Three and Out – ‘Vignettes’

Everything is connected to everything else. Life is a fluid series of reinventing and shifting perspectives. Some video games capture this message in linear, narrative ways. Other games abstractly demonstrate this schema to us, opening many doors to interpretation. Vignettes does both. Narratively, the game is silent – and yet there is a narrative to be found within the silent and initially unpredictable landscape of the game. In terms of gameplay, Vignettes embodies and literally applies the idea that the way we think about the world determines our perception of new information. In other words, the entirety of this game’s puzzle-oriented gameplay centers itself around perspectival shifts: how we can see familiar objects in novel ways. A bowl can become a ukulele; a telephone can become a television.

Vignettes presents a hypnotic soundtrack, paired with mesmerizing and simple gestures where I was tasked with swiping my mouse to manipulate 3D objects in a 2D realm. I thought of these objects as transmographic and malleable keys that, when visually aligned, cohered into an image which became the object of my next fixation. A chalice can be seen as a trumpet, a trumpet can be seen as a knight in chess, a knight can be seen as a diadem, which can be seen as a cage for flying pets, etc. Vignettes offers repeatedly kaleidoscopic and psychedelic thought experiments in the form of puzzles, which, enhanced by the music, truly entranced my experience while playing. I imagine each person will approach the gameplay with a different level of engagement and patience, which will yield two fundamentally main styles of playthroughs: a straightforward single session playthrough from start to finish, and my approach, which consisted of small bursts of ten to fifteen minutes in which I periodically experimented from where I recently got stuck. 

Vignettes was first released as a mobile game, and there’s a strong argument to be made that it should have remained a mobile game. The PC version offers little advantage to the original. The gameplay has not substantially evolved from its initial release. Clearly this game was intended to be “swiped” rather than clicked through. That being said, playing Vignettes on a full screen desktop with properly balanced sounds filling the room from well-built speakers felt like a unique experience from the mobile release. The message of the game was better captured in the larger and therefore more immersive experience. In either case, both iterations of this artistic achievement feel like successfully formed neural links in a connected web of imagistic and ideologically infused ideas. Vignettes embodies how interpersonal subjectivity and the art of interpretation can be abstracted into an objective art form/video game for all to enjoy.

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