This spring’s Manygame Collection titles grapple with learning, whether it’s in a school setting, growing up, or a metaphysical train ride. No matter the age or situation, it isn’t easy. These three protagonists put in the work. The next time I worry that I should know more, do better, listen harder, I’ll remind myself that I’m working on it too. Discomfort is a necessary part of the process. Thought leaders and technocapitalists will try to sell you a frictionless substitute for self-discovery, but the end result isn’t real.
Previously on Manygame Collection: Rev your text engines.
Some things never change. I have a test coming up this week, accompanied by the familiar twist of nerves in my gut. Realistically, I know it’s a single measure of my abilities. But emotionally, it feels much bigger. My classmates are anxious. Seatmates double-check answers after class and swap homework strategies. This is what learning feels like: new, strange, a bit lopsided. Nothing like it is in games.
Perfect Tides: Station to Station
It’s my first full semester of college courses in eleven years. Playing Perfect Tides: Station to Station feels like accidentally grazing a hot stove. I’m in multiple places at once: an undergrad in stubbornly eking out science fiction in my creative writing course, an older man looking around at my present-day Accounting 101 classmates. Mara’s fumbles through her schedule, student job, and interpersonal relationships are too close for comfort, like all great works of fiction. I grimace, I laugh, I keep pointing and clicking.
Perfect Tides: Station to Station’s resource management is deceptively simple: use keywords you’ve learned from Mara’s classes and the city at large to finish upcoming assignments. But each one is a trade-off. It’s 2003, so you can only type up assignments on the library’s well-worn iMac. Do you diligently research an excuse for your haphazard shelving system, or do you opt for more first-person observation at an acquaintance’s college party? Either way, the clock is ticking. Better relationships lead to more insights, but in true undergrad fashion, sometimes the only way to learn is to crash and burn.
Perfect Tides: Station to Station replicates that churning feeling in my gut as I map out the next few semesters of real-life college courses. I don’t know enough yet. What if I get overwhelmed and fall behind? How do I figure out what to do with my life? I’ve never studied at an early-2000s city college, but that doesn’t matter. Mara’s swings between budding confidence and early adulthood anxieties hit me right in the solar plexus.
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass completely passed me by on its original 2018 release, so I eagerly dove into its console version on Nintendo Switch. Jimmy is a wordless eight year old boy who lives in a dream world with his eccentric but loving family. His mother Helga sends him and his rebellious older brother, Buck, out into the world to run an errand. The dream world Jimmy lives in grows stranger as the journey continues, with something odd simmering beneath. Locked doors in their house threaten to burst open, and nearby villagers are openly hostile to Jimmy.
At first Jimmy feels limited in turn-based combat, but through his empathy he can take the form of other enemies. First, he adopts the form of a blob, able to pass through small spaces. Jimmy’s inner voice is strangely self-critiquing in blob form, then full of swagger when he adopts a hooligan persona. Each form comes with a new set of abilities in combat.
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass hits a tonal balance that even contemporary games struggle with. The cheery world hides pockets of dread and strangeness at the edges. Although the RPG Maker world and structure occassionally grate against the story, easily readable environments and the off-putting flashes of sadness keep me coming back. I know there’s something strange at the core of this game, and I trust it to go at its own pace.
Freeride
Freeride reminded me that some quizzes reveal more about the author than the person answering. You’re a passenger aboard an intergalactic train, soon swept up into conductor duties. Carrying objects from place to place, talking to other passengers, and mediation are your chief tasks as the Fate Train goes off the rails.
Freeride is upfront about being a playable personality quiz, yet I found most of my interaction almost frictionless. Telekinesis is floaty instead of tactile, and passenger interactions swing from prickly to friendly almost too quickly. Despite creative world design and charming text, I found myself going through the motions from plot point to plot point. Short playtimes are usually a mercy for game reviewers. But Freeride left me wishing for more time and friction in each loop.
Other players won’t bounce off Freeride quite as hard as I did. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s just the wrong time. But if you want a fourth-wall breaking personality test with less antagonism than other horror contemporaries (Doki Doki Literature Club or BURN, another Manygame title I bounced off of), Freeride might get you back on track.
Until next Manygame…
That’s all for this season’s Manygame Collection! (I know it’s a short one, but it’s midterms week. Wish me luck.) For more indie coverage, stay tuned to Press SPACE to Jump!
