Peak Bleak Blues (and other moods) offers nine new places to wander from Connor Sherlock
The sky in Isle Of The Dead is way too pretty to belong to the dead only
A kaleidoscopic fall; a world jarred by spiked lights, rocks, and scan lines; and an inescapable mirage are among the “other moods” from Connor Sherlock’s latest volume of walking simulators, titled Peak Bleak Blues (and other moods). To experience them you’ll have to get inside and hike about, stumbling upon all kinds of wonderful or ominous or wonderfully ominous oddities or just feeling the wide-open expanse of place. But you can still get a sense of each of them, like flipping through a travel brochure, thanks to this handy trailer.
That’s nine places to dig your fingers and eyeballs into, wandering as you please. “No goals, direction, or invisible walls,” reads the game’s itch.io page. Just you, and space, and the ability to walk or run.
Running is an interesting proposal, despite the name of both genre and collection. (Though titled for one of the games within, this is also “Walking Simulator A Month Club Vol. 3,” after a first and second of similar style.) The swaying speed of the gait isn’t quite the same in any two of the places, lending them an extra quirk to their atmospheres. Plus there’s the fact that running inherently feels more urgent than a lovely amble around, which can change their context.
A Sense Of Pieces, for example, begins with a claustrophobic maze, and bursting out of that into a pink haze of jagged mountains and open sky might feel like a relief. But if you keep running, it feels more like its own enclosed maze, you still stumbling for an exit that doesn’t exist. And then you start finding the bones.
Peak Bleak Blues (and other moods) is available from itch.io, where it’s currently $7.20 thanks to its launch sale. As the name suggests, you can also sign up to receive one of these monthly via Sherlock’s Patreon.