Curate of Curiosities

What I've already covered is by no means the entirety of Nicky Case's works. There's also:

• Coming Out Simulator, a game similar to Adventures with Anxiety, but rather than being abstract and symbolic like the former, is grounded in Case's experience of coming out as gay to their parents,
• Nothing to Hide, an "anti-stealth game" set in a dystopian surveillance state, where the objective is to stay in view of surveillance drones at all times,
• The Evolution of Trust, an interactive page showing how people trust each other, with variations of the Prisoner's Dilemma,
• As well as, for whatever reason, this video.

Naturally, it would be very impractical to do write ups of all of these, so let's just focus on what we've already covered.

The first time I played We Become What We Behold was in 2017 or 2018, and back then, I was pretty impressed by its message. It might have been because I felt that the game resonated with the political climate of the time. Since then, I have encountered so many messages about the evils of mass media that this game doesn't seem all that remarkable anymore.

Adventures With Anxiety was somewhat better. It helps that the message there is a bit less simplistic. That doesn't mean that the game doesn't simplify things: it can't be a coincidence that the game attributes three basic fears to anxiety, and that you are often prompted to make one of three different choices. I can understand that its very purpose and subject matter practically require it to lecture the player at some point, but it still felt a bit awkward to read through (at least, compared to the companion site)

The :the game: trilogy, on the other hand...as I've said before, I believe that the trilogy, particularly the final entry, is Case's best work, even if they would think otherwise. Now, what would lead me to come to this conclusion?

Maybe it's the nostalgia factor: playing the games reminds me of browsing meme pages back in 2010.

Maybe it's the variety of gameplay: while most of the stages involve your character falling off a platform, but oftentimes the game tries to keep things fresh with stuff like an FPS level and a DDR clone. While the third game consists of actual platforming challenges, there's no shortage of variety there either.

Perhaps it's the humor: when you make so many jokes in quick succession like this, some of them are bound to land. Granted, it's still a product of its time, but I believe it still holds up pretty well.

Or maybe it's that I just miss when browsers supported Flash by default.

Whatever the reason, I found the trilogy to be really engaging. There may never be another web game, Flash or otherwise, that's quite like this.