Sherman. Sherman. Sherman. Sherman. Sherman. It was a chant; it was a prayer. As much as Luz wanted to find her other campmates, Ada, the few folks she’d met outside on runs--no one came before Sherman. She’d left almost everything behind in her haste to reach him. Fuck it. She could find new things. The only supplies she had with her were the ones she kept in her bag just in case.
Luz was a smart girl. Or so she’d been told by every teacher at every school conference. But she was impulsive. All that cleverness. All those facts. They all meant nothing to her in the heat of the moment. Luz Fuentes DeDios would rather die looking for Sherman than live preparing for what might mean a lifetime of wandering in search of him.
As she took the corner of a building too fast, Luz slammed into someone else and scrambled up and away as if her entire body was the fingertip of a child reaching for the heating element on a burning stove. “F--fuck.” She spat out as she raised her handgun to meet the other’s gaze. Not a walker. Dios mio. For once that wasn’t a blessing.
35TH FANTASPORTO – PINK ZONE "Pink Zone" - Benjamin Walter- 92’ – USA When a group of young delinquents, carrying a deadly virus for women, attacks a girls high school, the spoiled reckless daughter of a powerful local man has to collaborate with her cruel schoolmates to get out before she gets infected.
you should try pink zone tho it's a wonderful exploratory world of a game
the overworld music is amazing, just this very cheering yet strangely haunting melody -- i broke the "rules" and played in firefox which seems to cause a glitch where upon returning to the mothership and coming back, the two pieces of music layer over each other, sometimes in multiple instances -- i will treat this as a feature, a richer and more polyphonic melody occurring every time
i was tickled by how much there was to interact with and how the minimalist, almost proto-earthbound-esque (earthbound on atari 2600, perhaps, earthbound on a graphing calculator) graphics allowed you to project your own ideas onto the surroundings, your own possibilities, your own stories. pink zone has one story but it has many stories too, that's nice
like jkittaka said the permeable boundaries of the world are very interesting -- i felt breathtaken the first time i realised i could [REDACTED] -- and yet it never felt wrong or broken, it felt conceptually innovative in a way so simple that flags up just how adherent to formula most game designers are -- like really, in over 40 years of games no one else has ever deconstructed the idea of walls?? it heartens me to see this in indie game design and it shocks me to see it nowhere else, ever
When I first played Pink Zone (Porpentine, Brenda Neotenomie) I skipped over the description/instructions for whatever reason and jumped straight into the game. The biggest effect of this was that I didn't understand the special powers system. This will mostly describe my initial experience, although I did go back later with fuller knowledge for a bit.
I fall silently, and when I crash the only noise is the beginning of music, enticing me to look around. 3 colors exist in Pink Zone. Pink spongy ground; Black skeletal structures; White, the color of et cetera. I see purple, but purple is an illusion, the color of my tranparent black cockpit glass over the pink mud.
I take my first steps. The squishy ground forms footprints that gradually disappear. I value my tracks, for grounding me in my motion, especially in the sparser pink fields, and for allowing me to make a mark, however impermanent.
I find buildings, I find plants, I find people. Sometimes I don't know if a squiggle friend is sentient until I walk up and try to speak with them. We make small talk but I'm not sure if we understand each other at all. I assume the silent squiggles are foliage... rubble... but maybe they are simply silent people.
I overlap myself with everything in sight. Sometimes my overlapping builds. Sometimes my overlapping destroys. I gasp audibly when I am crystallized, or when my overlapping spawns a dozen tiny creatures in an enclosed space. Overlapping is intimate. I cannot stand at a distance and decide what to do. I can only overlap or not, and once I have overlapped, the damage is done and I am too close to ignore it. I cannot get away from the newly crumbling person fast enough to avoid the shards of their body, which stick in my hair.
I can always overlap... but more than that, I can never not overlap. Every wall is permeable. Every place is penetrable. Everything is permissible. Gates and mounds may slow me down, crossing space-holes may make me a flailing, white creature, but there is no place where I am simply stopped. I am led by glimpses and intuition, not walled passageways. I may even walk off the edge of the world.
Eventually, my feet getting tired, I set up a beacon to contact my ship. Back on board, they analyze my findings and turn to me, beaming. "Wow..." they say, "You are good!"
