Tag: Mason Lindroth

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Manipulate shapeshifting hell in Mason Lindroth’s latest game

Mason Lindroth’s animations exist somewhere between the realm of a hellish nightmare, surreal art, and collages. It’s all those things, and also none of them. Lindroth’s repeated animated aesthetic is wholly unique—there’s nothing else like it (and in fact, he even hand-sculpts some objects from clay). And that’s why when he does something as “trivial” as VA DA, a new “animation/drawing program,” it still resonates. It’s wild and bizarre, like so many of his other works before it. A distorted conglomerate of gif-able lo-fi clipart VA DA, as described above, is a simple “drawing” program. You control a space with…
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Mason Lindroth’s "walking simulator" is a thing of surreal beauty

Mason Lindroth’s videogames have always appealed at first look. You may extend that to ‘first feel’ too, given that they’re usually made of squirming clay and chopped-up degenerated photos; time and again, uniquely and gloriously tactile. But let’s stick with that initial love at first sight idea. In my experience, as soon as you see an image of Lindroth’s latest virtual world, a desire to simply move around in it becomes deeply embedded. This is why the disclosure that Lindroth gives ahead of his “small graphics exercise,” that it is not a game as such, but a “de-facto walking simulator,”…
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The material world of Mason Lindroth

Mason Lindroth has been building up to Hylics for over a year. It’s his biggest project to date, and along the way he’s been breaking off bits of it here and there, releasing them as smaller games. If you’re familiar with his work, you can recognize the ambulant skulls—coppery brain cases hoisted on a nest of tentacles—as they chase you in Hylics, as they were used in Lindroth’s delightfully strange god sim Weird Egg & Crushing Finger.  The more you explore the world of Hylics, the more you’ll see where an idea, a sub-area, or a monster has manifested elsewhere in…
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Mason Lindroth’s new game celebrates the malleability of his beloved clay

The most convincing argument for playing a Mason Lindroth game is increasingly becoming “because it’s a Mason Lindroth game.” Although you cannot predict what his next videogame will involve you can, at least, guess that it will be made of clay. Everything from hanging overgrowth coiled up into thin patty lines to grouchy finger-pressed waves have been molded by his hands. Lindroth has found a malleable muse in clay.  Combined with his signature dotty shading, Lindroth makes the best of the squidgy irregularity of the substance, grafting environments that feel decayed and worn in; appearing to have an alien history…