“You guys can’t envision the final collapse of capitalism? Incredible!”
I’ve followed Stephen Gill-Murphy online over many years. He has maintained a web presence in a variety of locations.
The sands of time have worn grooves into my brain – bad ones that have left me unable to remember precisely how I stumbled upon Gill-Murphy’s stuff. Space Funeral was probably the first of his games that I played. It was inspiring to see someone have so much fun with RPG Maker. Gill-Murphy has written at length about his experiences in the community that formed around RPG Maker. Space Funeral appears to be a small protest against many of the established tropes common to that community.
Gill-Murphy has in recent years moved onto Unity. Again we find him playing with the possibilities allowed by the tools. Most of the gameplay in his works involves exploring environments and reading snippets of text. While there’s always a wry sense of humour at work here, one can’t help but appreciate the quirky characters that populate his works.
Keep in mind that he has explicitly stated that he makes games “out of hatred and scorn” back in a 2017 talk given at an indie developer conference (folks who wish to hear him say this line can hop to 38 minutes and 30 seconds). He walks it back a little in the same video by saying that it usually comes down to a feeling of “affable incomprehension.” Gill-Murphy manages to pull it off by injecting genuineness into everything. His art is honest. Gill-Murphy isn’t presenting us with doodles because he’s making a comment about the art world. He embraces doodles because they’re fun. He has cultivated an aesthetic and voice. I love his little worlds that I get to explore.
His latest project is a series of games that feel like interactive comics (or zines). Their titles all follow the pattern: [A Body Part] of the Killer. Their protagonist is BB, a yellow bunny person with pink hair that covers one of her eyes. She is a zine-maker and the plots follow her as she finds herself the target of one killer or another.
Gill-Murphy collaborated with Alex Degen on this series. Degen designed cover art for each game and some art assets used in each title. The cover artwork does a great job at capturing the mood and happenings of each entry – just like good movie posters do.
There are already eight of these games to play. Each one is unique in its specific plot as well as some of the mechanics employed to tell the story. I frequently found myself wanting to inhabit these places. There’s a comforting beauty in the games. The pacing for each instalment is brisk. The writing is genuinely funny. I especially like BB’s reaction to finding out the identity of the killer in Blood of the Killer: as BB is being chased, she keeps shouting “WAIT” in a frantic effort to placate the killer’s thirst for blood.
A ninth entry is apparently in development. Gill-Murphy has said that he intends to put all of the titles together in a launcher application once the series is complete.
Gill-Murphy’s work is most effective at encouraging others to take a crack at creative outlets. After finishing his games, I’m usually left with the thought, “Hey, I could make simple little games like these.” That’s worth a lot.
2024-01-19