Screenshots: Black Room
Simon Groth
Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.
Black Room
by Casssie McQuater
Described by its creator as ‘a game about falling asleep on the internet’, Black Room comes across as a mashup of game styles and characters with a meditative bent. What begins as a 2D platform featuring an all-female cast of video game sprites from the past metamorphoses into an exploration of the ‘black room’, a visualisation exercise for an addled and over-tired imagination.

Its pixelated aesthetic draws heavily on nostalgia for early console gaming. But the game’s text is tight and evocative and its recontextualising of female game characters— lounging with flamingos, riding fantastic beasts through dayglo fantasy lands—gives it a bite it might have otherwise lacked. This is not just a longing for the past, but a recasting of it through a contemporary lens.
For a reader unfamiliar with old console and arcade games, Black Room’s gif-based visual assault and use of the web browser itself as a game mechanic brought to mind a Geocities web site. Nostalgia, after all, is highly personal thing.
Related posts
Simon Appleby, director of digital agency Bookswarm, highlights ten more websites that do their authors justice on the web. Back in 2013, I blogged for The Writing Platform abou...
Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. Little Emperor Syndrome by David Thomas Henry Wright Lit...
Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. Our Cupidity Coda by Mez Breeze To read through the text o...
Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. The Library of Last Resort by Matt Finch The Library of Last...
Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. Writing with Machine Learning By Robin Sloan Robin Sloan...
Rob Sherman responded to our Call for Digital Utopias pieces with 'The Hide' . We're thrilled to publish this short fiction, a creative practice response which has arisen out of Ro...