Osada

Amanita Design’s Osada is a totally nonsensical Western music video flash animation interactive thing.   I really dug the western themes, having gone through a big Sergio Leone stage a few months back, even though the western imagery and sounds were kinda ancillary to the whole thing.

Was this irrational western hiding behind this classy facade all along?

What it reminded me of were the old Putt Putt games, which taught me how to use a mouse when I was 4. Last year I found out that they were designed by Monkey Island’s own Ron Gilbert, which probably explains why I played them so obsessively as a child.  The joy was in clicking every stupid thing in the scene and enjoying the funny noise it made. You pixel hunted like in the most hardcore of adventure games, because you were a kid with one game and kids are weirdly vigilant about that stuff. It’s a funny balancing act, between the difficulty game developers have with kids getting bored quickly or turning off because a particular section was too hard and the obsessive, time bountiful nature of youth.

It’s been some time since I felt that sense of wonder when I clicked around my computer screen.  Possibly since I discovered pornography back when the functions of the human body were still a mystery to me. Some years ago now.

I feel my comparisons between Putt Putt and Porn are quite valid. Also I don't remember the colors being so bad. Nostalgia's a bitch.

Amanita also does something very clever to tie a single, thin thread of rationality and continuity into the last scene of Osada, so good on them. Clever chaps who remind me a bit of Team Ace, who made Zeno Clash and are hard at work on Rock of Ages.  Both are surrealist in a totally different way to the standard “digital-geometric-colour” surrealism so popular among computer nerds. Keep making different games, guys.