Plaidophile

Yesterday I finally got around to buying Darwinia after having enjoyed the demo. Today I finished it. It's been a long time since I've been so compelled by a game to simply devour it as quickly as I could.

I don't like most RTSes, but Darwinia abstracts away the resource management enough that you hardly even notice it. It also has a great visual and audio style (with music by trash80, one of my favorite minimal electronica producers), and a lot of great little homages to the classic demoscene (it's worth starting up repeatedly just to see the various "bootloader" intros for example).

The plot is also pretty simplistic, but that works in its favor. I kept on cynically expecting a stupid cliché plot twist to come towards at the end (there is a lot of potential for that to happen!), but instead it stays the course as being a tiny gem of a story, an interactive dreamscape about a reclusive computer scientist watching his life's work unravel before him. It's also evocative of the story of Icarus and is basically a modern-day take on classic fables of hubris and helpfulness.

My only complaints about it are that it's a bit short, there's no network mode (which is ironic considering the plot of the game), and I can't figure out how to invoke the map editor which is probably a big part of why there's so few mods for it.

I'm surprised that it doesn't have some sort of procedurally-generated campaign mode, though. Much of the game is seemingly procedurally-generated (from what I can tell from the map format it's all just parameters which are set to a fractal terrain generator, for example) and you'd think there'd be a lot of room for exploration in that capacity.

Many times while playing the game I had moments where I wished that this was the kind of game I had worked on when I was in the industry. It has me feeling like I should spend more time and energy on these sorts of interactive art pieces.