The ambience is not only heightened by the game's soundtrack but is often swayed by its own sonic juxtapositions. The eerie way the next car trundles up to the neighbouring house thereafter speaks to the jarring asynchronicity of modern life the cloistered way in which we live in cities, so close, so apart.
In one diorama you must nudge an unseen businessman through his evening's routine, helping him to park his car in the garage, flicking between the TV channels (tapped at through a gap in the window), brushing his teeth (and finally switching off the bedroom light. Some scenes infuse everyday objects with fantastical behaviours: the carry cases that rise and fall through the air, like horses on a carousel the detonation of bank notes, freeze-framed alongside the ATM, like butterflies frozen in flight. Another reveals a gaggle of palm trees riding an escalator, reaching the summit then cluttering up the exit point. As the vehicle descends, on a previously hidden elevator, into the ground, the eggs congregate in the shelter, whose sides rise to form an incubator. In once scene, a bus pulls into a stop and deposits a line of bouncing eggs. Its most interesting and curious effects come from its juxtapositions, between the bizarre and the ordinary, between the fabricated and the natural, the city and the forest. So it ever was, when you get down to it, in video games.ĭespite the mundane façade, Islands is in fact playful, humorous tour. When you've clicked enough lights to finish the scene, it's on to the next one.
In tactile terms, the extent of your interaction, beyond rotating the camera, is the option to click on light sources (lamps, laptops, televisions and so on) in order to produce interesting effects, unexpected animations, or pleasing snippets of audio. As you wheel around the scene, you gain new perspectives on the objects, which, like a surrealist study, can allow you to reflect on the familiar in an unfamiliar context. Each one is a dusky, tonal diorama, around which the camera can be rotated on a fixed circular path. There are ten scenes, visited in sequence. The presentation is as utilitarian as the subjects. This is a surrealist study of architecture's supporting cast in which you're forced to consider and prod, at length, at the places that nobody ever cares about, or thinks about, or notices. It's the hotel lobby, with its deep chairs and bowed pot-plants. It's the bus shelter, with its plastic seats, bathed in the white light of an advertising screen. It's the baggage carousel in the airport, with its melancholy conga of luggage. Islands, as its titular addendum 'Non-Places' insinuates, is a game about those non-descript patches of no-man's land through which we all pass en route to where we're going. A playful, often humorous tour of the modern world's transition spaces.
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