El Beso

In write-up of Daniel Benmergui's talk at GDC, it's mentioned that a "friend" showed him the poetry mechanic that he adapted for his game. That friend was Agustin Perez Fernandez and I know because I was there in the room rolling a J. His latest work could be his most defining yet, at least in terms of its artistic poise.

El Beso ("The Kiss") is a sort of performance art art-game, you wield the mouse as a lure for a sort of ethereal fluke draped in ribbons of light, trying to kiss against red squares to turn them blue and then grey, harvesting points. The dynamic is that these squares come in all sizes and vectors, overlapping and forcing you to dance your way through them. The opera track highlights this dance while sometimes giving an apophenic sense that the music is somehow responding to your actions, some actual procedural sound would have been an interesting feature to explore but it works. The opera also lends the game a certain air of, as the French say, "I don't know what". It's almost enough to make you pop your monacle.

After your first play through you'll notice some more things that make it come together as being more than just another experimental Jackson Pollack love explosion. The game times your overall session and doesn't really penalize you in a "game over" sense, but instead just slows you down, which affects your performance. So the better you dance with the mouse in-between the cascading overlaps of red squares, the better your score. You are the opera. Give that fat lady a kiss.