Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: PHN-HOME and The Secret of Tremendous Corporation
1000.
Believe it or not, this is the 1000th game I’ve played from this bundle.
PHN-HOME is a strange surreal experience created by Devin Raposo, an indie dev in the United States. Players are unknown and unnamed as they enter a strangely lit house to the sound of a telephone ringing. Only by finding it can the sound be removed.
This is a game about finding the phone that is ringing and picking it up. Players can only move around the room — no jumping on furniture — and once they find a phone they can select it and bring the receiver to their ear. The only indicator that players are close however is by the volume of the ringing phone, because the lights are so dark that players cannot see across the room.
Once that pesky phone is acquired, it can be picked up to hear… static. Noise. One of many sounds that comes with a disconnected call. And then suddenly, another phone starts to ring in the distance.
This is a game about phones that keep materializing in strange places to pick them up while sounds and events keep getting added to the overall atmosphere. Heartbeats start getting accentuated, strange sounds start getting added, and phones get placed in even stranger locations.
Once so many have been acquired is when the trip begins; suddenly phones are on the walls, sounds are breaking through their standard phones, and the sense of dread that there is no escape settles in nicely. What is happening is a mystery, and there is no way to fully explain it.
As a horror game, PHN-HOME preys on that confusion to keep adding stranger events and longer scenes of nothingness. It keeps you on your toes, even if you are not sure if anything is actually happening. In the grand scheme of things it only takes about 20–30 minutes, yet it somehow feels longer and shorter than that.
I don’t really know how else to describe it; only way to find out is to try it.
The Secret of Tremendous Corporation is a point-and-click narrative crafted by Polish indie trio Sebastian Krzyszkowiak (‘dos’), Konrad Burandt (‘Klonrad’), and Paweł Radej (‘TheWalruzz’). Sebastian is notable for us in the sense that he is 50% of Holy Pangolin, who created the game Karambola seen back on page 46.
Here we have a game jam game originally crafted in 2015 featuring a young game dev intern named Max living in a world in which all games not made by this megacorp are illegal.
As one might expect, players will follow Max through his new life as an intern by clicking on objects and trying to figure out how to progress the story forward. He can view an object to get a better description of it, or just try to interact with it and see what happens.
All items that he finds and keeps are put in to his inventory, which can then be combined by the player to create new objects that may assist. For example, players can collect as many pieces of gum as they would like from the table, but on their own they do nothing but fill the inventory. It is up to the player to understand how the puzzle is created by the game and what items may be helpful in solving said issue.
While it is not overly complex, what gives The Secret of Tremendous Corporation its intrigue is in its premise; a dystopian world in which the only games created are by this mega corporation and no genre freedom is allowed. It’s a strange dystopia as far as dystopias go, but it definitely has a place for those of us that have made games — after all, we are no stranger to corporations shutting a game down in the middle of its development cycle simply for ‘reasons’.
This does leave it to have some odd abstractions, since it cannot dive too deep in to the realm of game production without greatly lengthening the story. But what it does create is a striking narrative that makes you want to figure out just what these secrets™ are.
If you like point and click narratives, this might be for you. It isn’t long, but it doesn’t need to be.
Notice: Currently the game cannot run upon attempting to boot it — instead an error message claiming that the game is missing ‘OpenAL32.dll’ will appear. Simply downloading that file (it’s open source after all) seems to fix the issue immediately, but this is not necessarily the end. I ran in to some strange issues involving background images and missing audio even with the solution. The game still runs with the OpenAL solution, so give it a try and see what happens.
