maybe
emily koonce
Creator of
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crockpot is a game about bored teenagers growing up in the midwest that explores the intimacy of doing nothing with someone else ✨
play it at https://koonce.itch.io/crockpot
this game is a fish tank of the teenage experience.
you watch as the little people mill about, sequestered in this simple environment, left to pace and spin and pace and spin. as the player, you mold and mend that environment, encouraging spins, discouraging paces, attempting to direct movement toward one direction and ultimately failing.
my high school experience felt claustrophobic--there was not much to do, i didn't have much control, and every little change to my environment very much had an effect on my internal world. playing with this game felt like deconstructing how all of the shifts in perspectives, spaces, and movements deeply affect the agents within that paradigm who are trapped, simply reacting to their environment with so little power over it.
yet, you as the player are the god that shapes the world for its inhabitants and thus the one connecting your actions to consequence. although its clear that the systems in place account for the behavior of the people to change based on what the player does, there is no certainty from this faux-omniscient perspective of what your actions are actually doing. you can call a manipulation of the wall an unsuccessful or successful means of achieving a certain reaction from the meanderers or simply an exploration into this digital toy, but that is a characterization you have made and not something inherent to the systems at play. this parallels the way we look back at our adolescence: we wonder what then caused the affairs of now, what were the conditions that affected our skills, our thought processes, our trauma that we experience in the present.
it is clear that the design of things all around us shapes who we are, but the meaning that is made from that process is ours to shape. or, in other words, to decide "if it's fun."
again, flan has outdone themselves with a fantastic spin on the walking sim genre, literally wallowing in the depths of space, time, and iconic characters.
playing this game felt like sinking into my head in the hyper-mediated age of simulations, simulacra, and late capitalism. the way it's structured and the constant sense of not being able to tell where one room ends and the next begin, where you end and the world begins, was a deeply intrusive yet poignant look into my subconscious corrupted by media. the way this game is framed and its constant reference to other characters, media, and life formsallows it to hold a mirror up to our brains as they're filled with so much external stimuli--movies, games, music, pictures, museums, etc.--that we begin to question what thoughts are our own and what thoughts are intrusive sunken ships, armed with lost romances, abandoned ballrooms, and unfinished stories to disturb the insular deep-sea from its peace.
if i've learned anything from this game, it's this:
it's scary what goes on in all the places we can't see, but it's important to remember that even in darkness, your heart will go on.