Tux and Fanny, based on the Instagram movie, is a delightful surprise

Tux and Fanny, the 2019 film by Albert Birney, begins with the two characters – both pixelated in a flashy, blocky style, one purple and the other pink – playing a soccer ball before a cat with fleas walks by. The characters emerged in a series of 79 one-minute Instagram clips that depict a strange and wonderful exploration of friendship and hijinks. the New Yorker described it as having a “dizzying ingenuity” that is both “precisely and emotionally calibrated”, its simply drawn world and its characters who play with a sweet and strange story.

This idea has since been implemented in a video game, also called Tux and Fanny

, and it’s something of a prequel. Created by Birney and Gabriel Koenig of Ghost Time Games (Test tube titans), Tux and Fanny Again the stars Tux and Fanny – still purple, pink and pixelated – who want to play a soccer ball. But they found that it was drained. Of course, just finding a pump and filling the soccer ball with air isn’t that easy. Like the movie before Tux and Fanny

(the game) is always surprising. The initial goal of inflating a soccer ball opens up Tux and Fanny to so many little questions. The journey begins in their picturesque communal home and then spreads out into an ever-expanding world.

It’s both a puzzle and an exploration game that is clearly inspired by retro point-and-click adventures. The player leads four different characters: Tux, Fanny, a black cat and a flea. Any of these characters can be played, and I have to switch between them if I want to solve the game’s puzzles. Puzzles, stories, and even new games unfold quickly and abundantly. For example, I’ve been following the aftermath of a simple action – making a cup of tea – for hours and somehow that search led me straight to a pair of vomit-soaked boats. Though silly, surreal and often absurd, Tux and Fanny‘s different story threads balance humor with real joy and dark desolation, in between sweet moments of discovery and introspection.

If you follow these threads, Tux and Fanny surpasses his original art style by introducing new games – found literally on floppy disks hidden in the world – that are essential to Tux and Fanny’s lives. In these games within the game, the pixelated characters can enter a surreal 3D world, transform into claymation or find themselves in watercolors. Hell, there’s even a home simulation video game that I keep looping around; the loop changes slightly each time and eventually turns into nonsense. And yet it makes perfect sense.

Tux and Fanny may sound like there is a lack of structure. But that’s not how it feels to play. It’s structured around the joy and surprise of discovery, and it’s clear that every seemingly random detail – right down to a worm in a digestive tract – has a purpose. Knowing this Tux and Fanny

has an appealing lightness; It’s not that the game’s puzzles aren’t difficult, but it’s comforting to know that every part of it has a purpose. Sometimes I have no idea what to do with a certain object, but instead of stressing myself out or getting stuck with an idea, I just keep moving and searching the world further. Tux and Fanny leads me to something, somewhere – I just haven’t found that certain something yet.

Tux and Fanny also enables some discoveries just for the sake of discovery. I hear the twittering of birds and pull out my binoculars to find a robin or an owl, which are then lovingly cataloged in hand-drawn details in a bird watch book at Tux and Fanny’s home. (I enjoy birdwatching in real life, too.) The same goes for beetles, other living things, and even plants: I was delighted to find a crayon-drawn flower or a complex pixel beetle. I imagine I’ve played about 10 hours of the game so far and there’s still so much left that I don’t know. More importantly, I still have so much want to know. Tux and Fanny is a real, surprising pleasure where every click is a question: What can you find here? The answers feel endless.