Vignettes: Object twiddling to find new perspectives
A new angle on life
We haven't written about Vignettes [official site], except in passing as part of other articles. I wonder why not? It's a lovely game-ish toy about twiddling objects until you find the perspective where the object becomes this single block of colour. Once you find that, you move the object again to see it from a new angle and it has become something else. It's delightful and has been hovering on the periphery of release for a while now, cropping up at various games showcases and events. I saw it at GDC so this feels like a good reason to finally commit it to writing!
Here is a gif that will explain things better than me:
See?
The broad structure of the game as I understood it during the loud and crowded MIX event was that you can follow different pathways through the game depending on which objects you activate as you turn them this way and that. Think of it as a kind of branching path where your choices take the form of which perspectives you discover. There were framed pictures you could look at which would become populated with the items you discovered from particular segments which would help guide you or nudge you towards exploring further. There were also little Easter eggs as part of the process and points where you could have tiny playful interactions with the objects.
It's a smart, minimalist project with a nice core idea and it'll be good to sit down and play it in a more chilled out atmosphere when it finally comes out, whenever that is.
[Disclosure: I should add that one of the developers is listed as Pat Ashe and I know him IRL. He has never mentioned Vignettes to me so reading that on the page this morning is the first I heard of it. I would say Pat should probably up his self-promotion game but he is also responsible for a line of t-shirt merch with his own face on them so I have no idea what an increase in self-promotion would even look like in this scenario.]