Friday, November 15, 2013

Them Czechs

I always noticed that Polymorphous Perversity is a relatively underreviewed game. As a reference, right now it has 24.5k downloads, a little over 2k more than Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer. But BE:D has zillions of reviews and LPs around the Internet, while PP has a much smaller number. And even among the sites that do speak about the game, very few of them are actually reviews from people who played a considerable amount of it. They're listed on the "They have spoken" tab on the right of this page.

That's why I was pleasantly surprised when I found no less than SEVEN extremely elaborate and insightful reviews of the game on a Czech blog called Brnoblaster. I got to read them using Google Translator. I'm really not sure what is going on there, but apparently a group of people had to choose between 4 games and review one of them: Anna Anthropy's Dys4ia, Molleindustria's The Best Amendment, Lucas Pope's The Republia Times, and my own Polymorphous Perversity. These reviews are in-depth ones, very critical, with references to related material, even including psychoanalytic work.

Here is a list of the reviews, listed by author, linked directly to an English google translation.

Polymorphous Perversity analysis by Michal Zbranek
Polymorphous Perversity analysis by Tomešková Lucie
Polymorphous Perversity analysis by Vit Holubovské
Polymorphous Perversity analysis by Julie Dolezelova
Polymorphous Perversity analysis by Jan Owl
Polymorphous Perversity analysis by Luke Rifle
Polymorphous Perversity analysis by Vančurová

Special mention to Vančurová's review, for it was very daring and insightful in trying to interpret the game's symbolism.

It has also caught my attention that my games have received considerable attention from Czech gamers. Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer is mentioned on several Czech sites, and almost half the downloads for my latest game Suzy and freedom come from this Czech article. Both BE:D and PP have been featured on a Czech magazine called CD-Action. What's even more interesting is that these reviews and pieces are usually very intelligent ones. While reading Brnoblaster's pieces, I actually wondered whether the authors were gamers or psychologists. I'm not sure what to make of it, because I'm not very familiar with Czech culture or really anything related to the Czech Republic.

Funny fact: Portuguese word for Czech is "Tcheca", which is also slang for "vagina".

5 comments:

  1. Good to hear/ see!
    Hope this isn't out of place, but was just wondering whether you've ever considered putting your games on greenlight? I'd imagine less as a case of 'make money' or 'has to be on a platform/ steam', but more that I think it would be an interesting contribution to a marketplace that is missing this type of unique content. I'd be really interested to see what the reactions would be from that kind of audience, both positive and negative haha. Just something I was wondering!

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    1. Steam now tries to 'crowdsource' its application process to make a game available on Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight
      Unfortunately I just had a look, and Steam doesn't seem to allow 'adult' content. I mean of the sexual variety of course, it's fine to set a crying woman on fire with gasoline and then urinate on her to put her out (Postal) but sexual scenes are just too scary for games!

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  2. Thanks for the tip anyway!
    Also, RPG Maker 2003 doesn't have an official English version, so every game made on it is illegal in a way... even though it's not commercial. I don't think anyone cares at this point, though.

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