Eyeland
I saw Eyeland compared favorably to one of my other recent favorites, Animal Well (read about THAT indie gem over in our latest Indie and Retro Newsletter). I also saw it described as a “wander around and figure it out” game. When I played it during a half-week vacation in the mountains a few days ago, I wrote one note in my phone for this eventual post: “Home is a nice place to be, but you can’t just stay there forever.” Sometimes you have to take a little journey, whether you really want to or not. You can’t just sit around and watch the sunset every day. That’s not the kind of world we live in. We need to make money. We need to feel the sun on our skin. We need to… get out more.
But sometimes you meet some nice people, and sometimes you solve some Pulp-friendly switch puzzles. Sometimes the little island that you’ve crafted for yourself becomes a slightly bigger world, and it’s up to you to figure out what to do next. Eyeland is one of, or maybe THE, quintessential early Pulp adventure games. You’re a little… blob? with little thoughts and a little life that is turned upside down. So you head out into the world to see what’s up. Another Crab’s Treasure had some similar themes, too! The modern era of games (at least the ones I play, apparently) like to deal with themes of “home” and “doing things you don’t really want to do, but you have to/get to do anyway.”
Eyeland does a good job of giving you just enough clues to know which direction to head. Sometimes you get sidetracked, like in life, but you figure out what you should be doing eventually (also, if you’re lucky, just like life). That encourages me for my own day-to-day, since it’s hard to know where I’m headed sometimes. But games like this — less than an hour to see everything it has to offer and it wraps up the story with a nice little bow. Games like this remind you: you do need to get out of the house sometimes, but in the end, there’s no place like home.