Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Greg the Clumsy Ghost’ and ‘Jiayou Memovirus’
Oh.
Greg the Clumsy Ghost is a silly puzzle game created by indiegesindel, an indie collected based in Germany. This specific project was made for the Paint Jam 2018 and stars Laura Heimann, Jonathan Witt and Jose Campos as the three who worked on it. So what exactly is it, and how does a ghost and a lawnmower get along?
Players will be following Greg as he attempts to clean up the forest grass so that tourists do not accidentally get lost in its thickness and die. To this end, Greg will push a mower through each region in the hopes of cleaning everything up before the magical timer runs out. The grass does not grow back any time soon, and driving over already mowed grass does not hinder his progress, but players will soon realize that efficiency is key to getting past many of the levels as time becomes more constrictive.
There is also a little diamond ring within each level, placed in an obtuse location that players can seek out and collect to ensure their completionism is sated. Players will need to collect a blue circle before they finish mowing the lawn, as the last piece of grass is considered the end of the level.
The levels are silly and nonsensical, but that’s the point; after all, you are a clumsy ghost mowing the lawn of a forest. It’s a small game, but one that doesn’t take itself seriously with levels like JEFF and portals to slide your way through. If you like simple puzzle games that race against the clock, this is a great title to try.
Jiayou MemoVirus is a narrative Match3 game created by RATURE, an indie developer based in France, and features work by vfabian21. Players will be following the legacy and life of Dr. Li Wenliang, the medical professional in Wuhan best known as the whistleblower on the early rise of the Coronavirus. This game will go through the entire timeline, from the early stages to the identification of the virus to its rapid spread throughout China, culminating in the confinements of Wuhan and the social commentary that followed that affects us to this day.
In case it was not painfully obvious, this game is going to touch on some very sensitive topics about the pandemic. Be prepared.
Gameplay revolves around the player attempting to match two identical shapes together after the cards have been flipped back around. To assist in the memory department, the cards are divided in to two ‘types’; a home card, and an office card. Both are intended to signify the two places that the people (represented by the shapes) move between, and subsequently how the virus spreads.
Speaking of which, at the beginning of certain rounds one of the cards will be covered by a viral infection, rendering that card unable to be flipped. The only way they can be removed is by getting a successful match with one of the cards beside the virus, ‘curing’ it and allowing that card to be utilized once more. Of course, this is only on the rudimentary levels. Things get much more dicey, as we should all know from the pandemic itself.
Thanks to the narrative focus, the game is allowed to evolve in small but impactful ways to mirror not only the plot, but the evolution of a virus itself. Some of the matched cards can become ‘sick’, where they lose their colour and become unable to be matched until the virus is wiped off of the map. Thankfully finding one can find the ‘rest’ of the sick patrons, but this can cause a severe issue for the game board depending on the virus’ strength level.
The bottom right is the tell for this, informing the player on what will happen during the game that will alter how they approach the matching. A ‘Resistant’ Covid means that if a match fails for any reason, another virus will appear adjacent to the previous one. This means another match that cannot be completed properly and an increased likelihood of ‘sick’ matches; which can cause more failure if not properly mitigated. If the entire board is sick and/or viral matches, the game is lost and the round needs to be restarted.
The narrative is one that we became all too familiar with back in 2020, watching with apathy (at the time) as Wuhan declared an emergency and locked itself down. Jiayou MemoVirus explores the frustration of Li and his colleagues as the number of patients continued to grow no matter their best efforts, the annoyance at the government’s initial response and the lack of care the world seemed to have. It only gets worse for them, however, as we all know what came next; the virus went global, and many of the world turned their eyes on Wuhan and any citizen of Chinese descent. The panic was swift, and the rage was immediate.
This isn’t to say that there was no blame to be had, for Li struggled against being labelled a whistleblower by his own government and was only recognized for his efforts after his tragic death at the hands of the very virus he tried to warn everyone about. But on a global scale, and in an age of ‘information’ as we like to boast, misinformation ran rampant and was weaponized by many who wanted to take control of the scenario. It’s been more than two years since the start of the pandemic. Even now we are feeling not only the effects of the virus on society but also its effects on people’s perceptions of science and the medical field.
It’s strange to think that a Match3 game could be so narratively driven, but Jiayou MemoVirus does a fantastic job of conveying just how easy it was for the virus to spread while scattering in dialogue of the people who first had contact with it. It wants us to humanize them, understand their initial fears while also make us realize how silly we all were for worrying more about our summer and new year plans than a virus that caused us to miss 2 years of them.
It’s a very complicated game however, so be ready to reread the rules and documentation a few times over and have to restart many times. It crams many ideas and mechanics in to a very simplistic format, which can cause some friction as you attempt to learn it.
Once you do, however, it is hard not to get sucked in to the story that we all know, but cannot help to visit again in the hopes of answering a simple question as we still exist in a pandemic world; ‘how did we get here, and could we have stopped it?’. Just like they said to those of Wuhan back at the start, we say to each other now.
Jiayou! Hold On.
