Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: antique chairs, lighthouses and properly great pixelart.
The lighthouse at the start of Concrete Genie might be one of those rare perfect locations in a video game. I adore it. Beyond the gate is a little courtyard with a fountain. There’s a door to push through and then an entryway where the wooden planks on the floor have become warped and bowed, and eventually cave inwards, curved like pieces of a ship. Below you is a cellar where treasures lurk and above you is a network of iron ladders and gantries leading you back outside, where you can curve your way upwards until you reach the light itself.
I never tire of playing around here, spotting the detailing, no two pieces of wood exactly alike, no railing without a twist or a kink in it. And before even that, I love the part of the game where you learn how to handle paint by filling in creature designs in your sketchbook. The paint is lovely – watery and occasionally thick, uneven, the sense of a powder or paste in suspension. You move it, but it moves too – the colour is something you have to tug around on the page.
So many special moments. I’m replaying Concrete Genie over the course of this month, one evening at a time. It’s a short game that you have to measure out and savour. It’s transporting.
I’ve been lucky enough to chat to some members of the SNK team this week, which offered a perfect excuse to fire up the arcade cabinet and head straight to one of my most beloved Neo Geo games, Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Coming just towards the demise of the original iteration of SNK, it captures them at the peak of their artwork – the combat is considered, and like its contemporary Street Fighter 3 has some hardcore wrinkes with its own parry system in the form of Just Defend. It has all the swagger, too, of SNK in its pomp.