No gordian puzzles wait to trip you up, and I’m not sure there’s a grand message about the nature of anything you’re meant to decode.
BURLY MEN AT SEA WALK SERIES
Off they go to meet this fabulous beast or that one, skimming the ocean blue or plumbing its depths in a series of haphazard encounters, each repeatable with variations on a theme. They have Snow White-ish names like Hasty or Brave Beard and personas to match: a whiskered trio of surly swashbucklers answering the call to mini-adventures that veer from the irreverent to the numinous.
Three strapping men with beards like body-sized balloons amble through geometrically simple, pastel screens that gradually fill with fabulous creatures and locales. But like the three princes of Sri Lanka who potter from exploit to exploit in the Persian fairy tale, it’s also about serendipity. In our fall preview I mused that Burly Men at Sea looked like “ZZ Top meets Neil Gaiman” or “Hemingway on the half-shell.” Having played it, I can say it’s definitely that odd, a confabulation of quirks and insights that manages to balance both deftly.
BURLY MEN AT SEA WALK PC
And in Brain&Brain’s Burly Men at Sea, a folktale mashup out for mobile devices and PC on September 29, it’s the artful interplay of visual minimalism, waggish writing and hilarious but also haunting sound effects generated by gorgeous a cappella voices. In Virginia, it’s the absence of spoken words and smash cuts that elide otherwise dull peregrination. In Night School Studio’s Oxenfree, it’s the organically overlapping banter of a lively Scooby Gang in lieu of “I go, you go” dialogue. That’s put the burden of invention on audiovisual novelty. In the end, it’s not so different from how you operate a motion comic or a visual novel. But in all cases they involved me watching some things happen, clicking a button, then watching some more things happen. I have nothing against stories you play, though they’re currently shelved with video games only because we privilege unreliable terms like “interactivity.” I was meh on this year’s Buried and Firewatch, more in accord with Oxenfree, and awed by Virginia.
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