Posted December 2, 2004
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...she has really, really, really tiny teeth. Well, at least her bottom-front teeth are very very small. It was like miniaturized baby corn (yes, that small!) was embedded in her lower jaw.
I had never really noticed, and the sight of her tiny bottom-front teeth slightly disturbed me, especially when I was comparing them to how large I think my own teeth are.
Some people believe that cats see humans just as very large cats. More than likely, that's just well-wishing on many cat enthusiasts behalf but conversely, I think many cat owners see their cats as just ... small humans. I've been living with my cats for so long that I kind of forget that they're, well, cats and not children running around my living room. But occasionally you're visually slapped into reality by something like these tiny teeth, by something that is simply a matter of scale.
Saru Brunei's Cubivore contains a slightly more morbid matter of scale. In Cubivore, you take up the life of a young 'cubivore', bent on returning color to the his homeland by growing big and strong so he can conquer the Killer Cubivore. Of course, growing big and strong requires work. Work like violently ripping the colored flesh off of your cube brethren, which in turn adds color to your pelt. Add enough color to yourself and you can even mutate, which is to say the stocky, poorly-textured blocks that are considered your appendages err.. change positions. Just like in nature! The more mutations, the more attractive your cube becomes (somehow). The more attractive you are, the more women will mate with you. Yes, mating. Once you've defeated and eaten one of your stronger cubikin (which routinely entails ripping off a special part of their body), you have the opportunity to mate.
After mating with who knows how many women (at once, of course - you see them as a posse of cubigirls chasing after your sexy square body to join the women that have already dragged you off-screen), the screen goes to black followed by an iris-in to reveal your dead body.
That'll teach you to practice polygamy.
As you push the analogue stick, desperately looking for signs of movement, a tiny cubivore comes peeking out from behind your body, growing in leaps and bounds with each and every step. It's a disturbing image, seeing the scale of your (now deceased avatar) dwarf this tiny little creature and simultaneously realizing that you're now controlling said creature, the spawn of his cubiloins. But this image evokes the same sense of cognitive dissonance I felt when looking, really looking at the bottom row of my cat's teeth. That sort of image is a type of disconnect that makes you remember 'oh yeah, you're a member of an entirely different species'. And in fact, in Cubivore you stare that taxonomic dissonance right in the face.
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And evolve you must. You mutate to survive. However, you die only to evolve. In fact, you'll still be dying and evolving the first time you finish the game; the elusive Killer Cubivore will still be far out of your grasp. As a player, you're forced to die and evolve (well, at least your gameplay abilities) in order to continue forth. And as thematically respectable as that decision is, it's still rather dull and even aggravating to force us to transverse this world twice when once felt redundant already. Any evolution is fine and good I suppose, but many games have evolution as the core of their game design. In fact, not just games but entire genres. The heart of most role-playing games are for your characters to evolve into majestic warriors/wizards/etc., sometimes even through death (and sometimes even with new color hues!). Consequently, it shouldn't come as any big surprise that Cubivore mostly feels like some slip-shod real-time combat role-playing game minus the story elements (here replaced with some strange form of indirect-but-yet-direct narration). Well, except for the 'doo'. Yes, you can make yourself defecate on the lawn. In fact, little steam clouds pillow from the small bundle of colored joy you leave behind. 'Doo'ing has a purpose though - it's to discard poorly thought out color schemes. Yes, 'doo'ing basically exhumes the prior meat from your body.
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What it comes down to is that Cubivore has a few moments where you're forced to stare dissonance in the eye via a sheer matter of scale - be it physical scale or existential, you have your work cut out for you. The rest of the time the game feels relatively uninspired. Well, perhaps excluding the simple, solo-driven background music. That's quite fine, with its solemn piano work and triumphant brass.
Maybe next week I'll tell you about how my cats play my cello.
