Screenshot Saturday Sundays: Mapmakers, mushrooms and unfortunate fashion
Mushroom road, take me home
Screenshot Saturday Sundays! We're having a particularly lazy Sunday afternoon this week, but that shouldn't mean forgoing a stroll through the delights on offer through the #ScreenshotSaturday hashtag for our usual weekend viewing. This week: pastel cartography, mycelium cottages, data-corrupted highways from hell and squirrels.
We're once again visited by Au Fil De L'eau developer Samson Auroux this week, this time with a brief dabble in map-drawing.
Since releasing lovely picturebook excursion Au Fil De L'eau, Aurox's work has chilled somewhat. Literally, I mean, putting his efforts towards crunchy snowsports trip A Skier's Journey. Returning to warm pastels, his latest draft taps into the part of my head that's obsessed with maps, atlases and general cartography. Early days, for sure, but I'm keen on seeing how the developer chooses to landmark this promising world.
One thing you couldn't pin down on a map, mind, is Mr Thee's mobile mushroom mansion.
The idea of a walking house rings quite pleasant in the current moment. After all, if I can't go outside, I reckon it'd be quite nice to explore the world from the comfort of my fungal front room. Thee was previously behind The Growth Project, a pay-what-you-want golf 'em up that Pip took to way back in 2016. While it's hard to conjure more details on this project, Thee's been teasing what looks like a witchy little romp. I have to imagine this fully-mobile mycelial home is simply the work of a nifty little potion.
Moving on from things that shouldn't move across ordinary spaces, we're hopping into a perfectly normal car in an imperfectly broken highway.
The above may have been the clip that brought Taylor Swietanski to my attention, but their feed can be largely summed up as "entirely my shit". Glitched, broken captures of fragmented places, rendered in hellish low-resolution neon and captioned with short, ominous poetry. It's a mood captured by the title of Swietanski's latest Itch release, 2019's Caged Bird Don't Fly Caught In A Wire Sing Like A Good Canary Come When Called, a work in which this screen certainly stands in conversation with.
(Granted, this should've been on my radar earlier, given Jay's enigmatic dive into Caged Birds Don't Fly... last year)
Finally... I don't really have anything to say that isn't already said by Dusk developer David Szymanski, only that you might want to end the article here if you're overly fond of rodents. It's called, uh, "Squirrel Stapler" for good reason.
Just remember, fur is murder - and games are awfully fond of murder, aren't they?