LogFAQs > #933199905

7. 10 Beautiful Postcards (thecatamites)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g334qBswGKc

10 Beautiful Postcards is an easy game to recommend but a rather harder game to explain. Im caught between calling it an utter joy and a transformative work, if were lucky, and hopefully I can express both without undermining either one. To describe the actual time spent pressing keys in front of the screen doesnt sound like much, but rather its appeal grows in the way it sits in the mind, and I dont necessarily value one type of experience above the other.

To put a name to it, its a flatgame a genre which involves moving through a flat non-hierarchical space in a non-linear fashion, with minimal traditional game mechanics. Focus shifts away from the systemic and structural towards the expressive and associative. The game mostly involves visiting 10 different hotels, through a collage of incongruous, fragmentary spaces. Hotels are sort of transient, liminal non-places of shape-shifting function rooms and parodies of home decor, which can be freighted with all sorts of affect without any one thing sticking to it, which works quite well here. Visually, its a wide mix of pencil sketches, scanned photographs, stock images, pixel art, clay, etc. In a Fantastic Arcade talk by thecatamites from 2017, he mentions that the development process is made to accommodate whatever medium he felt like working with that day, and all of it can be thrown in and configured later. You go through rooms in any order without knowing what to expect, each room a stream-of-consciousness extrapolation, a non-sequitur, or both or neither. A subconscious network of logic may form in the mind here and there, but thats about it. That said, its not a chaotic, random jumble, and there are motifs that emerge. A frequent character type is the absurd visionary/wannabe entrepreneur/eccentric chancer, who seem to see in hotels the possibility of imprinting their consciousness, of turning out a manifestation of their psyche. Think BioShock, then forget BioShock. Its not really like BioShock.

Its a funny game full of very good writing, but its always hard to convey jokes by describing them, especially here where theyre not really jokes and a lot of it is absorbed ambiently as you zip through a room. Sometimes jokes dont work out of context, but in this case its more like Im giving it too much context by sectioning it off, but here goes: Theres a room where a mouse orchestra is rehearsing, and the onomatopoeia in the text box below it reads parp parp. In the attic room above theres one mouse playing a clarinet who goes sob i got kicked out. Theres a museum with a text box above saying that this is the educational portion of the game, and the rest of the room are a bunch of giant rocks with the proprietor standing next to each with some variation of nope, dont know anything about this one. And these are some of the easier ones to describe because theres a bit of narrative connective tissue to discern, but I dont want to spoil too much of it. The writing exists as fragmented memories that seep into the subconscious, taking on an autonomous existence there. Theres no ambiguity, no promise that the bits would cohere, or that it will make sense in culmination. It is, as the store page says, a wonderful pile of rubble to sift through on your computer.

Whats astounding is the rawness on display. 10BP has greater freedom of choice than any of the games that sell themselves on that feature. This is perhaps a bold claim for a game where you press something other than a direction key only a handful of times, and all the choices are instantly reversible and completely inconsequential, but what it has is an unrestrained interpretive space. A choice-heavy game will signpost its big decisions, putting emphasis on what it deems important. At the least, if a game has essential information it will lock you into a cutscene or conversation and a hierarchy emerges just by the sequence of sentences. In 10BP? If a character has 5 things to say, theyre on the screen in 5 spots, movement and change all coexisting on the same plane. Time and space are flattened out and everything is given equal weight. Theres no distinction between foreground and background, interior and exterior. Theres no collision, which means you walk straight through walls which arent there, or even off into the surrounding void. Do you want to walk into the void? Probably not, since theres nothing out there, but theres nothing stopping you.

So much of video games is about not seeing, about solving for the underlying systems and recognizing whats important and whats window-dressing that can be safely ignored. Walk into a room with a lot waist-high objects and youre no longer in that room but in the anticipation of the combat arena to come when the conversation ends. Games are typically meta-games, but here theres no possibility of a meta layer when there is one layer, allowing for pleasure in the totality of the aesthetic experience.

Overall, pinball hotel is my favourite - 5 stars out of 5 will visit again.

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