Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘kno’ and ‘Discsphere’
A relaxing start to our 50s I’d say.
kno is a meditative journaling game created by Vismaya, an indie dev in Scotland known for their meditative games such as Playne. This game is a precursor of sorts, helping players to learn the powers of meditation by having them write their thoughts and grow a tree.
Every day, players can log in to their account — which can be made within the game — and are greeted to a voice. Instructing them on what to do, they are greeted with the screen above where they can type in their thoughts abought a specific memory or occurrence that has happened. It’s encouraged to write single words, preferably descriptors of the memory no matter how vague or abstract. After entering each word, a small ball will fall from the ceiling at varying sizes depending on the word itself — angrier words will be a hue of fuchsia while happier words will be blue. Once complete, players will watch as all of these circles ‘water’ a sapling, and the progress of the tree is shown. Each day more ‘water’ is added to the sapling, and it grows in ways that relate to the words and phrases that are implemented.
The point, however, is not to compete or get a specific style of tree, but to highlight the growth of the meditation and your own understanding. The tree is a direct reflection of the thoughts that you have about those specific events during your meditation, and at times I didn’t even look at the screen while inputting the words.
Meditation is hard for many for a variety of reasons, but kno captures this strange middle ground by making you invested in the tree’s growth, and by proxy, your own thoughts and the thoughts on your thoughts. It’s almost strange to think that someone could be excited to log their meditations every day, but here we are.
If you have been searching for a meditation tool that also somehow gamifies the act of starting a meditation cycle, then this might be exactly what you needed.
Discsphere is an arcade sports game with narration created by Happy Frog Games, an indie dev in the USA seen a few times in the bundle before. Players will enter a world in which either they are a small boy stuck in a play with weird robots, or battling against their friend for the fun of it.
The goal of Discsphere is to defeat the enemy combatant by throwing a ball at them. Sounds simple enough, but that is only on a surface level; in reality, there are many steps to obtain before the player can even dream of hitting the enemy.
In each arena are goals that must be captured and maintained by the player, which are captured by throwing out discs. Charging up these discs (with a different button) can stun the opponents so that they don’t keep attempting to undo all that work, while also doubling as a way of flipping enemy-controlled goals back to the neutral ‘white’. Once at least three goals are maintained, players will unlock their final attack; the dodgeball. This magical entity is the only thing powerful enough to tag the opponent and declare them ‘out’ — I’m exaggerating for fun a bit, but the game cannot end if a dodgeball does not hit an opponent. Games can go on forever if both opponents are careful, but that just proves its dodgeball roots; the game only stops if a mistake is made.
It’s quirky as all get out, but that’s what makes Discphere so interesting to play. It fuses so many little gameplay mechanics together to create this strange dodgeball world that keeps you interested even if you didn’t understand it at first. Do note that if you don’t play the tutorial you are in for a bad time — trust me on this, I struggled on beating the tutorial even with understanding. Once the controls are down, however, you’ll be right in battling against the evil wizard in single player or the person beside you. Have fun!
