It was back in 2010 that Swedish developer Erik Svedäng started work on else Heart.Break() [official site], shortly after the release of his critical darling Blueberry Garden. The game spent a year in pre-production, and a further four in actual production thereafter, helped along by support from the Nordic Game Program. It was on Thursday, however, that Svedäng finally released else Heart.Break() to the world.
Well, we were mean about WatchunderscoreDogs, so I guess we should be mean about elseOpenCurlyBracketHeartFullStopbreakOpenParenthesisCloseParenthesisSpaceCloseCurlyBracket too. At least this is a game about programming though, so the silly name is a mite more justified. Or maybe lots of hackers really do use a lot of underscores and we’ve been unfair all this time?
Anyway: we wrote about this back in 2012, but the next game from Erik ‘Blueberry Garden’ Svedäng (with art from sometime collaborator Niklas Akerblad) is currently causing internet-wide cooing thanks to a thoughtful write-up and interview by Leigh over at Gamasutra. Apparently, the game has drifted from its puzzle-based roots during development, and into a new and extremely appealing focus on world-building.
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Games are pretty great. I realize that this is an incredibly contentious statement, but just work with me on this one. You know what else is really great, though? Saving the entire free world. But we can’t all be firemen, police officers, or the Hulk, and for us, there’s the Indie Royale All-Charity Lightning Pack. Every last cent from the bundle gets split between Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Actionaid, and Unicef, and hey, the game lineup is actually pretty awesome. Man, saving the world really is as easy as no one says it is.
The Lightning Pack – which has just over 80 hours’ worth of sand left in its hourglass – includes soul-soothing subatomic droplet magic toy Osmos, rough and rowdy physical party game B.U.T.T.O.N, hard-boiled Rabbi detective story The Shivah, and delightful exploration experiment Blueberry Garden. Are you tempted by the diabolical succubus that is charity? Then you know what you must do.
IGF-entrancing Blueberry Garden has found its way into the realm of (incredibly cheap) release, and it also has a demo. The game is indeed a kind of garden: an open-ended side-scrolling world in which many different things can by made to happen. Your flying, beaked protagonist is like something out of a child’s illustrated storybook, and travels about the strangely sketched landscape interacting with the beautifully imagined flora, fauna and inanimate stuff that resides there. Developer Erik Svedang says it’s “about curiosity and exploration”, and that pretty much sums this oddity up. You’re going to want to experience this one for yourself, I think, so go and download that demo.
A hundred thousand yes:
Blueberry Garden is by Swedish developer, Erik Svedäng, and just looks utterly wonderful. The game is entered into this year’s Swedish Game Awards, and you can find out more about it, and that, here.
