Prophetic: Glitchhikers Chap Starts Game "EP" With Oracle

These dreamy summer nights continue. Today I'm casting procedural prophecies and rolling my eyes back to watch surreal visions in ΘRAΩLE (and that's the last time I'll stylise that), spinning forecasts from words like "Knots", "Earth", and "Promises" then interpreting dreams of temples, trees, and dagger-pierced hearts. It's too hot but I can't stop staring at this gorgeous polygonal fire.

Oracle is the first game of East Van EP, a planned collection by 'ceMelusine', one of the folks behind lovely dreamy night game Glitchhikers. £1 gets you Oracle and three games yet to come.

Oracle starts before a campfire encircled with weapons, some kind of ritual space. As someone beseeches the Oracle for help, you select a word from a small selection--things like Promises, Whispers, Bones, Tunnel, Emerald Crown, Fog, Ashes, Drowned, Reach, or Knots--then another, then another, and these are spun out into sentences and string together in a prophecy. Lanterns, Flight, and Drain, for example, gave this:

Then your eyes roll back into a vision, several seconds-long flashes of scenes laden with symbols--skies, eyes, trees, temples, monoliths, megaliths, crosses, corridors. A snap of that one vision:

And that's about it. Words become sentences, sentences become dreams, then you're back at the bonfire and prophesying again, rocked gently by music. Like the declarations of Mountain, I find the symbols and prophecies pleasing to contemplate; they're little focuses for reflection.

"Basically, I think videogames should be more like music, so I've decided to pretend like they are!" ceMelusine says of the EP. That's nice. Small collections of small nice things.

Oracle is a small and weird and pleasant thing and it'll cost you £1 ($2 Canadian) to look. I could show you a few minutes of the game, let you see how it works and what you do. Or I could show you a minute of its fire. You probably know by now if you'd pay a pound to see more anyway.