is chess” and raised him one better with a wilfully inscrutable geometric rendition of the familiar pieces. At least since von Kempelen’s famous eighteenth-century chess automaton hoax, chess has been at the crux of debates about human and machine cognition. Man Ray and this weird little piece of freeware are both meant to challenge the way we think about the patterns of a game, whether they be the strictly geometrical contours of a chess-as-art object, or the complete upending of our expectations about the patterns computer chess is supposed to follow.
Oikospiel Book 1: The Dog Opera, by DK Games; https://dkoikos.itch.io/oikospiel.
I’m not sure if I really played Oikospiel: Book 1, or if Oikospiel: Book 1 was something that just happened to me. More than anything, it felt like if one of Radiohead’s labyrinthine old websites had somehow been built in the Unity game engine. Here’s what I can tell you: you walk around in the third person a lot, usually as an animal. It’s called a “Dog Opera,” so the interactive soundtrack is really important. And there is a story that seems to mostly revolve around your attempts to create the game that you are already in, involving animals signing union cards, a rainy trip through the “Kochiri” forest, and a possible move to the Arctic. The beautiful thing about Oikospiel is that, like some of the best works of Salvador Dalí, it gives you just enough interpretative handholds to climb with but it doesn’t force you to take one simple route to an interpretation. Just when you’re thinking about the relationship between “oikos-spiel” as a “house game” and the etymology of economy (oiko-, nomos) in relation to union cards, Ubu Roi shows up! (Again! Who’s ready for their tarot reading?) What might that mean? Rather than haphazardly suggesting conceptual relationships where none exist, Oikospiel openly invites the player to follow whatever interpretative path subconsciously presents itself. As with Breton’s “soluble fish,” you are free to immerse yourself in and become part of a world where the Venn diagram of dream and reality is one perfect circle.
