Bokida and One Last Dance for the Capitalist Pigs
Here’s a twofer for you: a while back I streamed both Bokida and One Last Dance for the Capitalist Pigs on my twitch account, and the archived show is above. They mostly speak for themselves, though I’ll admit I’m an amateur streamer, but I’ll add some more thoughts down here.
I wish I liked Bokida more, because its stark world and strange creation/destruction mechanics are very cool. The problem is that you’re given a lot of abilities and nothing fun to do with them, leaving you to just go from point A to point B and vaguely interact with the environment until the chapter ends. It’s supposed to be the first bit of a larger game, but there’s no concept of what the larger game could do that would be more interesting given the limited toolset and world you’re given. It’s neat, but totally empty.
One Last Dance for the Capitalist Pigs
I really like the hand-crafted aesthetics of a lot of the games I’m playing lately, where it’s clear that someone made something by hand and then just scanned it into the game. There’s an honesty to it, a sense that this crafts-centric way of thinking about games is really what liberates people to be weird and experiment with more personal stories. One Last Dance is definitely one of those.
Deus Ex by way of a politics 101 class, One Last Dance is a story about fighting capitalistic oppression through a weird blocky world made of markers and paper, where you try to destroy the reality television that oppresses people by going to a shop run by Karl Marx. Who is a chicken. It’s a strange game, quirky in the most fundamental ways, and wholly speaks to being created by a singular vision. It’s hardly profound, but games with such clear authorship are few and far between.
One Last Dance isn’t a perfect game (I go on at length in the video about a really needless puzzle area), but I really like just how weird it is. There are few games that try to be so relentless strange, and One Last Dance pulls it off with an honesty that seems almost naive in its uniqueness.
(Source: http://www.twitch.tv/)
