Perfectly Peculiar Pixels [#11]

Even Apollo took 11 tries to make their giant leap, so I’m glad the small step of featuring our first interview came a bit later than planned, opposed to never!

The SCP forum fascinated me since the first time I ran into it. Not so much the individual cases portrayed, as much as it being such an aetherial entity in itself. It teaches, in my opinion, two very important things. Primarily, it shows just how little in terms of sophistication it takes to get people hooked on something - something the shear number of cases can atest to. And secondly, directly related - just how important a good concept, a good design, if you will, is important in making it happen.

The most mainstream way into SCP is probably playing Control. A game which for either legal or reasons of creative control, has no direct link to the foundation, but is a clear lift of its essence. The actual foundation however, is an amazing collaborative achievement of independent contributions. The site may be somewhat impenetrable from afar, but if you delve into it, you will find an assortment of stories all building the same world. Some of the stories you might even recognize in our main attraction today.

SCP: Secret Laboratory is a free 2017 game set in the titular universe. As essentially an FPS, it leaves a lot of potential on the table, even though escaping as various SCP entites does provide a variety of gameplay mechanics. I also picked it because it shares a ‘character’ with our main entry, and different interpretations of the same foundation is what SCP seems to be all about!

Before the main course of the evening, you should check out Mladen’s latest game, Go Home Annie. It makes amazing use of limited resources to create a compelling and enjoyable narrative that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Like some other games featuring peculiar underground laboratories with otherworldly technologies that don’t go on forever, it leaves ample room for a future sequel, which I personally hope we get.

Unlike Unicorn Wars, a masterpiece of an animated movie that could only have come out of Spain, the cutesy characters in this game provide a more Cartoon Network level of violence. Outside of unnecessary cosmetic upgrades to your character in the story mode, the game doesn’t really seem to offer anything new in terms of gameplay. It is, however, a masterclass in how not to treat your PC players. While there might be one, because of the highly unorthodox control scheme, I couldn’t, for example, find my way out of the fighting mode. Shortcuts in-game are also scattered across the keyboard as if to not let any of the keys go to waste, conventions be damned.

Mladen Bošnjak of Misfit Village shares his story: