Posted on: November 12, 2024
Burrito
Verified ownerGames: 1500 Reviews: 54
Solid example of a divergent ex-genre
There used to be a genre of games, largely coming out of Germany, that might be called "User Interface As Puzzle". Games where the approach to victory isn't immediately obvious, and actually doing things in the game required puzzling out how the UI worked. You might see some tributes pop up from time to time as short games on sites like Itch, but like Interactive Fiction games it is now largely a dead genre outside of some very niche locales deep in the web being kept alive by die hard fans. Vangers. MadTV. Lula. Is Lula good? No, not really. It gets grindy once you've figured it out, gameplay is pretty simplistic, and the third act is massively underbaked. Is Lula interesting? Yes. It scratches the same itch that gonzo comics used to, hand drawn acid trip inspired insanity, mass produced on the boss's copier the last day before the artist quit his mail room job. It's has a retroactive appeal for the days before managing a game's controls could be solved within thirty seconds of booting it up, when weirdos with no credentials could turn out labors of love that nobody could summerize as "It is [game a] but with some of [game b]'s mechanics/theming and [genre X]'s standard control scheme". MadTV is a better game that fits the same ouvre I've tried describing above, one that stands on its own merit as a 'capital G' Game, but that doesn't render Lula without merit. I think if you go in with less of a desire to "Play a good game" and more of one to "Wrestle with a museum piece and witness the unfolding of an artist's intent" you'll probably have a good time.
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