by Omar (@siegarettes)

• Small Radios Big Televisions
  
• Developer- Fire Face Corporation
  
• Publisher- Adult Swim Games
  
• PS4, PC (Steam)
  

Small Radios, Big Televisions leans heavily into the contemporary digital aesthetic, taking several popular trends and exaggerating them until they’re blown out. Tilt shift blur gives its structures the presence of a diorama and chromatic abberation blows out its edges into distorted colors. The buildings themselves are stark, with strong edges and geometry that owes a lot to the low-poly movement. The colors are heavy on the saturation, with an emphasis primary colors, flat and artificial. Its exteriors give a sense of being manufactured, purpose built, with little texture other than those of the distortions brought upon by the photographic effects of the post-processing.

The artificiality begins to break down in its interiors, where machinery sits alongside graffiti and painted graphic work. Go a little further, play a little in its corridors, and you’ll find a set of tapes. These are the real interiors of Small Radios. 

Slot these into the tape player you’re carrying and you’ll be whisked away to natural spaces that are both intimate and endless. Here the ambient synthwave soundtrack shines, managing to convey both the digital nature of landscapes and its warmth. Each tape contains a small escape, the kind you experience on an autumn day when the leaves begin to change color, or on a clear summer afternoon. While these scenes use the same low poly aesthetics as the buildings, they’re more naturalistic, with colors just as vivid, but warmer, free from the same harshness. 

These places are digital nonetheless, and as you continue you’ll have to expose these tapes to magnets to progress. The distortions that result give these landscapes over to the artificial qualities of the media they’ve been recorded on. Their audio warps, becoming cavernous and dark, and their landscapes distort to match. These places are no less awesome than they were originally, but you can feels the creep of manufactured world within them.

That play between the representation of the natural and the artificial methods used to capture it is the fulcrum of Small Radios, and exploring the intimate spaces caught within that tension provides more than enough momentum. It’s a shame then that Fire Face Corporation felt the need to fill the interstitials with vague narrative wrapping. While they provide just enough context to hint at a larger situation, they never feel as compelling as the spaces themselves, and come off as lacking confidence that those spaces could support an experience by itself. To their credit, they’re brief, and never get in the way, but their most definitely not the focus here. Small Radios Big Televisions isn’t a game about challenges or some large, dramatic story. Rather, it’s a meditation on the digital and natural worlds, and the influence of each on the other.