Conway Corrupted

An unusual game. The grid-based level design (if you can call it that) combined with the inspiration from Conway's Game of Life that the game wears on its sleeves lends itself nicely to the Corruption theme of the jam.

Game mechanics are simple and immediately intuitive, despite no explicit instructions telling us how the purple and white squares would interact with or amongst each other. In this regard, if the game's objective was to provide a tourist's perspective on this very mechanic, I'd go so far to say it did so quite splendidly. A prime example of this is demonstrated in the strong feedback the game gives you for discovering the 4-square perpetual motion machine (doubtlessly other such self-perpetuating structures exist, though this may be the most common configuration).

Even as I said that, this fact only remains true for the first few levels. Once the first dozen or so is over, the level design seems to shift into a frenetic mess of white pixels for us to rack up the score meter to our heart's content, only to move on to the next level to do the same thing (I assume these levels were not manually handcrafted and were procedurally generated in some way, but many props to the developer if this isn't true). And as unmistakably dubious as it was to throw us into this fray of infinite infection (I can attest as the player it was not what I say would fit the conventional videogame definition of fun), I think the decisions leading up to it definitely made for an interesting work of art. The world of Greater Splendourshire, whose name would suggest it is the land of the fantastic and the whimsical, the promised land of imagination where all dreams come true, is black and dreary. Its inhabitants simple and mindless, corruptible. It drones with a vile sickness that emanates from its very core. In this respect it's hard to tell whether our purple protagonist is its salvation or its destruction. It's a world which only needs a group of square of side-length 2 to fuel the economy and run the state. It's a world where one purple pixel can ruin it all. It's a nightmarish hellscape you wish to escape from. Where's the exit...? Will it ever end...? Until the purple square, too, grows tired, grows bored, purges its own essence. Until it, too, corrupts into the fading blackness of the eldritch cityscape. Alas, peace contains itself in Greater Splendourshire. It wouldn't the Empire's cradle if it couldn't.

Welcome to Splendourshire. Where every instance can pass has passed and will. Where fantasy becomes reality and vice versa. It is, after all, a most wonderful place to visit.

-Jacob Feller

5/5