TekWar is the first in a series of cyberpunk novels “written” by William Shatner. If you read sci fi books around 1990, you’ll vaguely remember TekWar. You’ll vaguely remember it so damn hard.

According to popular legend, Shatner wrote the book during a strike on the set of Star Trek V. According to unpopular legend, it was the work of professional ghostwriter Ron Goulart. According to a bullshit lie I just made up, it was actually written by popular entertainer Herbert “Tiny Tim” Khaury while his ukelele was in the shop for repairs. Since truth lies in the middle, we can confidently say TekWar was written by Shatner, Goulart, and Tiny Tim working together and no I will not take further questions.

The book is about future-cop Jake Cardigan (far less cool than his brother, Jim Pullover). Framed for dealing a “Tek”, an illicit mind-altering drug, he must clear his name by infiltrating and cracking Tek cartels at the behest of a shadowy PI agency.

Today “cyberpunk” means a fluffy visual aesthetic, but in the 90s it meant a literary movement: Ballardian/Ellisonian “new wave” sci-fi with an emphasis on the sordid side of life: drug use, crime, and urban blight. Cyberpunk was raised around the principle that it’s not beauty that defines an age, it’s ugliness. The true face of the Middle Ages isn’t the Chartres Cathedral but the bubonic sores festering on a peasant’s neck. The 21st century will be remembered for World War II and the Holocaust, not the Green Revolution or the moon landing. As Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer realized, ruin and death have a fetishistic compulsion that draws us in and forces us to stare. What will the future of decay look like? The verdigris yet to flower, the crack yet to appear? How can we depict that?

In practice, the average writer isn’t very imaginative, and most 90s cyberpunk stories feature a futuristic setting awkwardly bolted to a bog-standard 1950s crime/western plot (Gibson’s “console cowboy” trope is an unsubtle nod to this). They were quick to write and cheap to adapt to film (places like Hong Kong’s Walled City and New York’s East 14th Street looked fairly cyberpunkish without a dollar spent on set dressing), and this led to a glut of substandard work that crashed the market.

Next to the genre’s more interesting works, such as Vurt and Snow Crash, TekWar stands out as particularly disposable. ”I wrote them as the sort of books you could read on airplanes and throw away afterwards,” Shatner once said. With that kind of sales job, I bet you’re itching to read TekWar already. But I am not here to talk about the book, or the TV show, or the other TV show, or the movie, or the comic book, or the marital aid.

I am here to discuss the PC game.

TekWar was a first-person shooter that came out in 1995 and left no trace on popular culture. That’s because it is a bad game. But in the long run, it wouldn’t have mattered if it was good.

Games have the lifespan of mayflies: they are released, played by however many people play them, and then fall into the same abyss; goodnight. Where they fall to, we cannot say. There is no thud as they hit the bottom. I remember countless PC games that once stood above the market like titans: dominating, inescapable…and now they’re gone. They’re not even obsolete, it’s like they don’t exist. Nobody talks about them, few even remember them, and if you think you do, it’s actually your childhood your remembering, not the game. Don’t believe me? Try replaying your favorite childhood game. It will feel strange and awkward and totally unlike your memories: you’d swear the game has been sucked out of the timeline and switched with an inferior off-brand copy. Your childhood is gone. The door into adulthood swings one way.

Music isn’t like that. “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” is from 1968 and still sounds like it was recorded this morning. The #1 song on the UK pop charts in January 1991 had Gregorian chanting. Occasionally a random song from decades ago will go viral, racking up tens of millions of listens for no other reason than it’s good and people like it.

Music lives forever: the same is not true for videogames. The most they can hope for is that an embarrassing Youtuber called “PixelNostalgia” or “8BitMemories” will waddle through it in DOSBox to the adulation of two hundred viewers. I remember this game! It was so great! I played it when I was six! Again, it’s not about the game, it’s about their childhood. Old games have past tense constructions (was, did, had) hanging around them like flies around roadkill. Their moment is short and they never get a second one. No revival is scheduled for The Fortress of Dr Radiaki.

1995 was an awkward year for first-person shooters. The “pseudo-3D” technology that had railgunned 1993’s Doom into the stratosphere was beginning to age, but the 3D revolution of 1996’s Quake hadn’t arrived yet. The industry settled into a holding pattern: we got iterations on the Doom formula (Heretic/Hexen/Star Wars: Dark Forces), as well as noble experiments (Magic Carpet 2/Descent) that never really felt like finished games. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath.

Then came Ken Silverman’s Build engine.

Silverman was a child prodigy from Rhode Island with a savantlike grasp of graphics programming and assembly code. Around 1992, he saw his brother playing a new game called Wolfenstein 3D, thought “I could make that” and…uh, he did. He reverse-engineered John Carmack’s cutting-edge “3D” engine from scratch, without a peek at the source code. He was sixteen years old.

Doom caused a spike of interest in shooting games. Licensed engines became a hot commodity, and so did the programmers who could work with them. In 1993-4, Scott Miller of Apogee wanted to develop a 3D shooter, but id Software wouldn’t sell him the Doom engine, so he hired Silverman to write a copy of it.

What followed was a long, messy process (Silverman had just enrolled at Brown University, and was soon failing entry-level courses because he spent all his time programming!) that culminated in Build, an quirk-filled oddball engine that powered some of the most memorable games of the 90s.

Build wasn’t a visual feast. Essentially a 2.5D engine with a lot of fancy tricks, it looked good by 1994 standards, passable by 1995 standards, and was severely manhandled by Quake. It was clunky and awkward. Everything cool it could do—such as rooms on top of rooms and mouselook—was achieved through an ugly hack. Silverman was a self-taught programmer, with all that implies, and his code was notoriously abstruse and buggy. This caused frustration for the programmers who had to work in it. I watched someone “speedrun” Duke Nukem 3D: it was actually kind of funny. He barely played the game, he simply exploited one glitch after another, clipping his way through whole levels.

So where did the Build engine shine? Dynamism. It did stuff. Unlike Doom‘s idTech 1 engine, which relied on pre-rendered BSP trees, Build generated level architecture on the fly, meaning walls and floors could move, rotate, and shift. Build took those little moments of environmental interaction in Doom (such as crushing a Spider Mastermind beneath a descending ceiling) and amplified them by a factor of ten. 1996’s Duke Nukem 3D let the player launch nuclear missiles and blow entire landscapes to pieces. 1997’s Blood had a level set on a moving train. 1997’s Shadow Warrior had driveable vehicles years before Halo. Few engines have been so exhuberantly designer-focused as Build.

The earliest Build game to exist (for a relaxed definition of “exist”) was 1994’s Rock’n Shaolin: Legend of the Seven Paladins 3D. It was the illegal afterbirth of a failed deal between Apogee/3D Realms and a Taiwanese/HK studio called Accend. For years, it was believed that the game was never finished (although Accend did leak an unauthorized demo on the internet), until someone found and photographed a game box at a flea market. So apparently Accend actually finished the game? And then released it, in complete defiance of the law? But didn’t advertise or promote it at all? I don’t know. There’s a lot of weird rumors surrounding that game. It’s cursed, and we’ll talk no more of it.

The first legal Build engine game was 1995’s Witchaven, a graphically ugly and technologically primitive Heretic-clone that I will probably never play again. I have made peace with that fact.

Witchaven is the most drab and depressing-looking game I’ve ever seen. The enemies look like claymation trolls melted with a hair-dryer. The controls suck. Combat consists of lining yourself up with enemies and swinging a melee weapon at them—which is frustrating, because there’s a delay of about a second before damage registers, and the first-person perspective means you can’t see where your feet are. Your melee weapons break after a few swings. At times Witchaven seems hell-bent on denying the player any sort of fun. The designers exploit virtually none of the Build engine’s possibilities. If the story of Build had ended with Witchaven, the engine would be forgotten today.

But then Duke Nukem 3D came out: a wonderful romp packed with style, personality, and humor. Quake was a leap forward for 3D technology,but Duke 3D was a comparable leap for design. It’s packed with silly cosmetic touches—you can flush toilets, and roll balls around on a billiards table—that individually seem pointless, but when you have a thousand of them the game just sparkles to life. When you played Duke, you felt the winds of change blow. The “boomer shooter” era of space marines shooting aliens in gray metal corridors was drawing to a close. Blood and Shadow Warriors (two more Build Engine games) further sealed the deal: shooter games could and should depict a living, breathing world.

But between Witchaven and Duke Nukem 3D, we got TekWar.

Again, we have Capstone Software to thank. I don’t know if this was made by the same team that worked on Witchaven. Given the differences in art and style, I guess would guess at “different people”. A sufficiently motivated writer would check the credits on MobyGames. I am not that writer.

TekWar features an early-gen version of Build, scarcely more capable than the version under the hood of Legend of the Seven Paladins. There are no slopes, rooms-above-rooms, or voxels. It supports reflective surfaces, but when you see yourself in a mirror you’ll wish it didn’t. Your character has no animation, and slides around as if on roller-skates.

TekWar loosely adapts the book’s story. The detective (deTektive?) elements are gone. Now Jake Cardigan is a wet-worker hired by Walter Bascom (voiced by William Shatner) to murder Tek dealers on the street without a trial. Who am I working for? Rodrigo Dutuerte?

You walk around city streets with your gun awkwardly jutting into the field of view like you’re a flasher with your dick clenched in your hand, looking for Tekgoons. It’s embarrassing. This could have been a setup for another brainless Doom clone, but TekWar is actually strangely creative. It boasts an intriguing “open world” layout: instead of playing levels by tapping through a menu, you step on a train inside the game, which takes you to part of the city controlled by one of the seven “TekLords”. This train station acts as a central hub, keeping you inside the experience and adding to the sense of immersion. This is standard today, but the idea of taking a train in a videogame seemed cool in 1995.

TekWar has sparks of the still-uninvented “tactical shooter” genre. The game is populated by NPCs who bumble around and get in the way. Shoot at them, and police start attacking in waves. This (in theory) forces you to be smart: rather than killing everything that breathes, you must eliminate Tek dealers while sparing civilians unharmed. Doom is “you against the world”. TekWar is “you against team 1, while trying to pacify team 2 by not hurting team 3”. This idea, if it had been done well, would have added a tactical, cerebral edge to Tekwar unlike any FPS game yet to be released. It would have been a revolution.

It’s not done well. The AI is Daikatana-level terrible, and this makes it impossible to plan or predict what will happen. Cops ignore Tek dealers who are firing guns at you, but the moment you unholster a gun to fight back, the cops start blasting away at you too. It sucks.

Everyone in this game is absurdly sensitive to sound. You can unholster a gun in an empty room and hear cops reacting to it in the street outside. Often it’s quicker to just massacre everyone you see, cops and civvies and bad guys alike, and deal with William Shatner’s bitching afterward. Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.

Even if you’re a boy scout who’s dedicated to minimizing casualties, it’s easy to shoot civilians by mistake, because they look like enemies, particularly at a distance. The enemies themselves are identikit clones: I accidentally killed a TekLord (!) and didn’t even realize it until Shatner started congratulating me. I assumed he was just a regular enemy who was soaking up a lot of my shots for some reason, possibly because the game’s hit registration is terrible.

Tekwar has severe Teknical difficulties. Bugs I’ve seen or heard of include:

• You sometimes lose all your weapons when starting a new level.
• If you get pinched between two sliding doors, it kicks you back to DOS with an “INVALID SECTOR FOR PLAYER” message.
• Like Doom, enemies can be “gibbed” by explosions. However, gibbed enemies don’t drop vital keys, and levels become unwinnable if this happens.
• Binding movement keys to your mouse allows for super fast movement for some reason.

Some glitches are honestly adorable. In the Carlyle Rossi section of a game, there’s a ceiling-mounted turret that…isn’t a turret. It moves around the ceiling, chasing you like a lost dog. (An explanation for this I found on a forum: the turrets are considered regular enemies in the game code, just with their movement speed set to “zero”. But this parameter had to be set by hand, and the developers evidently forgot in the case of this one turret. So it moves.)

The game has FMV videos, where your boss Walter Bascom (played by William Shatner) gives missing briefings. He’ll say stuff like “Quick! I’m uptown, and I just saw Marty Dollar! Get down here and help me bring him in!”, giving the impression that the game’s is co-op and you’ll be fighting side by side with Captain Kirk. And do you? Don’t be stupid. Shatner never once appears in the game.

I should mention that 1995 was also the peak of the “interactive movie” fad, when people thought the future of gaming lay in clicking buttons and watching 320×240 Smacker files of actors reacting to what you just did. If you eliminate a TekLord without harming civilians, Shatner praises you. If you fail in either of these tasks, he yells at you (although I’ve found that he sometimes compliments you on a bloodless victory when actually you did kill a civilian. Maybe it was a minority.)

I enjoy Shatner as an actor, but I don’t need to: nobody loves him as much as he loves himself. His every line is delivered with consummate smugness. “I’m not gonna waste your time…or, more importantly, my time.” And then he pauses for an uncomfortable amount of time so you can chuckle. And it’s 1995, so the videos all look like this.

If you’re allergic to excessive pixels, don’t worry, these videos won’t even trigger a sneeze. The actual game is at leats more colorful than Witchaven, but in a garish, kitsch way, with a color palette ruthlessly optimized for ugliness. The in-game sprites are rotoscoped from real-life actors (probably from the TV show), which sounds great in theory, but creates a persistant sense of unreality. They clearly do not belong in the world of the game.

Do you see what I mean? The actress is being lit from her right (camera left), but there’s nothing in the game that could be casting that light. She’s standing next to a building, and should be in shadow! This sends a white-hot signal to your brain that something’s not right. Every character model has the same problem: they are illuminated and highlighted in all the wrong places, and it breaks the illusion of reality.

Other Build engine games dodged the problem by rendering sprites in very soft light (Duke 3D, Blood), or by being so cartoony that it didn’t matter (the rest of them, basically). Tekwar, with its Promethean striving for realism, actually looks the fakest out of any of them. It doesn’t help that the sprites often have really shitty roto, with bits of the backdrop visible on their models.

Everywhere you look, the reality of the game world is broken by sloppy and bizarre touches. The textures don’t match up. There’s water, but you can’t swim: you just instantly fall to the bottom and then start walking again (amidst reeds that don’t seem to connect with the floor). Climbing ladders is absurdly slow. This is the only game I’ve played where it takes longer to climb a ladder than it would have taken me in real life.

Then there’s the infamous “matrix” levels, which are totally confusing, are ripped off from System Shock, and just look like complete ass. Nothing makes visual sense. If anything, it looks like one of those “filler” games from Action 52, where it’s just a jumble of random sprites they had lying around. And that’s basically the climactic ending point of the game.

So, in TekWar we find some ambitious ideas, along with execution so botched that not even the combined powers of Capstone, Will Shatner, Ron Goulart, and Ken Silverman could save it. I wish I liked it more, but Tekwar badly needs teknical support.

Everything it needed to be, but still not enough.

The first two Age of Empires games (from 1997 and 1999) are childhood classics that I played for a literal age. Particularly the second one. I’m uncertain on this, but if you added up all the hours I’ve spent playing Age of Empires II, I think you’d have a number equal to the hours I’ve spent playing Age of Empires II. The game was so satisfying, succeeding at everything it tried to do, with deep, economy-focused gameplay that took skill to master (the difference between a 1400 and 1600 ELO Age of Empires II player is just as large as in, say, chess) and visceral, kinetic battles.

The historic theme gave you context and a reason to care (“lead the Golden Horde against the Shah of Khwarazm” will always be cooler than “are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?”, for some reason) and the graphics were great, winning me over from Blizzard’s Starcraft, which was also fun but must rank as one of the ugliest games ever made. Age of Empires II’s matches played out a lot slower than Starcraft’s, but they had a bigger, higher build. Games with lots of players on a giant-sized map took on a deliriously epic quality, lasting for hours and hours, with backstabbing, politics, mounting desperation as resources dwindled, heroic last stands, ended friendships, etc. Think of all the fun things you’ve done and rank them from 1 to 10. Unless “eight player Age of Empires II LAN party where everybody’s drunk” is on the list, the most you’ve experienced is a 9.

2002’s Age of Mythology was step backward. It had some cute stuff and a lot of polish, but the new 3D engine didn’t look good and Ensemble Studios had some questionable ideas, like making higher-tier units take up multiple population spaces, causing you to hit your population cap the moment you tried to do anything fun (or so it seemed). And it was the start of the epoch where games coddled you, and didn’t allow you to make mistakes. For example, you can’t delete your town center. Not that you’d really want to, but I still feel philosophically that if I want to delete my own buildings I should be allowed to. Age of Empires I and II had a libertarian “anything goes” ethos to game design. Age of Mythology was like being artificially confined at every turn.

I played Age of Empires III for a few hours and uninstalled it. I’d seen enough; the home cities, card system, and so forth just screamed “artificial complication”, and the idiot-proof game design had hit new levels, with villagers that collected infinite resources and never needed to be moved. All the depth was gone from the core gameplay loop, leaving the sense that the game was mostly just playing itself. The colonial theme was dull particularly next to the largeness of the last two games. In Age of Empires you take cavemen at the dawn of history, and create Rome, Egypt, and Carthage. In Age of Empires II you take illiterate barbarians and guide them into the Renaissance. In Age of Empires III you take 17th century settlers and turn them into 18th century settlers. Oh my God, I paid for the entire seat when I’ll only need the edge! The campaign was actually laughable: why am I fighting Illuminati cultists for the fountain of youth in an Age of Empires game?

In 2009, Microsoft disbanded Ensemble Studios for unclear reasons (the company hadn’t put a foot wrong commercially: even Age of Empires III had sold millions of copies), sat on the license for a while, then licensed it out to other studios (particularly Hidden Path Entertainment and Forgotten Empires), who all did various things that I call “the same game, but now on Steam”. These include Age of Empires II HD Edition, Age of Empires Definitive Edition, Age of Empires II Definitive Edition, and a number of add-ons and expansions such as Forgotten Empires. Each “improved” the game from a technical perspective, but none seemed really necessary, and they also had the effect of fracturing the already-dwindling community – Age of Empires II DE players can’t play with Age of Empires II HD players, and custom maps developed for Age of Empires II are not compatible with any later versions. I kept playing my CD-Rom version of The Conquerors for a long time.

And now there’s a sequel. A sequel that I wasn’t aware of until it launched. While I have an amazing ability to dodge million dollar ad campaigns, it’s also possible the game didn’t get a million-dollar ad campaign. Quiet launches are normally a bad sign (developers don’t want their game to get beaten up too much by reviewers) but this isn’t the case: Age of Empires II is decent and well thought out.

The game is basically a collection of all the series’ best ideas – which are 90% from I and II, honestly – and puts them in one package, with some new gameplay improvements. It sticks closely to the series’ main concept – you have a town center, train villagers from the town center, use them to build houses and gather resources, etc – but there are little touches that are nice. As with previous Age games, you advance through multiple “ages”, each of which unlocks additional units and technologies. But where in previous games this would lock down your town center for several minutes (pumping the brakes on the game’s momentum), AoE4 lets you continue using your town center even while advancing. It’s a small touch but it makes the game a lot faster.

Advancing to a new age now requires construction of a “landmark” – you have your choice of several per age, which each offer unique buffs and perks. Chinese, for example, can choose to Castle with either a Astronomical Clocktower (“Acts as a Siege Workshop. Produces siege engines with +50% health.”) or Imperial Palace (“Possesses a large sight radius. Activate to view the location of enemy Villagers for 10 seconds.”). This is the exact same mechanic as Age of Mythology’s minor gods, but it’s not a bad idea.

The eight civilizations (English, French, Mongol, Rus, Holy Roman Empire, Chinese, Delhi Sultanate, Abbasids) are pretty different in how they play – it’s almost like learning eight different games. The Mongols get a kind of abusive Oovoo building that allows you to build two units at once – I have a feeling this will be patched soon.

Also, I’m glad they finally added “attack move”, 1995’s hottest new feature.

Beloved mainstays of the series all return, such as the trebuchets, relics, and Black Forest (an absolutely obnoxious map that every noob picks because you can hold off pushes forever with a few walls). The monks don’t go “wolololo”, but at least there are war elephants. God damn they’re big. They’re the size of buildings.

The minor changes above aside, it just doesn’t feel like a sequel. It’s just Age of Empires II rebooted for the 3rd or 4th time. I won solo against 2 hard AIs on my first game because of how close it was to AoE2, despite the fact that none of my old hotkeys worked.

The graphics are surprisingly drab. The 2D Age of Empires games only had 256 colors, but they worked hard to make every unit distinct with sharp color contrasts and animation cycles. Here, armies just blur into a blob of indecipherable 3D men. The graphics are just technically unimpressive in general. The recommended graphics card? A GeForce 970. There’s no map editor, because why would there be.

It’s clear why they’d draw so much inspiration from AoE2, as it’s the only game in the franchise that still has legs. But it doesn’t do anything to move a stale genre forward. AoM was flawed but at least tried some new things. AoE4 is super safe and takes no risks. They probably wore kneepads and padded helmets while programming it.

The game is fun, but only in a faceless and bland way. I still remember the AoE2’s William Wallace campaign, with that hilarious fake Scottish accent. It was great. AoE4’s learning mission is about a faceless tribe of settlers fighting faceless enemies, while a woman issues instructions in her best “your call is important to us” voice. It was just dull.

And while I hate to sound like a 2014 Youtuber ranting abouty ESS JAY DUBYAS ruining vidya games, there’s no gore, no references to genocide (the Mongols are described as a “a disciplined civilization, recognized for changing history in connecting the East to the West”), and nothing remotely edgy or offensive at all (I liked how AoK:TC let you literally research the Inquisition as a tech). This works against its historical aspect. There are female soldiers, too. Can’t wait for the upcoming DLC adding transgender people and furries and whatever.

I don’t know how long I’ll keep playing it for. It’s fine. But one of the many ways the world has changed since 2003 is that the real-time strategy genre has completely fallen dead. Out of curiousity, I went on Twitch and viewed the top-viewed RTS games.

Age of Empires IV. Mobile scam game. Mobile scam game. Starcraft. Hearts of Iron 4. Age of Empires II. Starcraft II (uhh?).  Mobile scam game…

The top 20th RTS game was Command and Conquer: Red Alert. A game from 1996. And if you take out the contemptuous mobile shovelware and mislabelled wargames, it would have been in the top 10. You know a genre’s in healthy shape when its 10th most viewed game is an MS-DOS title from the middle of the Clinton presidency.

The last viable branch of the genre is probably MOBA games such as DOTA and League of Legends, whose click-heavy isometric style is a clear artifact from the real-time strategy genre. I don’t know why the genre stopped selling, but it’s probably going to take more than another remake to bring it back. Age of Empires IV feels like a slickly missed opportunity. The title is bitterly ironic: this series (and genre) is indeed showing its age.

Eversion is a short horror platform game I downloaded in 2010.

That last part – me downloading it – is very important. From a certain reference frame (mine), the game did not exist until I downloaded it. So you could say I created the game by downloading it. No, don’t thank me. It was no trouble.

Eversion is a Mario clone with a unique concept: you transport yourself between variations of the same stage that exist in different realities. Fluffy clouds in Dimension 1 might be weight-supporting platforms in Dimension 2, while a solid roof might be breakable tiles in Dimension 3.

In most games you move a character around a level. In Eversion you move a level around a character. Much of Eversion consists of toggling between various layers of reality, seeking the one that will allow you to advance. New dimensions become available as you progress deeper in the game, and sometimes the game forcibly dimension-shifts you no matter what you do.

It’s like the game exists in 3D space without having 3D graphics: you can traverse the game in four directions, plus go “inward” and “outward” into slightly-different universes. As you might have guessed, the dimensions become increasingly dark; the music scarier, the monsters replaced with nastier versions of themselves, and so on.

Eversion proves a fact that’s already proven to hell and back: less is more with horror. Many of the mid-tier realities are creepy, with their slightly-off color schemes and slightly-cracked music. In the lowest dimension you’re picking up skull items while VERY SCARY horror music shrills in the background, and the result is more comical than frightening.

The production qualities are reasonable for a one-man game originally developed for a contest. The pixel art is okay, the music is really good, and the mechanics feel solid. The game’s not long – after memorizing the puzzles I could run through Eversion in about 30 minutes – and it has two endings, a happy and a sad one (perhaps sad and happy?). The least fun parts are the tiny hotspots that often have you running all over a level, jumping infuriatingly at air, trying to trigger the magic pixel.

Super Mario Bros is such a cliche that even its ripoffs have cliches. You’ve got the super-hard game that sadistically kills you every 2 seconds (and then taunts you with a kill-counter), a’la Syobon Action/Cat Mario. Then you have the parody or subversion, such as Super Hornio Brothers (or arguably Nintendo’s own Wario).

Eversion has elements of the latter, but it’s also that rarest of birds: a SMB copy that conceptually evolves Super Mario Bros in an interesting way, and thus deserves existence. You wouldn’t think improving on a 1985 platform game would be an achievement, but I’ll be damned if 90% of indie games can manage it.

You play as a flower. I never noticed I was a flower until I re-read the game’s description on Steam today – it was a detail I’d totally overlooked despite it being the central part of the game and the one thing I should have seen. I assumed I was a weird furry character. But then, how familiar are you with the details of your own body? Without looking, could you draw (or describe) your toes in such a way that they’re distinguishable from other toes? How much σεαυτόν do we γνῶθι?

Eversion was released for Windows in 2008, and has since been ported to Mac OS, Linux, and real life. Why real life? Because when I watched a Youtube playthrough of it to refresh my memory in 2021, it was nothing like I remembered. It’s possible that the graphics and sound were spruced up in a later version, but I think you’ll agree it’s more likely the world really works like the one in Eversion and I travelled to another dimension without realizing it.