#adult swim
#adult swim
by Omar (@siegarettes)
I don’t enjoy Rain World. I don’t appreciate its hostility, the way it alternates between small moments of wonder and long stretches of frustration. I don’t enjoy the way it disrupts exploration, forcing you to inhabit the same area for long periods, feeling away on the edges of it until you can decipher its obtuse demands and wander into a solution. Its environments are filled with visual noise, making interactable objects difficult to spot. The platforming is imprecise and often unreliable, a constant liability when hounded by the threat of predators and rain. And its map is laid out in a sequence of sewer-like piping, areas twisting into each other that make it difficult to create an internal sense of direction.
I also find it hard to fault Rain World for any these aspects, as they all form a coherent, intentional core.
by Omar (@siegarettes)
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.