Alice0 has a habit of introducing me to weird and slightly frightening games featuring brutalist architecture. Well, not a habit exactly, but it’s happened three times now, which is enough to make it a thing. Fugue In Void, by Moshe Linke, is technically and literally a walking simulator, in that you are going for a walk and that’s all you do in it, but what it simulates you walking through is kind of a surrealist nighmarescape of raw concrete. I know I’m supposed to be making this game sound like something you’d want to play. Honestly, it’s very good.
It’s also very short. It’s a 45 minute stroll through different but somhow connected buildings, some set in strange landscapes. They’re all huge, grey, made of blocks of untreated concrete. It’s the sort of place you’d hate to be chased through, which is why I spent the whole game scared I was about to be chased. Some of the rooms hold strage geometric shapes, sometimes spinning or lit from odd angles, which seem more like animals than they do sculpture. Things change in repsonse to you being there to observe them.
One of the most memorable parts is finding yourself in a desert, looking at a huge, squatting building that has the air of a temple from an ancient civilisation. The only thing you can do is move, but when you press the button to go forwards you move backwards. It becomes clear that in order to approach the building you have to turn your back on it. It creates the sensation that the building is moving towards you, not the other way around. I hated it. It was great.
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