Editor’s note: Hello! In the next few days, we will hold the “Disappearing Games” series. We finally started looking back at the games released sometime in 2021, but due to various reasons, we could not fully cover it at that time.
We have reviewed some real gems, so to get more catch-up comments like this, head to the Games That Got Away Center, where we will gather all the works in the series in one convenient place. enjoy!
Game Kid A Mnesia: The first thing Exhibition tells you is that it is not a game.
Although it’s published by Epic Games and can be downloaded from the PlayStation and Epic Games stores, Kid A Mnesia is not a game in the traditional sense, no, but that’s why the additional subtitle “Exhibition” here provides some useful Context. As a partner of Epic and the alternative rock band Radiohead, Kid A Mnesia is not so much a traditional game as a visual and auditory experience. This is an interactive music video through which you can experience Radiohead’s music and singer Thom Yorke And the band’s long-term psychedelic art work-standing cover artist, Stanley Downwood.
Kid A Mnesia: The exhibition trailer from PlayStation Showcase.
Your experience begins under the angry canopy of the 2D hand-painted forest. The dark, fertile tree trunks stretch endlessly up towards the colorless sky, their limbs sticking out at acute angles, entangled and jabbed at each other. A bright red fluorescent light is burning in the distance, but that can’t be the way I should go, can it?Red means it is a exit, Not an entry point-the entry channel usually emits a green light. Sometimes red is even shorthand for “terrible things are about to happen” in video games. When my knowledge of code and symbology (read: not much) tells me that I should avoid it, why do I turn to the dreaded red light?
However, this is Kid A Mnesia’s business; the usual rules do not apply. Just like a traditional exhibition, you will shuttle through the exhibition, glance at it at will, and stop to actively interact with others. Everyone has a sense of strangeness and avant-garde. Your adventure will take you to experience a delightful mix of different formats, including carved wall markers and multimedia screens, low-fidelity computer monitors, and the full color gamut between a room made entirely of confetti, from a concept to Another concept swings wildly, so you’ll never be completely sure what you will encounter in the next room.
No matter what it insists on, Kid A Mnesia is a game, as long as you decide where and when you want to go. Although sometimes it will deprive you of your agency rights-some sequences, usually accompanied by the complete track in the album, completely on track-you can decide your order in the exhibition, or if you want, you can repeat the discovery to you Curious about the dark slopes. There are some recurring themes; a horned beast will pop up frequently to say hello, accompanied by the periodic reappearance of the door concept (when you walk into the exhibition space, the lyrics of Radiohead’s “Pulk / Pull Revolving Doors” The center position: There are doors in the doors/There are trap doors/There are doors that open automatically/There are sliding doors and secret doors/Some doors can let you in and out/but never open/There are trap doors/You can never come back). But, what route did you choose and the order in which you chose these doors? That is your choice.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, for me, the best part of the experience is the most “game” part, in which you follow the path of the fiery text printed on the wall of the concrete room. Throw away the clues-this is easy to do, because you can have six to seven different sentence parts on each wall in a narrow space-and the sequence will not be completed. It is here that the lyrics of Pulk / Pull Revolving Doors also take revenge, but it is much more than that. The complete narrative revealed through a few words at a time can only be completed when you carefully follow the clues to the end.
However, other times, I feel very upset and unable to make a choice for myself. The speed at which you peruse the exhibits is painfully slow-presumably to ensure that you listen to a certain percentage of each track before exiting-and there is no way to skip the parts that you are not very interested in, especially if you stumble upon A scripted sequence will not let you leave until you have gone through the entire track.
Having said that, it is undeniable that the ingenious tension between music and vision, the latter is not “frightening”, but intoxicated in the “uneasy” deep water. Sometimes, it’s not clear whether the residents close to you are friends or enemies-you may be too scared to find out-but this is a fascinating and completely novel way to peek into Yorke’s creative thinking and learn more about how Kid A Mnesia came about. No, I don’t always know what all of this means—as the game describes in the store description, Kid A Mnesia is a “crazy dream space, a building, composed of Radiohead’s Kid’s art and creatures, text, and recordings. Built into A and Amnesiac, they were discovered more than 20 years ago, reassembled and given new mutant life”-but this is a crazy adventure, and “fever” must be a proper description here.
However, as you might expect, it is the soundtrack that dominates the experience. Kid A was released in 2000-and Kid A Mnesia was released in 2021-but the two albums share the same DNA and are well realized through the eye-catching visual arts of Yorke and Donwood. Therefore, if you are familiar with Radiohead, the various title songs painted on the wall-In Limbo, Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box, Ghost Chamber, The National Anthem-may be more meaningful to you than to me, but Even if you are only interested in modern art, those who are not familiar with Radiohead’s past catalog can enjoy Kid A Mnesia, as long as you don’t mind being forced to listen to a few tracks in their entirety.
I suspect that many Radiohead fans will oppose it, but those who don’t like their music may feel frustrated because of the lack of agency and control over their own destiny. Thankfully, it only takes a few hours to visit the entire exhibition and you will not be forced to do anything for too long.
