Variable Village

For all its brevity, Variable Village is still a good game. Designed as a coding exercise to teach the developer to work with variables, it nonetheless manages to work in a very pretty eastern ghost story ala Fatal Frame. The game is strictly linear, taking place in a scant handful of screens, and the only interactivity it features amounts to which objects the player chooses to investigate during the scenario. It would be tempting to call it minimalist, but the carefully designed maps it's played out on are anything but. Burning butterflies, a music-box-like soundtrack, and careful attention to atmosphere are clear indications that if developer kitten2021 wanted to, he could scare the pants off us all.

One particular scene stands out in my mind, where the player descends into a crude mortuary that was dug below one of the houses. There's absolutely nothing in the game that can threaten the player, but I felt my heart rate pick up a notch when I saw the bodies of travelers carefully laid out on slabs in the center of the room. I'm not what you would call a wuss, either. I enjoyed Amnesia: the Dark Descent.

As a creative exercise, I think Variable Village is a success. I'd even be curious to see how far this premise could be taken. Would other horror scenarios work as a micro-game in the same style?

Bear with me for a moment, I want to try out a premise.

You awaken in an attic full of dolls.

The trapdoor leading out of it is locked, but you find the key. An old, creaking stepladder takes you down into the upper floors of a mansion, empty but for the mannequins scattered around every room. You search for a way out, eventually discovering a floor plan, but the room marked as 'exit' is a windowless chamber in the middle of the building. There are doll parts hung from yarn, and fishing line, and thread dangling from the ceiling over you. Arms and legs and bits of dresses. You turn to leave, and the door closes.

End game.

For all of my praise, Variable Village does have a few flaws. I was able to find a dialog bug that left the abnormally large character portrait superimposed over my screen until I advanced the plot, and the script is not without awkward typos and places where the words don't entirely work. The credits are almost as long as the game itself, and the epilogue does a complete 180 on the game's tone.

Still, if you have a few minutes and want to try something different, you could do a whole lot worse than Variable Village.