Helps that it’s bloody gorgeous, mind. Released last week, Steeped By Blood River is another videogame-slash-poem from the creator of caged bird don’t fly caught in a wire sing like a good canary come when called - a piece that, if nothing else, is a wordcount-anxious writer’s best friend.
Like caged bird don’t fly […], Steeped By Blood River is another series of seriously low-fidelity vignettes - this time, framed around a kind of grubby motel full of surrealist secrets. Each room, rather each night offers up a fresh dreamscape. A highway burning with neon sunset. An oppressed, sepia-soaked waiting room. A monochrome spiral staircase leading to a long-empty house. Each step, punctuated by another form to sign and submit before the next door will open. There’s a Twitter bot I adore that presents an endless feed of “Liminal Spaces”, the kind of in-between nowhere spaces trapped between somewhere else and nothing-in-particular. Shopping centres after dark, airport lounges in the early morning. Swietanski’s empty rooms feel like they’d fit right into this lineup of half-remembered voids perfectly, a lineup of fuzzy, hard-to-make-out locations that come with an undercurrent of deeply isolating anxiety.
In the shallows of Steeped By Blood River are also hints of some of my all-time favourite works in this walky-thinky indie game space. A stunning low-resolution look and soundscape that harkens back to Dreamfeel’s Curtain; effortlessly stylish transitions that, while more fluid, immediately call to mind Blendo Games’ Thirty Flights Of Loving. Most of all, though, Swietanski’s work rings heavily of the kinds of stuff I was dabbling in before I burned out of game development. There is, perhaps, a selfish joy in seeing these ideas take form in ways I couldn’t possibly have imagined. That Night, Steeped By Blood River is free to download over on Itch.
