Epanalepsis
Cameron
Kunzelman
According to one of his
websites, “Cameron Kunzelman is a human. He make games about social
issues and contemporary philosophy and alpacas. Some of these games have
sweet jumps and sweeter songs. Some others are very sad”.
According to another “After a
very long and weird journey that has destroyed both my mind and my body,
I have released Epanalepsis. It is a short narrative game that’s sort of
cyberpunky and sort of Literary Brat Pack and generally just a weird
thing and I don’t think we’ve seen very much of in games. We certainly
don’t see it very often in commercial games”.
According to the Steam page
“Rachel goes out drinking every night. Anthony plays his videogames. The
machinery beneath the world keeps right on ticking. Epanalepsis is a
narrative-focused point and click adventure game that tells a story
about those connections across sixty years and beyond that pays equal
homage to New Wave science fiction, cyberpunk dystopian stories, and the
art cinema of the early 1990s.
FEATURES
Play as three characters in
three radically different time periods. Experience an authentically
recreated 1990s, a consumerist 2010s, and a cyberpunk 2030s.
Hand-crafted visuals wrung
from the cramping hands of a very committed developer.
Narrative-focused adventure
gaming without the stress and trauma of puzzles or inventory
management”.
Having spent some time clicking
around his websites and blogs, Mr Kunzelman seems like an interesting
and thoughtful guy. I certainly enjoyed reading and thinking about some
of his material. Unfortunately Epanalepsis wasn’t one such piece.
In short, it’s a silly,
nonsensical, very short narrative piece. You do very little except move
through it. Far from freeing me from trauma and stress, some puzzles
would have been a welcome distraction. And I fail to see how the
rudimentary pixelly graphics authentically recreate anything.
Perhaps I just missed the point.
You play three different
characters in three different times, but largely on the same street.
Move left and right with the keyboard, and click on things with the
mouse. It might take you an hour if you click on everything. There is no
spoken word, but there is a musical score. There are points which
suggest alternative endings or events, but I confess I won’t be going
back to see what might change.
An epanalepsis is a figure of
speech defined by the repetition of the initial word (or words) of a
clause or sentence at the end of that same clause or sentence (so says
wiki). Predetermination and the consequences of choice (or lack thereof)
are writ large. I am not sure what they all have to do with each other.
Clearly I did miss the point.
And in the absence of the point, there really isn’t anything else.
Grade: D
I played on:
OS: Windows 7
Processor: Intel i7-3820 4GHz
RAM: 12GB Ripjaw DDR3 2133 Mhz
Video card: AMD Radeon
HD 7800 2048MB
GameBoomers Review Guidelines
July 2015
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