Where is the logic in this surreal gameplay?

Super Realism, Contemporary, bizarre images, paradoxical combination of objects, irrational situations – all these are surrealism. This style showed itself in different media and eventually came to video games. A lot of surreal games have already accumulated, but all of them work mainly with the artistic language of style, that is, they create surreal images (characters, objects on locations), use the color scheme characteristic of the picturesque work of surrealists, or in the design of locations they use direct references to well -known paintings. Simply put, artists create a world of game according to the laws of surrealism as an artistic style, so that they look like the paintings of Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Georgio de Kiriko and others.

But there are special games that go not only along the visual path, but also comprehend surrealism in gameplay. It is such games that all the games of the Rusty Lake studios. As the developers themselves admit, the Universe of their games is inspired by the famous TV series Twin Pixes, David Lynch, which is filled with mysticism, mystery, strange situations and characters, the developers and strive to create this atmosphere in their games and not unsuccessfully. Let’s figure out what techniques they use for this.

Firstly, the developers present images to the player in which, according to the laws of surrealism, incompatible. The most obvious example in this case is repeatedly encountered people with the heads of animals, birds or insects. We can find this visual technique in the works of the famous painter-scurelist Rene Magritt in the work “Collective invention”, which depicts a fantastic creature-half-wisdom-semi.

Secondly, the developers, most importantly, create a surreal gameplay. On Spinsheavencasino.uk the static canvases of surrealists, we see only images that combine incompatible things. Cinema is able to reproduce absurd situations, illogical behavior of characters and strange dialogs. But only games can make you think in a surrealist manner. The games of the Rusty Lake studio are created in the quest genre, that is, in the genre where logic is the fundamental element, but at the same time in the Cube Escape series, the Rusty Lake series, in The White Door and the logic of familiar actions is missing in Samsara Room. All these games are filled with paradoxical situations that the player does not expect to see. The developers build irrational and logic of causal relationships, for example, a character hidden in the watch, from whom you can open a nipple and get into a new location, and the player in theory should have assumed or keep in mind that the nipple could play the role of the door. You can encounter a similar situation in the game dedicated to Vincent Van Gogh – Cube Escape: Arles, where after you make an famous act of the artist – cutting your ear -, Van Gogh’s ear becomes a new location with a puzzle.

Surrealistic gameplay breaks the usual logic of the game and, as a result, makes the player literally think in a surreal paradigm-to combine incompatible things, expect absurd consequences and think with illogical causal connections. And this is not the situation with a poorly designed gamed -hammered puzzle when there is no sound logic when connecting things in a classic quest.

Why what Rusty Lake is doing is important: using surrealism not only from the point of view of the visual component, but by applying it to game mechanics, the developers give the development of the classical artistic style in the new media – video game, creating new laws of the style of the style of surrealism, thus embedding games in the general cultural context of the development of art and culture.

It is possible to talk about surrealism in video games not only on the example of Rusty Lake games, the very essence of surrealism, its distinctive features and how to determine where the surreal game is, and where not, we reveal in the video.

P.S.: The idea of ​​a video about surrealism in games arose after we watched a series of videos on this topic on YouTube, and came to the conclusion that the bulk of the authors did not correctly interpret and applies this style to the games.

Text and video: Irina Shedko – art critic, author of a new video game criticism