Coil

By: Derek Yu

On: February 1st, 2008

Coil

Coil is an experimental Flash game with no instruction or clear direction.
Please keep an open mind while playing.

A bizarre game that definitely shows off Edmund’s talents as an artist and game designer. He and programmer Florian are in top form with this lovely little piece. I’m inclined to think you’ll agree (provided you don’t get stuck too early on).

The game is controlled with the mouse only.

  • Al King

    Dracko, I’m not being an elitist prick, you just failed to understand my post.

    In short, Interactive != game.
    Geddit?

    No?

    That is, just because a text is interactive, does not mean that its focus is interactivity. I think that’s pretty much word-for-word what I said above, but you might understand it the second time. There’s not much to the concept, no elitism there; I’m not using jargon.
    I used what I thought to be a fairly illustrative example in the case of the medium of film, where music videos/art displays/movies all use the same features – moving pictures & sound – yet their focus is on a different part of it.

    If you still think I’m being an elitist prick, you’re being an ignorant prick.

    And John, I feel for you -.-

  • Al King

    Just to be clear, I wasn’t saying that Zeno isn’t ‘allowed’ to dislike Coil on the basis of poor gameplay – feel free to dislike the thing and opine all you like.
    My point was regarding his broader statement that “gameplay is the defining feature of a game”, which just doesn’t hold true if he’s using game to cover all interactive works such as Coil – as I said, “a text can focus on whichever feature it bloody well likes”. I’m not on the “this is art, so you can’t criticise it” side of the fence, I’m just explaining why a statement is false.

  • namuol

    aside from the last two levels i thought the gameplay was great; not to mention the design, graphics, and music were very unique and still outstanding…

    my favorite minigame was the one with the three colored cells. it was very effective.

    encore!

  • 21GP

    i think this game is really pretty.

  • wormguy

    Maybe we need a new word for this kind of thing. It’s definitely more of an experience than a game. As a game, this would be a failure, but as an experience it definitely succeeds.

    Interesting little discussion this brought up.

    P.S. I generally don’t like generalizing, but if you don’t consider games to be art by now I don’t know what you’re doing on this site. For example, how could you appreciate a game like Mondo Agency unless you see it as art? That kind of mentality is why games really aren’t taken seriously yet by society.

  • Arne

    The falling thru germ level was frustrating, so I X’ed it. Not a game for everyone, obviously. Taste is like the butt, split. I might put up with random clicking to progress in Hentai games though.

  • Obscuritan

    I would not describe this as a game, so much as i guess an interactive poem.

    To me, a game has clearly defined objectives and gameplay. This piece had neither of them, but that’s not saying I did not enjoy or appreciate it. It was very interesting to figure everything out.

    The breaks between scenes did confuse me though, as i was always trying to click my way past and only in one of the later levels when i was reading the piece of text (while absent-mindedly drawing circles with my mouse) did i realize that was how to proceed. This was my fault for not paying attention though.

    I think we’re coming to a point where a new term will need to be made for things like this.

  • krizzl0r

    nice and all. but.. is it about rape? oO

  • mcbpete

    I’m not quite sure why people are having so much difficulty with the ‘falling’ level, as long as you build up enough speed by moving from left to right frequently enough (by rotating the pointer anti-clockwise and clockwise a la in the ‘loading’ screens) then you’ll be able to have enough brute force to knock the things out the way and get down first time.

  • Bob

    ^wormguy

    “Maybe we need a new word for this kind of thing. It’s definitely more of an experience than a game.”

    Demo?

    ^mcbpete

    “I’m not quite sure why people are having so much difficulty with the ‘falling’ level”

    Neither am I. I got past it on my first try and thought that it was pretty easy.

  • Jimmy Kane

    As a squeamish person, watching the little ovaries pulse as you spoilersturnedspoilers on the 4th (I think?) level really freaked me out.

    Nice music, though!

  • Rory

    That was cool! Such good art design!

  • Lailoken

    I actually enjoyed this as a game. The controls are only frustrating if you are mistaken about something(what you are controlling, or what your goal is). Each level (well almost) was barely hard enough to figure out to give me satisfaction for doing it, but none were hard enough to frustrate me. As an experience it was fantastic.

    I wanted the words to make more logical sense as a story or an explanation, but I also don’t appreciate poetry as much as a lot of people, so I think that’s just a preference thing. Maybe I’ll read it again and see if I can make more sense of it.