Type stuff and see what happens in Constellation

Forget 'God Games', because Super Hexagon creator Terry Cavanagh has come up with something that that shows you what it's really like to be a deity. Constellation is a free game with a five word premise: type stuff, see what happens. You can run it in your browser, and while it's designed to be played at events I've been having fun poking at it on my lonesome.

There's little consistency to the results of whatever you type in, but that's part of the joy of it. It's probably best if you go in completely blind, but there are enough possibilities that I can tell you about some of the weirder stuff that went on when I took it for a spin.

If you're stuck for ideas, you can just type in 'random' and the game will type something for you, and repeatedly doing that can lead you to some strange places. It's not as fun as stumbling on novel things yourself, but you can treat it as a springboard for getting you there. It transported me to what I thought was the moon once, which lead me to start typing in planets that then appeared as small floating orbs. That lead me to 'star', which does something completely different.

In the past 15 minutes, I've explored shapes, inanimate objects and concepts in a way that I never have before. Take a look for yourself:

There are jokes, too - typing in 'game' brings up a score at that top left that goes up whenever you add something. Don't worry, you can type it again to go back to appreciating the interactive software as mere 'art'. Alternatively, you can just type that in as well.

Terry initially made Constellation for Now Play This 2017, an exhibition of experimental games that took place in London back in April. You can download the game for free from its Itch.io page, or play it in your browser on the self-explanatory justtypestuff.com.