Comment by lkois
2 days ago
I wasn't aware of this game until AFTER I saw the movie. Made a lot more sense after that. Watching a guy solve the same puzzle over and over felt like an odd narrative choice.
A labyrinthine Shinjuku would still be way cooler. Shibuya station doesn't have quite the same disorienting featureless repetition to it, but offers a more overwhelming MC Escher-like experience where you can often SEE exactly where you want to go in the near-distance, but every path and every turn brings you into a completely different space, and rarely any closer to your destination.
> offers a more overwhelming MC Escher-like experience
That reminds me of one of my favourite games of all time, Knossu [1]. It's a short game from the peak of the indie era, written by Jonathan Whiting (whose post "Why I write games in C" made the rounds a few times here [2]). It's not anything like a train station, but it's non-Euclidean, labyrinthine, and surreal. My favourite part is that despite it being extremely simple (WASD only), and despite having beat it, I still don't really understand the core mechanic. It feels like a dream.
Actually, hell, that reminder reminds me of another similar looking game, LSD: Dream Emulator [3]. One of the many surreal Platstation 1 & 2 "games" from Japan. I haven't played it, but I've been thinking about it lately as it's the cover art for Alt-J's album Relaxer [4].
Which reminds me of another *--STACK OVERFLOW--*
1. https://jonathanwhiting.com/games/knossu/press.html
2. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Why+I+Write+Games+in+C
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD:_Dream_Emulator
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxer_(album)