Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Jonatan ‘Cactus‘ Soderstrom is one of the most prolific and interesting indie developers currently working. During the IGF judging sessions I was fortunate enough to play an early version of Mondo Nation, the compilation of Cactus’ series of bizarre, unsettling FPS puzzle games. These games are, I would suggest, about as close as videogames have come to the weirder elements of a David Lynch production. Cactus cites Mr Lynch, along with plenty of other esoteric influences, in the interview below. If you want to set the scene for yourself, and get a little flavour of Cactus’ mad humour, then perhaps you should play some of his games before reading onwards. Mondo Agency, Psychosomnium, or SeizureDome are all good places to start.

Read the rest of this entry »

My favourite indie soloist, Cactus, is now part of a duo, Lo-Fi Minds, and they’re working on a new platform adventure called Brain-Damaged Toon Underworld. They’ve just released a brief demo for the game, which will be out in full shortly. (And that’s probably days rather than weeks if Cactus’ usual turnaround rate applies here.) I’ve also just noticed that Cactus has created a 40mb (2.something Peggle) compilation set of his previous games. That’s a great place to start if you’re unfamiliar with his insane lo-fi coding.