Proteus
In Proteus, players explore the small beauties and subtle mysteries of a tiny island as it passes through the seasons. One of the most immediately striking elements is the visual style, which is rendered in a deliberately pixelated nod to impressionism and fauvism—the music even references the classic Ravel ballet “Daphnis et Chloe”. With moments of both charming poetic fancy and elegiac loneliness, it entices the viewer to subtly ruminates on the inevitable passing of time in a human life. The ambient experience given to the player, free from any sort of puzzles, competition, or goals, makes the game feel more like exploring a site specific installation or land art piece far more than any stereotypical videogame. (Indeed, there was a heated conversation within reactionary elements of games fandom as to if this even counted as a “real” video game, much akin to the old “is this even art?” conversation that was present in modernist painting.) Part of the depth of the experience is the way that Proteus self-consciously uses procedural generation technology, lo-fi graphics, and exquisitely bold chunks of fragmented color to explore the limitations of realistic representation in digital spaces much the same way that Impressionist paintings’ brush strokes drew attention to their status as paintings, not simply magic windows. Ultimately, Proteus is both a savvy deconstruction of the affects of light, sound, space, and time in digital space, but also a haunting human-scale mediation impermanence.
Creator: Twisted Tree (Ed Key and David Kanaga were the lead creative team.)
Link: https://twistedtree.itch.io/proteus
Connections:
Ravel - “Daphnis et Chloe”
Monet - “Impression, Sunrise”
Robert Smithson - “Spiral Jetty”
Game Skill Rating: 1.5 (Uses WASD + mouse movement scheme; but is purely exploration based, so any additional time wandering while learning the controls is rewarding.)