Judero

Throughout the game you are delivered consistent poems and prose, given folklore and history of the world around you. It is dense, it is strangely believable, it is bizarre, it is funny. This game is imminently interesting and gripping and unknowable. In the last act it even begins to be self-aware. It knows it is telling stories, and it begins to ask itself and you what this folklore even means. How does it relate to what it means to be human, how can we find persistent themes and symbols that connect to us to every other human to have ever lived. You are told pieces of folklore and the game asks you, what does it actually mean? It has its own ideas and it is bold enough to share them with you, to do analysis of the text within the text and yet not bold enough to make any definitive declaration. How's the gameplay? Don't worry about it.

[h1][b]"Where is my fishy wife and fishy children?"[/b][/h1]

Judero is a little action-adventure game delving into Scottish myth and folklore. It's a very charming little game, the kind of janky little thing that you'd find on no end of "Best little known PC games" lists if it had dropped in the 90s instead of 2024. The presentation's great (all handcrafted assets including Judero himself being sort of a handmade poseable action figure and a bunch of claymation style enemies), the music is beautiful, the writing is very lovely and poetic, the voice acting is fun. Well worth playing through, just I'm not sure if there's much value in selecting normal mode since it ultimately just means you'll probably have to retry boss fights a few times as you sort them out and that's not the strength of the experience. Treat it more like a playable and interactive folk story and it'll be a great time.

I'm a pretty big fan of Jack Spooner, but I also come at this acknowledging that his strengths aren't really in making fun games. Judero is his attempt at making a more conventional game as opposed to his usual glorified walking sims with maybe a light gameplay element here or there. This game I do think displays some talent for game design but I feel it's a case of Spooner being more interested in his quirky aesthetic and thematic vision than he is the depth of his gameplay and enjoyment of this game really boils down to how much you can stomach that. That said I do think the conceit of his aesthetic vision is fascinating. Everything you see in game being handmade is done on the reasoning that the material you see in gameplay is something that's tangible rather than abstract. What produces the imagery of gaming is not something consumers can actually grasp, it's all code designed through abstract means to produce something that looks tangible. The fact what he produced that's actually physically tangible plays into his broader conceit about where our cultural myth originate from values and the context we live in, with an ending that suggests that an amalgamation of myth and value…

Incredibly strange and wonderful. A genuinely beautiful game

Art.