Patreon Letter: 1st September 2018

Hey all,

It's Jackson here with another Patreon Letter, I hope you have all had a good week, I hope you're enjoying the long weekend. I don't have a long weekend, partially because I'm in the UK and partially because I'm on disability and don't have a day job. But it's been a fairly busy week for me with prep for the podcasts so I took an extra day again so the Letter is dropping on a Monday rather than the recording heavy weekend proper. 

This week, I am going to talk briefly about a video game, and then I'm going to look at how many words I have, and if it's below 600 I'll talk about something else as well.

So I played Donut County, which is a game wherein you control a hole in the ground. You position the hole such that items in the world fall in, and when they do, they make the hole bigger so that larger items can fall in. The veteran gamers among you might read that description and go "wait! that's literally katamari!" and you would be 100% right. Which leaves the game in somewhat of an awkward position, because not only is it mechanically similar but its thematic aims are almost identical, and well Katamari Damacy is one of the greatest games ever made by anyone. It's almost unfair to mark it down for falling so short, but unfortunately it invites the comparison basically constantly, so I'm going to talk a bit about why. 

Katamari Damacy's defining feature is its constant, boundless earnestness. It is on the surface a fairly straightforward critique of capitalist consumption (these are the themes Donut Country pulls most directly from), but it never expresses this with cynicism. When you roll over like ten plates of sushi in a single roll it feels good. It feels incredible. Katamari makes the act of endless, uncritical consumption one of immense joy. Which seems counter-intuitive until you realize you've gone from being 3cm tall inside a child's bedroom to swallowing entire continents whole. The game encourages you to consider the world with a relative viewpoint, to recognize all of these scales as equally valid and to communicate a fairly simple point about the sheer amount of stuff that humans have put everywhere on our precious, probably dying rock.

Donut County, however, is if not cynical then directly concerned with cynicism. The act of making the hole bigger to get more things in the hole and so on is a far more rigid process than Katamari's sandboxes you grow too big for, and instead draws your attention to the hollow satisfaction and repetition of making the numbers go up. It then adds a the layer of context that the entire game is a mobile app with meaningless numbers that go up, all played by an asshole who refuses to realise that this rote and thoughtless thing he does has very real world consequences that he refuses to acknowledge. And what it gains in specificity it loses in tone, it simply doesn't have the emotional space to come close to Katamari's whimsical melancholy. Its a game about an asshole learning not to be an asshole, and that's all it can be.

Donut County's best moments are where it strays away from the Katamari formula and adds some more mechanics into the mix. Occasionally, it becomes a puzzle game as you have to, say, fill the hole with water, which you can then place under an electric circuit to power it on, which activates a fire, which you can use to light a firework, which you can use to bring something down from the ceiling and finally get it in the hole. These moments give the game a more unique sense of identity and they are unfortunately so few and far between and after one fairly cool extended puzzle sequence, the game is over before it's really able to step out of Katamari's shadow. 

It's a shame to be the obnoxious person going "this other game did it better!!" but I guess I have to accept that's who I am on this one. Sometimes that's how you fall. I've played some Katamari Forever recently because it's the only one I haven't finished and while post-Takahashi Katamari has all been kinda hollow, it's just been nice to revisit old levels and remember how fucking good Katamari is. Just put out the original two games again, Namco, please and thank you. 

Alright, that's it, thank you for reading, I'll be back in a couple weeks and hopefully I'll have more to talk about. First month without school! Oh god! This is weird, I feel very listless. Though I still have a lot to do because we're always busy at Abnormal Mapping so I guess I'll get on with it.

See you later

-Jackson