Walking through the doors of this boutique video game festival, you are immediately greeted by a bullet hell shoot-em-up with a painterly twist. In ZOE Begone!, you dodge and unleash attacks at blistering speed before the game erupts into a euphoric shower of pointillist colour, dazzling the eyes and punishing the thumbs. Next to it sits Left Upon Read; at first glance, a dark-fantasy Quake clone, but one that gives you the bizarre task of checking text messages on a smartphone as you slice your way through a dungeon. These are subversive games, taking well-worn design tropes and breaking them in witty, playful ways.
Rule-breaking is a major theme of Glasgow independent game festival, the latest iteration of an event previously known as Southside games festival. It took place last weekend at Civic House, nestled in the shadow of the M8, the concrete eyesore that carves through Glasgow and connects the city with the wider central belt. On display are more eccentric and smaller-budget games than those you see on shelves, all made by developers who either live within Glasgow or a short train ride away. Co-founder Joe Bain sees such works as part of the “wider cultural landscape” of games, and sought to create a space treating them as such. It’s a far cry from trade fairs such as Gamescom where, beyond the boisterous public halls, the machinations of the games industry can feel as if they’re moving in capital-driven lockstep.
During a panel on “unconventional games”, Glasgow-based game maker Stephen Gillmurphy, better known as thecatamites, jabbed at what he describes as the medium’s “cult of depth”: his argument goes that video games often consist of keys opening doors, abilities unlocking paths, design intended to lead you further into the depths of a virtual world, only to discover when you complete it that there’s nothing meaningful at the end. Gillmurphy has transformed this thesis into a stunning horror game of uneasy, deliberate flatness, Anthology of the Killer, playable at the show.
Elsewhere, attendees make peace with dead virtual pets in Tamagotchi Seance, an interactive fiction game that invites them to speak (out loud) to their dearly beloved critters (all I say is “sorry”). The darkly compelling Apartment Story is in the same room, a miserabilist slice-of-life simulator – part gangster thriller, part The Sims, with the boozy chaos of a John Cassavetes movie.
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Events like these are all about spontaneous interactions. I huddle together with another attendee to play language-deciphering game Kevin (1997-2077). We’re presented with an inscrutable pictorial and lexicographical text, and few guidelines on how to read it. We wonder what it could possibly mean, and who Kevin is. We annotate the text, adding our own words and pictures, and puzzling over those of others. Over the course of the show, it becomes a participative art piece, a harebrained exercise in collective puzzle-solving for which there is probably no definitive answer.
For decades, Scottish video games have been synonymous with the maker of Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar North in Edinburgh – but not today. Here, as co-founder Ryan Caulfield says, is a wonderfully broad selection of the “weird and wonderful”. In an era when it can feel as if the possibilities of video games have contracted, when every other game appears to be a live-service looter-shooter chasing perpetual profits, what a thrill it is to play a set of games with such an irreverent attitude towards upending convention.