Tag Archives: benmergui

Hope for the Future

Premier video game industry news site Gamasutra just released their top 5 indie games of the year. Number one is Daniel Benmergui’s wonderful “I Wish I Were the Moon,” which I’ve mentioned before. Number two is “Everybody Dies,” third-place winner in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition and a game I’ve yet to play. These two selections give me a great deal of hope for the future of interactive entertainment.

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Benmergui’s Three Views of Love

A screenshot from 'I Wish I Were the Moon' of a man on the moon and a woman looking up at him from a boat.Daniel Benmergui, the creator of “Night Raveler and the Heartbroken Uruguayans“, has been releasing three games, one a week, for three weeks. They were created for an event called Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Game Show, and they each deal with a similar mechanic of moving or duplicating things in the game world to change the game’s situation.

One of the things I love about Benmergui’s recent games is that he deals with themes that are underexplored in most digital games: namely, love. “I Wish I Were the Moon” is based on a story by Italo Calvino, and relies on the player shifting elements around to affect a tragic and bizarre love triangle. “The Trials” actually has you taking Polaroids of game elements to create duplicates and solve several puzzles, including one that puts me strongly in mind of “Raveler.” Finally, “Storyteller” has the player rearranging the position of characters in three periods of time, to affect the final outcome: who lives, who dies, and who loves whom.

Check these games out. They’re short, they’re cute, and they’re very clever.