Have You Played... Proun?

It was long ago and it was far away, and it was so much better than it was today. That's not true, actually, it's been an amazing year for games. But Proun still feels like it came from another era, one of surprise and subversion. Just a matter of abundance, I suppose - throw a rock in the air and you'll hit three-hundred-and-eighty-two indie games trying something interesting today. The PC had long been home to formalist racing games when Proun arrived, and with clarity and panache (and a ball) it threw the doors open to everyone.

Proun is and was enormously pretty too - dialing back everything to abstracted minimalism, then making what it did contain (a ball, a pipe, some shapes) as impressive as possible. What a soundtrack, too. It all combines into feeling good. Unless you turn the difficulty up, in which event it's as harrowing as it needs to be.

RPS used to have an occasionally-repeated mantra back in 2011: Play Proun. Almost four years later, I have just one thing to say:

Play Proun.