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
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...
Serendipity is the great unsung hero of publishing. We can never be sure of the precise value arising from chance encounters in bookshops, the flash of a good jacket catching the r...
Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. A Poem Floats by Pascalle Burton How much can you say using ...
Since taking on my role in the team building the Digital Literary Atlas of Wales, I’ve been lucky enough to visit some spectacularly uninteresting places: motorway service stations...
‘Anyway, those tickets, the old ones, they didn’t tell you where you were going, much less where you came from. He couldn’t remember seeing any dates on them either, and there was...
Crowdfunding enables entrepreneurs and business savvy creatives to launch their projects or ideas with the help of financial backing from the crowd. Though crowdfunding is a relati...