Escape futility for mere seconds with Personal Archipel

The weight of this world is a crushing pallet of personal breeze blocks, hanging around our collective necks like cursed talismans. Every day we try to lift ourselves to betterment, and every evening we find ourselves exhausted in a bed of toast crumbs and fatigue.

Here’s a tiny island made of colourful pixels!

Your Personal Archipel makes a small, rotating island out of the magic of procedural generation. To keep you watching and inspecting for a few moments, it also cycles through all your favourite seasons, changing the colour of the trees in autumn from vivid greens to golden yellows and burnt orange, for example. Or covering everything in snow during the winter. How pretty and fast the island changes. Then you can press ‘Z’ to generate a new one.

There’s not much else going on here but we figured life is tough. Sometimes you just want to look at a miniature island made of code and colour. After all, this pleasant idea has seen other interpretations. The creator of this one though, Trasevol Dog, explains some of the workings on the Pico-8 message boards (“The island is generated using custom cellular automata,” we are informed) and has also made a bunch of other Pico-8 creations with pulsating rainbows and grappling hooks and twisting trees which may help you to feel a lightness in your heart for a limited time, a small oases of relief in this world of cerebral embers and fetid ideologies, this world of endless, merciless upheaval.

Aren't videogames awesome!