Colours in games (small memories)
I follow a twitter account called No Man’s Pics. It regularly tweets and retweets pictures of (you guessed it) No Man’s Sky, a game whose colours are mouthwatering.
I remember No Man’s Sky as a series of colours.
Colours that pop out of the screen at me.
They scream, they whisper.
Desert warmth hazily drifts into my eyes,
the cold blues, whites and pine greens of winter cause my screen to ice up,
the bright nebulae and colourful depths of space meld into one as I zoom between solar system to solar system.
No Man’s Sky’s brushstrokes upon my mind feel like a distant dream, journeying through a distant painting.
It has rhythms, speed, tempo. The colours in No Man’s Sky are two extremes — either one long mind meltingly fast blur of colour after colour after colour, or a hazy mix of colours, floating by slowly.
I feel like like the feel and memory of colours in games tells us (or at least me) an awful lot about them.
Take for instance, Gone Home.
Gone home isn’t the most colourful game, in fact I remember it as mainly browns, purples and blacks, interspersed with bits of colours.
Unlike No Man’s Sky, Gone Home isn’t a blur. Instead the colours are slow moving, and despite the tense atmosphere, they are welcoming and draw you in.
If Gone Home was a painting it would require you to walk right up to it, to take in all of its subtlety.
I know this sounds vague, and whilst I may expand on this point in the future, just take a minute to think back to a game or two and reflect on the colours in your mind.
What do they conjure up? Does it accurately reflect the game or has it gone further?
(Sorry if this was rather niche, vague and rambly, but I definitely want to think more and expand this stub of a point. Look out for more colour discussion in a future article hopefully maybe)
