Lunarcade Sydney 2012

Overview

The Lunarcade is rolling into town this week and you had better be concerned. A circus of madness and joy, of lateral thought and digital poetry, Lunarcade will have you prying open your ribcages and allowing the child inside to leap bloodily for the nearest game controller.

Landing in Serial Space for just seven days, Lunarcade is an international festival of independent games that are putting the art back into artificial intelligence. The theme for the Sydney season is 'Spatial Narrative', and audiences are invited to take part in games both completed and in-development that engage storytelling practices in real and virtual spaces.

Heavily represented are games that place more focus on exploring alternate worlds, with almost none of the bloodshed that has become the opiate of mainstream gaming masses. In place of the lust for gunfire, you have atmospheric, taut mysteries that unfold in realtime. Already available for purchase is Dear Esther, a ghost romance by Dan Pinchbeck that often feels like you're reading a novel hidden in beautiful graphics. Equally seductive is the yet-to-be-completed Lifeless Planet, which plunges you into the suit of an American astronaut exploring a distant, presumed uninhabited planet, only to find that Soviet Russia got there first.

More intriguing, though, may be the emergent tales from the in-progress Memories of a Broken Dimension, with a game world that appears to be glimpsed through an MRI scanner and almost nothing else known about it except for some forum posts about satellite orbits. Similarly, there is the aptly titled TRIP, which all but challenges you to explore its polygon acid kingdom with your sanity intact.

Finally, and perhaps the most likely to enthuse with bursts of glee, is the real-space game J.S. Joust, which runs each evening at 7pm. Grab your friends, prepare your slow-speed control, and prepare to make some new enemies before the night is over.