The aesthetic strategy neatly dovetails with a particular brand of dread: what is often referred to as the uncanny. The visuals keep a player perpetually off her axis by mixing obvious unreality with more faithfully naturalistic objects, leaving her unsure of what to make of this world: “Using low-polygon art specifically helps us exacerbate this feeling of an askance reality, because some portions of the environment are oddly realized (like the jagged boulders), and others which are geometric even in the real world look almost normal.” Everything must be interrogated.ĭhruv Jani of Oleomingus explained to me via email that the game’s graphic style was designed to contribute to the sense of unease and mystery. Photographs can be entered and explored like portals to new lands, bringing “reality” itself into question.
Other characters can be snuck up on, possessed, and later revealed as nothing more than figments of another character’s imagination.
Nearly every aspect of the experience, from the player’s identity to her setting to her understanding of the world enveloping her, remains in perpetual motion.
#Magical realism dragon landscape art oleo series#
Playing through the game means playing through a series of stories within stories. Players must unravel the tale layer by layer in pursuit of a mythical city called Kayamgadh-which may or may not actually exist. The game is a kind of narrative nesting doll heavily influenced by magical realist literature. More twilight than witching hour, India-based independent studio Oleomingus seeks to use low-poly in part to continually unbalance players in their forthcoming title Somewhere. And just as the lighter feelings inspired by the games mentioned earlier ranged from the meditative to the purely pleasurable, their darker counterparts seek to elicit everything from creeping unease to outright aggression-a spectrum mirrored by certain Modern artists.
We’ve seen plenty of low-poly designers and artists who leverage Modernist ideas to inspire primarily positive vibes, but others in low-poly’s second wave are using the style’s evocative potential to lead players into less comforting territory. You can read part one here and part two here. This is the final of a three-part series.
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