“Dr. Signal’s Strange Machine” by Caramel & maoudamashii.
“A short story about a doctor and a dinosaur.”
The first thing that I found interesting about “Dr. Signal’s Strange Machine” was the optics. It breaks a bit with the usual Bitsy aesthetics by choosing sprites which would be a better fit for old Game Boy games. Maybe that visual choice is more than only an aesthetic one, but chained to the main motif of the story itself.
But let us take a look at the story for now: In the role of Dr. Signal you will walk through a research base, chat with the people in there and then go into the basement. An ominous contraption is waiting for you there. The machine allows the scientist to speak with the dead, and Dr. Signal chose a dinosaur to have a conversation with. Day after day the both of them will talk about the past and the nature of change. Why? That brings me back to the first paragraph of this article.
Just like the Game Boy is nowadays a relic of video game history, the dinosaur is an extinct creature of the past. But just because they are dead like the dinosaur or do not get produced anymore like Nintendo’s classic handheld console, people are still influenced by both of them. Game developers and artists still adore the pixel aesthetics and emulate them in their games, and Dr. Signal hopes to get answers to an important question by this mystical research of the dead. So figure out the question for yourself. It is absolutely worth it. [PLAY]
