Given To The Wild, Wonderputt
By: James (@thaumatropia)
Every week we’ll be recommending a game and an album to check out. This week, we take a look at Given To The Wild by The Maccabees and Wonderputt.
- - Label: Fiction Records
- - Recorded: Rockfield Studios, Monmouthshire, Wales, UK
- - Released: January 2012
Given To The Wild opens the same way you emerge from sleep— slowly, unsure of your surroundings, vaguely aware of what’s happening around you but totally unable to respond. By the time the transition to “Child” hits, you’re fully pulled into the album’s waking/sleeping state with a luscious rolling bass line and an exhilarating horn section. Later tracks bring tidal waves of intoxicating feeling— “Ayla” presents a fast beat and rollicking piano that strikes a dissonant chord with lyrics that speak to disaffected wandering, while “Pelican” thunders in your ears like an ex-lover begging you to take them back. Given To The Wild is a heady brew, the kind of album that makes you put everything else on hold. This isn’t an album you listen to— it’s an album you bear witness to.
Recommended Tracks:
- Wonderputt
- Developer/Publisher - Damp Gnat
- Browser, iOS
Wonderputt is really two separate things— an elaborate, garishly retro Pop Art painting, and a fun mini-golf game. Whether you mention the former or the latter first probably says something about how you feel about the game. Wonderputt features deceptively simple gameplay that besets the player with menacing traps, all couched in a bright and lurid aesthetic. In this way, the game is as faithful an adaptation of mini-golf as you’re likely to find. What the game lacks in depth, it more than makes up for with a visual and ludic design built on elegant precision. This is an exquisite appetizer of a game— the experience is short, but it hits the spot.