This month we look at a pair of games by Mike Bithell, Subsurface Circular and Quarantine Circular.
Another long one. A little ironic for the focus of this podcast episode being on two fairly small games, but also not ironic given how textually dense they both are. And that’s not just a pun on the gameplay being text based. Both games are like the best of those mid-century sci-fi stories, they’re about ideas and about communication.
Subsurface Circular, while nominally a detective story, plays out more like a slice of life experience on the subway. We play as a detective robot and while as we investigate an anomaly but spend most of the time talking with the various teks on the subway, learning about the world and finding clues. We do find the culprit, but it turns out the real bad guy is capitalism. We figure the final choice, robot revolution or status quo, is a smoke screen.
Quarantine Circular, while nominally an alien first contact story, it plays out like the worst day of office politics ever. We play as a group of people tasked with communicating with the alien, each member with their own personality and viewpoint. This ended up being a big point of contention between Nick and me. I like the drama that was created out of this conceit, while Nick had problems with forced nature of it.
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“Enemies with guns and war crimes are easy to bat away or destroy. The people who are capable of actually challenging their constrained views of ethics are dangerous.”