This is your brain on videogames
Brains are impressionable little animals uniquely at the mercy of videogames For Cobysoft’s Joe Buchholz, it was Pokémon. “The obsession I had with that game was almost like a psychic wound,” he tells us. He hadn’t thought of it that way at first, but after talking to a friend about his lifelong recurring dreams of Pokémon merch, Pokémon toys, Pokémon everything, he started to realise the depth of its influence. “‘It’s almost like PTSD’ is what he said.”
The obsession is apparent even before we reach the monster-collecting portion of our demo. We are dreaming, memories chopped up and fed back to us in flashes. 3D models of childhood toys hover in giant hands. The camera flies queasily through a family computer room disintegrating into fuzz. Nostalgia and horror blend in the narration: “I’m swallowing a penny that was lying on my dad’s office chair. I’m immediately puking it up.” It’s almost a relief when the dream’s interrupted by a little wooden figure asking us to delete one of two galaxies from existence. And then we’re catapulted into a console UI, where we boot up Dome-King Cabbage from inside of Dome-King Cabbage.
Our own brains have stubbornly held onto this unusual game since we first saw it at an Asobu Indie Showcase. Visually, it remains unlike anything we’ve ever seen – not its 2D sections, which have been expressly designed to push players’ nostalgia buttons, but Buchholz’s 3D Blender work. Photorealism, clay textures and vinyl-toy glossiness combine to phantasmagoric effect. It caught the attention of Japanese indie publisher Hyper Real, too, whose funding has allowed Buchholz to develop the game full-time. “The last three years have really been making the game from scratch in this new 3D style,” he says. “It’s just a better medium for me to tell this story.”
