Cal Michael is a developer who release a series of small games and zines on Itch.io – most of them cycle around a specific set of interwoven themes: The search for god, demons, (probably christian informed) mysticism, the sea, and especially sea urchins. I’m used to deal with strange media, but if the author hadn’t described his own works as surrealist, I might’ve been tempted to doubt his sanity at times. The games offered here are cryptic, unapproachable, turn sometimes even into the bizarre, but are nonetheless beautiful: Blake meets H.P. Lovecraft, the dadaists, and acid folk.
Urchin Teeth is a Twine-Game. A poem about god, existence, and the ocean. It remained a fragment but contains some pretty good poetry. „the oceans are filled with hatred.“.
five angels come and name it fire is about a young moth that sets out to explore a world that is at the same time both quite naturalist, yet phantasmal. It is an occult, esoteric, delicate, and gloomy poem – with a language and imagery that reminds me to the lyrics of Tom Rapp and some of the darker parts of the output of Witthüser and Westrupp. For me, this is the best game in the authors repertoire.
Coronation is a bitsy game, that leaves any logic and integration to reality in the traditional sense behind – you play a undefined entity, who has to get a blessing from the silence to complete a ritual that will turn it into a god – interestingly, not only will the game not end with finishing the ritual, but you’ll still be vulnerable to the snake that might (following the christian metaphorical language) be epitome of sin appearing in the game.
scallop star song seeker is a visual novel. It is visually stunning and acoustically good, but the chosen format (that resembles a theater play) doesn’t support the poetical qualities found in the preceding games – it stays shallow, and can’t enfold an atmosphere.
SEVEN SONGS AND THE HYMNS OF HELL, a zine that accompanies images of blaring waves and foam with poetry typical for the author remained distant and cryptic for me; at first I thought that this would be a result in the change of media, and that Twine just worked better as a format for this art – but after reviewing the zine again, it seems to me as if the author submerged so far into his own mindscape here, that the result is seemingly outside of my comprehension.
WELLSPRING OF SONG escalated this tendency: The texts in this zine are written, according to the author, in a language constructed by medival german mysticist Hildegard von Bingen, that he uses as a language of the end of the world here. The images are beautiful collages. The English translation that was announced never appeared – the zine stays aloof, great, and strange.
AUGUR SOUTH is again a bitsy game, and it might be seen as a unification of different ideas and themes: A devil travels to god – the texts are in the authors usual style, sometimes obfuscated through shaking fonts and (probably deliberate set) cuts through the engine, but seem to be more graspable again, and the accompanying visuals are beautiful. While „five angels“ is poetically greater and „scallop“ and „wellspring“ were visually more striking, this is arguably the best synthesis in the authors oeuvre so far.
The games of Cal Michael are a demanding „Gesamtkunstwerk“ – even if you approach them with good will and an open mind, they might largely escape you in the end – but are certainly worth a look. If you manage it to penetrate them, they reward you with a dive into a mystical, enthralling, and unique other-world.
The games run either with Twine or Bitsy, making them FLOSS. Worked fine with OpenSuse Leap 15.3 and Firefox.
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