Was it darkness, or the shadow of my brother?

August 5, 2015 5:13 PM

Spend some time with a depressed, laconic Luigi as he chain smokes and wanders through a crumbling Mushroom Kingdom, ruminating on ontology, ethics, family, identity, and the mistakes he and his brother have made, in Josh Millard's Ennuigi
posted by Catblack (27 comments total)

Beckett's "Warptube"
posted by The Whelk at 5:15 PM on August 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

Oh man, the lack of a "jump" button is brilliant. All those pipes and platforms that you know you ought to be able to reach, and you know the whole point of the game is supposed to be getting up there and exploring them, but you just… can't. I mean, not that the game has thrown any real obstacles in your way. You just don't have the capacity somehow. That is so vividly what serious depression feels like.
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:21 PM on August 5, 2015 [12 favorites]

Mefi's own
posted by Apoch at 5:30 PM on August 5, 2015

"You wear a shell; I've become one."

This is amazing.
posted by naju at 5:33 PM on August 5, 2015 [7 favorites]

Note to self: get more cigarettes.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:34 PM on August 5, 2015 [5 favorites]

I look at a turtle
and I think,
I have done you one better.
You have a shell,
I have become one.
posted by numaner at 5:35 PM on August 5, 2015 [8 favorites]

oh naju beat me to it. but man that is some serious ennui.
posted by numaner at 5:36 PM on August 5, 2015

I tried this on my Galaxy S-5. I couldn't move, I couldn't ruminate, I couldn't do anything. My character could only stand there in the dark while sad, tedious and mildly annoying music played over and over.

I think I had the perfect experience of this game.
posted by happyroach at 5:36 PM on August 5, 2015 [6 favorites]

See, let a smart smart guy go to WPI and this is what happens. Nice work tex.
posted by vrakatar at 5:40 PM on August 5, 2015

I feel like I've lost perspective.

As if the depth has gone out of the world.


BRILLIANT
posted by numaner at 5:43 PM on August 5, 2015 [5 favorites]

Lovely. But I kind of want a jump button where he lifts one foot a pixel, holds it there a moment, and puts it down.
posted by zompist at 5:43 PM on August 5, 2015 [17 favorites]

Stunning; a marvel.
posted by mrdaneri at 5:51 PM on August 5, 2015

I want a jump button where he just steps off the edge, into the void.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 6:05 PM on August 5, 2015 [4 favorites]

It was clear by now that there was no other castle, there was no princess.
posted by Flashman at 6:09 PM on August 5, 2015 [3 favorites]

This is how I feel when I play the original game. Though I've played it many times over the intervening decades, I've never finished it. I get killed now at the same places as I did in the 80s. I don't even reach some of those as my already poor reflexes degrade even more with age.

I will never save the princess. Bowser has defeated me.
posted by double block and bleed at 6:12 PM on August 5, 2015 [7 favorites]

Nice. And the smoking animation is perfect, wow.
posted by LobsterMitten at 6:15 PM on August 5, 2015

The screen that sometimes pops up, with the single tree in the middle of the frame: perfect.
posted by gauche at 6:17 PM on August 5, 2015

This is glorious.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 7:08 PM on August 5, 2015

This is my new favorite game.
posted by isthmus at 7:09 PM on August 5, 2015

"When I look at my life and its 16-bit colors, I feel like bursting into tears."
posted by turbid dahlia at 7:13 PM on August 5, 2015

This is fantastic! The writing is superb, and the concept is just genius. Made my morning.
posted by Dysk at 2:18 AM on August 6, 2015

Hi! Glad you guys like it, it was interesting to construct and to write over the last couple days.

Lovely. But I kind of want a jump button where he lifts one foot a pixel, holds it there a moment, and puts it down.

I had originally imagined letting him "jump" up one block by holding the button down and invoking a slow, laborious animation of pulling and scrabbling and, eventually, exhaustedly hoisting his sad weight up, but in practice I ended up balking at how much of my sprite sheet those extra animation frames would take up, so I kept it simple.

This was written in PICO 8, which grobstein posted about a couple weeks ago and which I've fallen head over heels for; it's a game development kit for a fictional 80s-era console, and so it restricts a ton of stuff to suggest the pain of writing for 32K game cartridges. It's fantastic.
posted by cortex at 5:48 AM on August 6, 2015 [10 favorites]

So, fun fact that a buddy told me a little while ago, but apparently some people thought for a while that Luigi was named so because he looked like Mario--the word 類似 means resemblance in Japanese.

The reality is that the American team came up with the name, but Miyamoto did think it was appropriate for that reason, apparently (source, Japanese).

Dunno, somehow I feel like that fits in with this.
posted by dubitable at 7:51 AM on August 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

I especially love how you can smoke while ruminating, but you can't start ruminating until you finish smoking.
posted by mrgoat at 2:27 PM on August 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

The plaudits keep rolling in. cortex, welcome to the exclusive club of people whose side projects of whimsically repurposing dark existentialism subsequently become popular memes.
posted by ardgedee at 5:43 PM on August 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

another write up
posted by namewithoutwords at 12:03 PM on August 14, 2015

Also at Rock Paper Shotgun.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:37 AM on August 16, 2015 [1 favorite]