A very personal, audio-visual, gawking simulator experience. If you're prepared for an art piece, that like all art has a chance of individually being affecting or not, I say it's well worth the trip!

Fugue in Void is a very personal piece. On its itch.io page, its creator, Moshe Linke, called it his 'all and everything.' You can see why it might be. The brutalist architecture, atmosphere, setpieces, places and spaces, sounds and sights all seem like the product of a mind-meld between man and game engine. It's difficult to come along and interrogate it as a value proposition or even a time proposition.

I see the windows 2000 screensaver got out of control

Perhaps how best to see it for the former is as a lifetime entry ticket to an art installation. It's only 45 minutes long if you keep up the pace, but you can muse on it, read up on/around it, allow it revolutions in your consciousness and of course revisit it. You could watch it instead, yes, but one thing I feel any semi-interactive game still succeeds on - particularly an exploration game with artful genesis - is that having hands on controls gives you a presence in the world, and the world a resonance you'd otherwise miss. Especially when that resonance is the entire point.

I see skies of purple and clouds of orange

Fugue in Void in game terms is a walking simulator. One in which you are free to explore the structures, funneled through ever more rhyming and adapting places. Some sections are more visually arresting and others more ambulatory. Some sections have control absent - indeed, the entire opening sets the pace with a lengthy, noninteractive descent that might concern you control is not forthcoming. Almost like an episode of sleep paralysis. It's an audio-visual treat at times, for sure.

I see the Big Bang nucleosynthesis

So what if 45 minutes passes and nothing clicks, nothing's felt, nothing's understood? That's life I suppose. Or art. My experience was one at first of impressing meaning onto every last setpiece and structure, until my track of thought ended up thoroughly lost in the milieu. With my sci-fi proclivities, the ending was the biggest high point. I made a connection I thought made sense and shoved the game aside. Perfectly valid, but so too I now think, is accepting it all without desperately impressing meaning and instead appreciating it on a surface level artistry. The mind meld I described might be one simply of putting a love of brutalist architecture 'on game engine'. The game opens with 'this is the story of my mind' and then 'this is my mind.' This is Moshe Linke's fascinations, his obsession with brutalism, and playfulness with structures explored, and that's perfectly valid too.

I see a single hair on a fly... and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

So where does that leave us? Walking simulators of Void's ilk have taken advantage of the 3D worlds possible in modern game engines to carve out a special art niche I think is personally well worth exploring. Spaces that can be walked around whilst taking advantage of perspective, visual and audio effects, sudden cuts, etc. Let's call them gawking simulators (you saw it here first!). Many people, I'm sure, won't think so. Purists as they might be. An advantage of this niche is that you likely already intuitively know which group you fall into. If you're prepared for an art piece, that like all art has a chance of individually being affecting or not, I say it's well worth the trip. Give it its best shot at immersion, take a ton of screenshots, and read up on brutalism to make its creator happy. Then you can join me perhaps in sampling more of the genre, of which Fugue in Void can probably count itself as one of the more interesting. I would say best for the better ring to it, but allow me to educate myself first!