unhinged fictive rambling: the first one
I genuinely love fiction and fictive works. this is a notion easily proved by the existence of the Archive, but I also wanted an excuse to write and be Incredibly Normal about things that interest me, so now here I am.
it's genuinely mind-boggling to me how much of our lives are devoted to works of fiction. games, novels, webcomics, hell- -even entire college courses dedicated to the art of Making Something Imaginary Tangible, there's so much fiction out there that it'd be literally impossible to experience it all in one lifetime.
so, I thought, sitting at my desk at shit-fuck-o'clock in the morning, staring deeply into the #004052 canvas upon a #01242E backdrop, why not write about it?
Hylics.
Hylics1 is an RPGMaker game made by claymation artist Mason Lindroth about being a weird little guy in a world that barely makes any sense, on a quest to topple the tyrant of the moon for reasons that aren't actually explained.
hands-down, it is one of my favorite creative works of all time. It's so unabashedly weird and eccentric in a way that immediately captivates your attention, from the clay figures Lindroth himself sculpted and digitized into game sprites, to the surreal surf-rock and abstract electronica soundtrack that veers straight off the comprehensibility cliff and can be sufficiently be summarized as "musical shitposting" (see: Messy Song, the appropriately-named main battle theme) gives the whole game a unique charm that I wholeheartedly believe cannot be found anywhere else.
the best part? that's not the only piece of Hylics media out there.
In 2020, Lindroth released Hylics 22, a game developed in Unity instead of RPGMaker, and for lack of better terms, it was spectacular. Experimenting even further with his style of claymation, Lindroth implemented animated sprites to the game, making each combat encounter feel much more like an intricate dance routine as your foes shuffled, gesticulated, posed, and marched forth, each attack and action being portrayed by an amalgam of clay figures, visual effects, and gestures by Lindroth's own leather-gloved hand that imbued the whole game with a sense of constant motion that'd been absent from its predecessor.
This, in conjunction with a fantastic soundtrack that exemplifies the themes and ideas that Hylics 2 is centered around, made in collaboration with musician and composer Chuck Salamone (which I genuinely cannot put into words how good it is, I've tried six times already, here's the YouTube playlist, go nuts) makes for a complete and memorable experience that I still treasure to this day, and encourage you, reader, to go and give the games a try when circumstances allow.
Not to forget the fact that Salamone worked on both a musical expansion of Hylics in Moonage Lobotomy, and an entire rock-opera album that retells the story of Hylics 2 in musical form in Absent Moon, with a surprise vocal feature from VINNY GODDAMN VINESAUCE (this isn't a bit, Track 1, The Champions of Ennui/Into the Pastel Sky), and that Lindroth is currently in the process of making Hylics 3 means that I have completely lost the point of this blog post and I'm going completely off-the-rails, and I could not care less.
In summary: Hylics. Awesome. go play it or consume literally any related media to it, trust me it'll be worth it.