One of the special things about games, and a thing that I have always struggled to articulate, is that the good ones, the really good ones, take you deep. Have you ever noticed how small a TV screen or a computer monitor actually is? Let alone the dinky grotto skylights of a Game Boy or a Vita. These screens take up such a small portion of your overall vision, unless you’re crowded in really close. But when the right game comes along, the rest of the world just irises out. You don’t see the border of the screen. You don’t even really get a meaningful sense of its flatness anymore. A good game draws you deep inside.
Bahnsen Knights reviewPublisher: Chorus WorldwideDeveloper: LCB Game StudioPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 14th December on PC, and 18th January 2024 on Switch, PS4, PS5 and Xbox.
This is what William Gibson called cyberspace, I gather. He tried to picture the world on the other side of the scrolling PC monitor and a whole landscape was born. But it doesn’t feel like cyberspace here very often. I always feel that I emerge from games after playing – that I have to kick my way up to the surface from deep underwater. Some games don’t replace the world around them in a delicate manner so much as absolutely flood it. A great game always leaves me feeling like I’ve just crawled, soaking, out of the drum of a washing machine.
Bahnsen Knights is one of these games. For the few hours this week in which I played it, it was a comprehensive submerging of the rest of the world. I was in there deep, just as I have been with the other two games in the Pixel Pulp series to which Bahnsen Knights belongs: Mothmen 1966 and Varney Lake. So this is a review of Bahnsen Knights, but it really feels like a belated review of the whole Pixel Pulp project. And that’s because, right at the start, I got something wrong, and it’s upset me in some dim, muttering way ever since.
The Pixel Pulp games are a glittering oddity. I guess you could call them visual novels, because that’s a handy genre that exists, and because these are stories that you page through, occasionally making choices, and because the prose bears the unmistakable ring of proper literature, being deeply interested in people, memory, doubt, and that strain of experience that requires a proper examination before it sits neatly in the brain. As the names suggest these are all horror stories, weird stories. Mothmen 1966 is about everyone’s favourite cryptid. Varney Lake is about a lost childhood summer spent with a vampire, and Bahnsen – well, we’ll get to Bahnsen.