Triennale Game Collection Volume 2: 5 indies to celebrate art and video games (and which are free)

Triennale Game Collection Volume 2

Have you ever thought of visiting an exhibition and taking home a piece of it, to explore at a later time? With the 23rd International Exhibition you can probably do it thanks to the Triennale Game Collection - Volume 2, a collection of five independent titles that will be released starting July 12 and downloadable for free on the Apple Store, Google Play Store and Steam.

The five works, with a strong experimental connotation, explore the theme of the unknown in parallel with the installations of the International Exhibition: "Unknown Unknowns. An Introduction to Mysteries" is in fact the title chosen by the Milanese cultural institution and, like the works on display, also the five video games were commissioned for the occasion. To take care of everything is Pietro Righi Riva, co-founder and creative director of the Santa Ragione development studio and already directly involved in the creation of the first Triennale Game Collection, that Volume 1 inaugurated with the 21st Exhibition in 2016 (and who totaled over 180,000 downloads).

The poster of the 23rd International Exhibition As mentioned, the games were commissioned for the occasion, involving five independent game designers, who were asked to interpret the theme of the 23rd Exhibition. The artists selected by Riva are Yijia Chen & Dong Zhou of Optillusion (China / USA), Fern Goldfarb-Ramallo (Argentina), Nina Freeman of Star Maid Games (USA), Akwasi Afrane Bediako (Ghana) and Llaura McGee (Ireland) of Dreamfeel. Five works that explore the concept of the unknown that we don't know is unknown, each in a personal and intimate way, choosing different genres (from first-person adventure to puzzle game) and languages. "The Game Collection" Riva tells us, "was designed to allow the public to enjoy the work of art deferred with respect to the traditional visit to the exhibition. The video game is something you can take with you, accessible anywhere and at the reach of all ". And after having tried them in preview, the advice is really to carve out a few minutes of tranquility to enjoy the immersion in the five works, certainly contained in the duration but still intense and impactful. The application of Volume 2 will be available from 12 July, including the first experience, entitled WADE; the other chapters will be released in the next few months but they will always be part of the same application.

Riva in fact says that the developers were clearly left with a lot of creative freedom in the realization of their works, while the part was particularly stringent. technique. The application, as mentioned, is unique (so you will not have to download five different games but a single app) but at the same time contains the five works created independently by the developers. For this reason, the selected artists were provided with detailed documentation on how to make their own game and with what limitations (for example: do not include the double click in the scenarios because it is feasible on a PC with a mouse but not on smartphones and tablets, or, al conversely, the use of screen flip because it is impossible on a PC). Later, Unity was then used to group all five experiences into one application.

Here are the five games in detail in the Game Collection Volume 2.

Wade

Wade from Optillusion [Available July 12, 2022] Yijia Chen & Dong Zhou from Optillusion propose with Wade a surreal walk of a cosmonaut immersed in an underground river. The adventure is configured as a puzzle game with strongly dreamlike connotations, which symbolically represent the various stages of mourning: a range of emotions that gradually force us to abandon anger in favor of a more complex and rational elaboration of what we are living.

A path to be faced in one direction only, as well as the scrolling from left to right of the faceless protagonist.

We Are Poems

We Are Poems by Fern Goldfarb -Ramallo [Available from 29 July 2022] We Are Poems is perhaps among the five the most surreal works, which asks the player to explore the surface of an alien planet (or the depths of a cosmos?) Populated by numerous nodes, each of these composed of a riot of lights, colors and sounds. The game does not in itself have a purpose, with an unfolding and an end, other than to push the user into an exploration of only rarely intelligible elements, which change continuously in a whirlwind of random changes, constantly destabilizing expectations. of the user.

A fluid exploration of sexuality and the queer world.

Nonno's Legend

Nonno's Legend by Nina Freeman (Star Maid Games) [Available August 26, 2022] Nonno's Legend is an autobiographical work, which owes its name to the way in which the developer Nina Freeman called on grandfather (using the term "grandfather" due to its Italian-American origins). As a child, at her grandfather's house, the protagonist often played with a globe, which in this game has a decidedly magical nature: by unlocking a secret key in the pedestal of the object, the player will be able to break up the earth's crust and reshape it to his own pleasure. |

Mine

Mine by Akwasi Afrane Bediako [Available September 16, 2022] Let's take a first-person exploration adventure with Mine, from Ghanaian developer Akwasi Afrane Bediako. A long walk in a mine, full of natural materials and ... electronic components. The work reflects on the lack of consumer awareness, specifically on how no one often relates the real natural resources used for technology products, and the virtual spaces that we live every day thanks to these consumer products.

After all, Ghana and other African countries have been facing a tough fight in recent years against the illegal extraction of minerals and silicates, used for the production of technology (such as coltan) and whose fraudulent extraction causes a progressive depletion of the water resources of the country.

An unknown drama that many of us do not even know.

Contact

Contact by Llaura McGee (Dreamfeel) [Available from 30 September 2022] To close the second volume of the Triennale's Game Collection is Contact, an interactive text adventure by Lllaura McGee. The game, which boasts the original voice acting by the same author, will see in the Italian version the dubbing actress Marta Pizzogallo as narrator, while the text adaptation is by the Italian team We Are Müesli. Contact talks about the search for an alien life form, inspired by the biography of the author, who since childhood wondered if there was anyone besides her, at the time of her confined to a small Irish village, endowed with a sensitivity similar to that of she. An investigation that starts with an almost sci-fi incipit and progressively heads towards more intimate and unexplored shores.

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