Christian: How can a game transport you somewhere truly alien? Mu Cartographer has an answer, and it’s a goodie: the trick is to keep you at a bit of a distance. Mediation is a video game thing, of course – the screen, the pad, the fact that you’re sitting on the sofa or leaning forward at a desk – but there can be a real skill to the shaping of it.
Mu CartographerDeveloper: Titouan MilletPublisher: Titouan MilletPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Released in 2016. Available on Steam (£4) and Itch.io ($5).
Mu Cartographer is like looking down on an alien world. It’s one of my favourite things in all of games, an activity bear – a screen filled with buttons and mechanisms and you have to find out what each one does. The chat box! The peg board! The twisty thing. The…actually what is that? This is the game, but the game is also projecting yourself into the fiction, because at the centre of your attention is that shifting mass of colour and volume. Is it a weather radar? A landscape? Are we inside a body or under the ocean?
None of this should be spoiled. Just enjoy it. I tell myself that anyway. Prod and twist and dial and move things around on the peg board, but I always end up trying to pull everything together. The promise of exploration, of a perfectly bizarre mystery to solve, is just too powerful. I cannot resist it.
And so I make notes, I create theories. I give tentative names to the objects and try to piece the fragments of story together into some sort of narrative that makes sense. I scan the surroundings – if they are surroundings – and I feel a certain desperation that I am missing something, or passing up an opportunity to understand something, that I have already failed.