One of the special things about games, and a thing that I have always struggled to articulate, is that the good ones, the really good ones, take you deep. Have you ever noticed how small a TV screen or a computer monitor actually is? Let alone the dinky grotto skylights of a Game Boy or a Vita. These screens take up such a small portion of your overall vision, unless you’re crowded in really close. But when the right game comes along, the rest of the world just irises out. You don’t see the border of the screen. You don’t even really get a meaningful sense of its flatness anymore. A good game draws you deep inside.
This is what William Gibson called cyberspace, I gather. He tried to picture the world on the other side of the scrolling PC monitor and a whole landscape was born. But it doesn’t feel like cyberspace here very often. I always feel that I emerge from games after playing – that I have to kick my way up to the surface from deep underwater. Some games don’t replace the world around them in a delicate manner so much as absolutely flood it. A great game always leaves me feeling like I’ve just crawled, soaking, out of the drum of a washing machine.
Bahnsen Knights is one of these games. For the few hours this week in which I played it, it was a comprehensive submerging of the rest of the world. I was in there deep, just as I have been with the other two games in the Pixel Pulp series to which Bahnsen Knights belongs: Mothmen 1966 and Varney Lake. So this is a review of Bahnsen Knights, but it really feels like a belated review of the whole Pixel Pulp project. And that’s because, right at the start, I got something wrong, and it’s upset me in some dim, muttering way ever since.
