Things are wanting bleak proper now, y’all. Between world pandemics, environmental and financial collapse, and nearly all the things taking place with politics, it’s typically arduous to look on the brilliant aspect – not to mention begin planning for a greater tomorrow. But Utopias: Navigating Without Coordinates, launched at this time, is attempting its hardest to just do that. A collectivist work from collectivist artists, Utopias desires to discover what it means for games to be “utopian”, by the use of alien house-parties, anti-bullets and chook emancipation.
Utopias is the work of Berlin / Moscow arts collective AAA Software. Each of the game(?)’s 9 worlds is a self-described private utopia – a collaborative work designed to discover every member’s particular person imaginative and prescient for a utopian game-space.
They’re bloody weird areas, too, with even that brief glimpse within the trailer flashing by means of fluid swimming pools; the launch bay for definitely-not-a-Gundam, a inventory third-person Unity character controller sprinting by means of colors and noise, and a cryptic android that might’ve stepped out of the field artwork for any graphics card launched pre-2010. Its retailer web page sports activities some nice options, from “free a bird” and “shoot bio-bullets to spawn life” to easily “die”. Neat!
That act of weirdness is deliberate intent – positioned by the creators as acid games on their equally acidic website, a “collective psychedelia” to place their works in direct opposition to capitalist norms.
“Something that we keep coming back to as a collective is an attraction to weirdness, a poetic kind of not-making-sense. What happens if you take away the traditional narrative scaffolding? How do you respond to the discomfort, confusion, and frustration that arises from travelling without coordinates, when you don’t really know where your next step will lead you? How does it feel to be lost? To be unproductive? To be unusable?”
Is Utopias profitable by its personal metrics? Does it – can it – obtain its radical utopian beliefs? I flatly don’t know. Regrettably, Utopias was launched too late within the day for me to discover these dreamscapes myself earlier than my shift closed.
But then, it appears neither do AAA, who noticed their very own definitions shift over the course of improvement. If the works aren’t radical sufficient, then maybe the means during which they got here to be can fill within the gaps.
“We are uncertain if we can achieve our utopian ideals and we have come to embrace that. During the long development time of the project, we became aware that “utopia” was not essentially a spot or an concept we might attain however quite a technique of attempting to navigate the territory that lies between us and alter.
“This very much describes the practical process of learning to organize a collective. Utopias is a viewport into this process.”
Regardless, what we’re left with is a bounty of bizarre, surreal areas to tug aside. It’s maybe simple to write down off as “haha, so random” at a look, and possibly that’s the case as soon as I bounce in correct. But for now, I’m fascinated by the net of rituals, worship, nature, chook simulations and unapologetic color being supplied up by Utopias.
Utopias: Navigating Without Coordinates is accessible free of charge / pay-what-you-want over on Itch.io.
