Games that Won't Leave the Dark

Hey! My book, "How a Game Lives: The Annotated Essays of Jacob Geller" is available for pre-order, but only until May 10! Check it out here: www.lostincult.co.uk/howagamelives

About the end of "White Shadows": I am very sure that ‘A38’ is a very obscure reference... to the French animated film ‘The Twelve Tasks of Asterix (Les Douze travaux d'Astérix)’ (1976). One of the main character Asterix's tasks is to obtain the 'A38 permit' from the prefectural administration, the 'house that makes madmen'. In a Kafkaesque odyssey from application office to application office, he slowly begins to lose his mind. Only when he simply invents a new form ‘A39’ himself does he manage to escape the house. In my generation - I come from Germany - we watched this film over and over again on television, so that the expression 'A38 permit' is synonymous with the impossibility of escaping the bureaucratic madness. And the development team of "White Shadows", Monokel, comes from Cologne, Germany.

I can't believe I was challenged to not know a single game, yet when hearing "Golf horror" I got excited only to be presented with a different golf horror game than the one I know.

My favorite part about any Geller essay is how much he clearly savors every work of art that comes his way. Silly spooky golf game? Hell yeah. Come and See but it's a dark European fairy tale? You betcha.

As a swedish person, I kind of find it interesting that the micro genre "young child + dangerous world" is almost entirely scandinavian. Limbo and Inside were both created by PlayDead, a Danish studio, while Little Nightmares, Bramble, Fran Bow and Little Misfortune were all created by Swedish studios. I wonder why that is honestly.

I REMEMBER WHITE SHADOWS my read on the ending was something along the lines of .... everyone having a part to play. even in a revolution, even in a massive societal shift, the actual nitty gritty the pushing of the smallest domino is done by normal people. the tickets the birds collect, both the player character "A38" and the bird who comes after, "A39" are both revolutionaries. The ticket booth, feels less polished than the rest of the city, and feels like a holdout made by an underground (hehe) organization of other revolutionaries camping out in the city, rather than an intentional part of it. there are hundreds of floodlights. and they're all on separate platforms that are powered individually, and fly individually. one character cant shut them all off all at once. it needs to be a concerted effort. the serial numbers are the individual birds who have to go to each separate lamp. one bird, one set of artificial wings, and one number, per lamp. and the phone call is the go-signal. to me it felt like the game was saying "you aren't the only one who has to go through danger and trials and tribulations to get to where you are. revolution is built by community. and every single one of you has faced the same danger. you may not be the lone standing hero, but you were never alone in your struggle." having you change characters at the last second made me feel like it was telling me to recognize that camaraderie. that they're all fighting the same fight.

To clarify (as a scandinavian who has studied folklore), a myling isn’t necessarily a child that was sacrificed. Usually the story goes that an unmarried woman has a newborn child she doesn’t want, so she kills the baby and buries it somewhere near the house or by a church (sometimes inside the church walls). Since the baby wasn’t baptised or buried in accordance with the church’s rules, they become a myling. Most stories about them involve the myling appearing before a crowd to reveal their mother’s crimes as an act of vengeance (sometimes at her wedding, it’s all very dramatic).

the twitter “screenshot” at 2:17 is the funniest shit ever. “who else can’t regain their childhood!” by “she liminal on my space”

A38 is a reference to "The Twelve Tasks of Asterix" in which one of the tasks for the heroes is to receive the "permit A 38" from a system of infinite bureaucracy

Contextualizing tiny indie games like these as short stories is brilliant - it'll be an absolute gamechanger when it comes to explaining my tastes to people who demand 500 hours of content out of every single game they play.

The monthly release schedule is truly the best way to do it. Not so often that I get oversaturated, but also not so infrequent that I forget you exist. I’m always excited to click on a new Jacob Geller video

The golf game and mixing of genres really reminds me of the trend of "retail horror"-games lately. Like monsters aren't scary anymore. But the stress of dealing with the endless amount of new and entitled people that think they can take advantage of you, that scary!

13:47 jumpscares don’t usually get me and jacob geller was literally talking over this one but somehow i still got scared

"It's actually called fore-play" Dammit Geller, that one got me good.

silly horror is one of my favorites. you are being chased by a killer, you are alone, it is dark, you're in danger- but you just have to finish your round of golf. you are faced with eldritch horrors beyond your very imagination, your universe as you know it is to be completely destroyed by them- but you find these horrors... attractive, and in fact, your one End of World wish is to kiss them. you find out your neighbor is a murderer, someone you have had many a friendly interaction with, and you fear you might be next on the chopping block- how do you know this? you're a peeping tom, and as it turns out, you both have been eyeing the same people. you are being hunted by unknown assailants in broad daylight, all you can do is run for your life in terror- you are a duck. love it.

I just wanted to draw a bit of attention to these lines here. "The game traps you between the gears, makes you feel that you're the problem in this system otherwise perfectly optimized for mechanical efficiency. The massive scale of many of the levels further alienate you from the city, stumbling through a society that's designed you out of it." It's not the focus of the video I know, but these lines really hit me hard. Such a wonderful description of something I've felt my whole life.

13:04 "Your unseen room could contain any brand of evil" Look behind myself to see my cat staring back at me. Seems about right.

Okay so concerning the A38 moment in White Shadows. I really cannot explain the way it plays into the narrative here, but at least I can give a little more information on it. The A38 and A39 are WEEEELL known numbers to anyone in Europe who grew up watching Asterix and Obelix films. In The Twelve Tasks of Asterix (probably everyone's childhood favourite and for good reason, it's a fantastic comedy), one of Asterix' herculean tasks is getting "permit A38" at "the house that makes lunatics". It's a fantastic riff on the beaurocratic insanity of getting any kind of form at an administrative office in France - and it rings even truer as a German watching it, because our system is just...yes, it makes lunatics. And after getting bossed around and sent through the bowels of this house a dozen times over, Asterix eventually beats the system by instead asking the officials why they don't offer permit A39, turning their games on themselves. So I would say the A38 part is definitely an hommage to that, but how it works in the grand structure and narrative of the game...dunno. But perhaps this little nugget of info helps?

The Bonbon jumpscare reminds me that every indie game is a horror classic if you're a distrusting paranoid wreck who's worried to turn around like I am.

bonbon has always really stuck with me. the titular bonbon looks shocking like a reoccurring nightmare trauma creature I had when I was a kid. it's weird to see it outside of my dreams