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Single Press: Slam City Oracles’ breezy playground fun

by Omar(@siegarettes)

• Slam City Oracles
  
• by Jane Friedhoff, Jenny Jiao Hsia, SCULLY
  
• PC (itch.io)

Single Press is a series of short writings on small games.

Two minutes. That’s all that it takes to play through Slam City Oracles. But that’s also all it needs to make its point.

Slam City Oracles is a firecracker game. You bring into a breezy party space, fire it off and watch the color and sound light up the place. It’s LOUD. It’s rambunctious. It’s a game about two girls crashing down and throwing around the town like a tower of blocks set up in a bouncy castle. 

It’s immediate. Get two people, set em up and watch ‘em go. They’ve got two minutes to wreck things to the sound of a riot grrrl soundtrack by SCULLY. It’s real noisy, it’s real good. Jenny Hsia’s art looks like a set of stickers you always thought were too charming to actually stick to anything, all silly faced foods and colors like the brightest, freshest box of crayons you’ve ever opened. Between the two of you, you’ll lose control of the situation real fast and navigating that chaos, or just frolicking in it, becomes part of the game itself. 

There’s a couple of little challenges to figure out, stuff your group can work out as you pass the controls around, but they’re really just there to give a little bit more context to the party. Really, there’s not much that needs to be said . You can play a round of it in the time it takes to read this article. Slam City Oracles isn’t a novel sized conversation, but a space-bound SHOUT! It’s standing on a see-saw rocking it back and forth to knock each other off. It’s punting a kickball into a pinata. It’s two girls just really rocking out.