Through the Windo

Here's a link to a great new interactive game/environment called WINDOSiLL. It was created by Patrick Smith, who has been making interactive animated environments in Flash for some time now; I included his "Vector Park" work in a show of animation I curated for the Ottawa International Animation Festival back in 2003.


The game presents a very meditative experience. There is a goal, where you progress from one screen to another, but there's no urgency to get on to the next thing; part of the pleasure of the game is to dawdle, and explore the strange doodads and creatures that inhabit each environment. Part of what's effective about WINDOSiLL is the way it introduces its own logic to the player. What's even better is the overarching sense of mystery that permeates everything-- there are suggestions of deep and probably fundamentally inexplicable cosmologies lurking behind the images and facades. Over the course of the game, Smith lightly tips his hat to Bosch, Magritte, Brueghel, Rube Goldberg, and Dr. Seuss.

You can play the first half of the game for free; I plunked down the three bucks to play the remainder of the game, and it was money well-spent.

Patrick Smith's sketchbook blog is located here, and you can see WINDOSiLL sketches and tests here.