Project Search

⠀

I've had to come to the conclusion that I'm simply not cerebral - or patient - enough to understand let alone play this experimental piece. In fact it's so impenetrable that I had to resort to ALT-F4 just to exit the game. Other controls are similarly unintuitive. I do appreciate the sentiment of an artistic think-piece . The visuals are hazy and ethereal and I'm sure full of meaning. But I can't work out what they represent or how to interact successfully. I couldn't honestly understand ANYTHING, sorry to say. As such I just can't recommend this but if you fancy yourself as a more thoughtful type willing to explore something different then perhaps you'll find something interesting and unique in here.

Robert Kurvitz, the writer for Disco Elysium, said in 2020 'Games spread like wildfire over the world, in a way novels never can. They cross national borders, languages, ideologies, age cohorts — in a matter of months. They change minds. They make minds . . . Consider dropping book-writing for game-writing. It’s worth it.” To me Project Search accepts Kurvitz's challenge. It tells the story of a VR drone pilot and his buddies investigating portals but does so in short notes punctuated by beautiful abstract 3D scans of Linhai's old town. Characters are fuzzy and abstracted, the world shifts and morphs. The creator of the game, Jiadong Qiang, attributes the game's abstraction and mistiness to the theory of "cosmotechnics" which is described as "the unification of the cosmic order and moral order through technical activities" by Yuk Hui. In short, a culture's philosophical outlook and religious cosmology can be found in the technologies they produce, pushing against the idea that technological development exists linearly. I think this is the appeal to science fiction here. As a Westerner, I don't have the Daoist background this game operates in, but my understanding is that the pag…

<ı>εᐟᐠ•ﻌ•ᐟᐠз<ı>

I'm putting this as a "Recommend" because of the interesting thought, beautiful visual design, and fascinating narrative structure to be unearthed. However, I feel like a lot of people are going to be frustrated by the project's inscrutability, and some questionable or unfinished UX design. I feel like it could be greatly improved with some thoughtful interaction feedback mechanisms (sound response, mouse hover effects, confirmation animations) and addressing the input lag/invisible loading with animations. These don't need to even be technically robust; a simple idle loading animation goes a long way.

National Han palewalking