New World Gaming: Coma, The Latest Mini-Masterwork of Flash Game Art

Via the indispensable blog Jay is Games comes Coma, by Thomas Brush, an eerily beautiful Flash game, the story of a strange boy in an even stranger land, going in search of his missing sister through weird fields, shadowy forests, the belly of a beast, and probably all along, the psyche of the game developer himself. A near-perfect harmony of imagery, soundscape, and adventure game interactivity, Coma is the latest example of an emerging digital art form I've been excited to follow: The Flash-based mini-game. While Coma is very much a game (there's many challenges and puzzles to surpass, which will probably take you less than 30 minutes to overcome), the developer's emphasis is even more on the immersive experience of being in this world, and discovering the ideas it presents.

Coma is the kind of thing you wish Roger Ebert had bothered playing, after declaring like an a priori mofo, "Games can't be art". (But before he said, "Forget I said a damn thing.") Just as exciting as the creativity and ambition you see in Flash games like this is that they're developed with an extremely low budget, and serve a huge pre-existing market for Flash games. "Every Day the Same Dream", a very powerful example of Flash game art which came out last year, has been played nearly 400,000 times on just one site alone (it's hosted on many others.) How many works of conceptual art have attracted that kind of an audience -- either in real world galleries, or in Second Life?

Comments

[Bone]

This reminds me a lot of Knytt and Knytt Stories (http://nifflas.ni2.se/) in terms of gameplay and atmosphere. I highly recommend checking those games out (free, windows.) In fact, Knytt Stories was my favorite game that came out that year. And I play my fair share of games, indie and triple-A games.

[Jovin]

You should also checkout Samorost 1 & 2 if you haven't already - http://amanita-design.net/samorost-1/ then http://amanita-design.net/samorost-2/

Both classics in this field, IMO - the only thing I'd miss Flash for if I bought an iPad! :-)

[Mark]

Hamlet,

SL is not a game in that way and never will be. You should just accept that fact.