![]() In the absence of any narrative or referential coherence, it is the game’s RPG-ness – the fact that you’ve played JRPGs before, so you instinctively know what to do – that structures your understanding of the game: no matter how strange, how off-the-wall random, how just outright insane the game gets, the mechanics keep you grounded. It’s an interesting point to note that, as peripheral as the RPG mechanics are to your enjoyment of Space Funeral, they serve an essential role in framing your experience of the gameworld. In this lurid hell-carnival of a world, what do you do? Well, you quest, because questing is what you do in an RPG. Rather than mythology, Space Funeral draws upon a highly postmodern stream of pop culture detritus for its imagery: high fantasy tropes (wizards, quests, villages) clash with B-movie horror icons, comic strips, glam rock and poetry – Peanuts and Dracula, Charles Baudelaire and Marc Bolan all feature, in one way or another, and the whole thing is soundtracked by a remarkable collection of avantgarde music (I owe my discovery of the awesome Les Rallizes Denudes to the game, for which I am eternally grateful). ![]() ![]() In truth, Space Funeral‘s milieu is delivered with a nudge and a knowing wink, instantly setting it apart from the feverish intensity of the Chilean filmmaker’s symbolic visions. It’s a setting that has been, like Zeno Clash before it, compared to the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky because, hey, Jodorowsky is shorthand for ‘weird and surreal’. What awaits outside the house is a dayglo-bright wasteland, like body-horror virulently exploding into a Saturday morning cartoon: houses shaped like smashed heads, monstrous fleshy trees, primary-colour landscapes. Space Funeral doesn’t really care about being an RPG: although turn-based combat, dungeons, party management, levelling and item shops are all present and accounted for, they’re only there as the necessary frame upon which to hang You are Philip – a boy (presumably, not that you can tell from the astonishingly bad – and yet effectively grotesque – artwork) thrown out of the house by his parents, still in his pyjamas and crying his eyes out – as he will continue to do throughout the game. Space Funeral – which, I might as well point out, does not contain any funerals and is not set in space – is a JRPG, but that categorisation, though functionally true, is as misleading as it is pointless. Let me tell y ou, friends, about Space Funeral. In the spirit of living up to this resolution, then, let me tell you about the game that, along with the much more celebrated Minecraft, was my game of 2010. ![]() However, one of the many more-or-less vague intentions contained within that impulse is the desire to write more regularly – by which I mean writing fiction, primarily, but also an attempt, time permitting, to return this blog to being at least a slightly more regular chronicle of things that, in whatever form, leave an impression on me. Now, I’m not much the resolution-making type, save for, as I attempted to communicate to a friend some time after midnight at a New Year’s party over music that was far too loud to make this an easy task, a general sense of trying to do better. ‘Tis the season, as everyone knows, for the making of resolutions, the arbitrary line drawn in time by the beginning of a new year being as good a time as any to take stock of one’s life and try, however fleetingly, to imagine a ‘new you’. ![]()
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