NURSE: “Shouldn’t it be sterilized, doctor?”
DR. BENWAY: “Very likely but there’s no time.”
The year: 1954. The place: San Francisco. Specifically: Alcatraz and North Beach (south of Alcatraz). Tarred up Beat baby must escape The Rock; his Vollmer not yet William Tell Overtured, but such a fate floating on the cleansing chemical-trail of a club bemoawning germaphobe. The gramophone deigns to play only cats: a cat: literally. Things could not be much worse, but dig this: the loot was real, and the innocent guilty; freedom set to drag Romeo and Juliet deeper into the moral muck of wedding ringed, transvestite fellatio and the betraying seduction of murder.
If you wish to get your hands dirty: On-The-Rock-Romeo plotting his escape imprisoned in prison laundry rooms and guardeoisie Alcatraz Island pads. Marshalled by a white devil freemason, and amassing a massive inventory of miscellaneous flotsam and blotsam for the several separate escape plans parading before the player: pick one and sort through acquired bilge, and then reach the moment of climax through analogue interpretations of foreplay: kiss suck or spit means dig—dig—dig for items, talk and switch back and forth between real ass Romeo and neo noir-Juliette.
Whilst he escapes Alcatraz Island: she accrues enough detritus to find the loot and flee the country. Destination: romantic sunset; or glowing Golden Gate Bridge steaming with blood. The minor pathways the player dances down lead in one way or another to the same destination: final dialogue trees pregnant with several selectable endings: the penultimate confrontations those which are most directly affected by the player’s plotting and planning; but surmountable no matter the player’s largesse: allies are expensive: popping bobby pins like pep pills or valo, and devouring silos of manuscripts and old books: the currency of the Beats.
Always surmountable, except when the glitch-tics twitch more intrusively than animated contortions, and cause itemised puzzle solutions to cannibalise one another upon use: game over if sans pre-cannibalisation save in hand. This endless stream of itinerant items composes the puzzles’ simple construction: encounter puzzle; find puzzle-solving item; combine puzzle-solving item with unsolved puzzle. Reductionist, but necessary: a stock tonne of pixel Hunting pixelS Thompson-fired like canonised ashes splattered onto the lush, painterly, European North Beach and decomposing Alcatraz. A red herring and alternate-puzzle-solvers smorgasbord, illustrated so clearly that pixels need not, in fact, be hunted: a good thing? If not for the lobotomised ease with which puzzle-solvers combine with unsolved puzzles.
Worse still, she looks like she’s dyeing in bed.
Jerking; ticing on the beautiful backgrounds, the cast amble about: their mechanical posturing as ugly as their misshapen bodies and faces; never quite meshing utterly their pixellated depictions with the paintings in which they slumber: night in North Beach; day on Alcatraz Island—always. Robotic zombies Walking Péndulously halfway between The cel shading of the Dead: a pixellated imitation of painterly, comic book brush strokes which only helps to emphasise the discordant aesthetic notes; sometimes tantalisingly successful—so long as human flesh is rendered as stone: still.
—times the dialogue sounds punched in, cutting—evious sentences in—alf—ecially in German, but the tar Beat baby’s eloquent English is delivered via an earnest mouthpiece lamenting the five seconds of his wasted mouthpiece life pretending to puzzle solve with the wrong puzzle-solving item applied to the wrong unsolved puzzle; the plucky publisher filly just as earnest in her performance; their co-conspirators sometimes sincere and enthusiastic, but mostly miscast: the more natural voices and performances never vulgar or old or young or haggard enough for their pixellated personas, and their dialogue an inconsistent mixture of pastiched slang and modernised lingo. Or sometimes nonsensical repetitions of old lines when new plotlines and plans render them redundant: the shore; the shore; always the shore! What about the buoy? The water’s still cold, baby!
Evan Camfield: sex scene writer extraordinaire; crouched over a desk writing his million-word; post-modern masterpiece is a genuine amusement: mythologised as he has been over the course of one of the escapes. Both escapes that, by this moment of comedic catharsis, have wriggled their way wormlike into one’s grey-apple as if a misaimed lead-weighted arrow: through sheer determination and modest ambition: Goodbye Deponia and The Walking Dead still fresh in our mushy, mesocarp of a now-mangled memory: Hawthorns then Grapes then Beets in that exact chronological, qualitative order; irrespectively of respect.
