"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”
---
Typically, fictional worlds strive for immersion: limiting themselves to certain parameters - even if those limits are more fantastical than reality. But there’s another kind of fictional world, the kind that shatters the confines of the status quo. So say goodbye to gravity, say goodbye to time, say goodbye to space, and prepare for a voyage across realities with no restrictions...
0:00 Worlds that Break Rules
1:11 Into the Rabbit Hole
2:57 Dreams within Dreams
4:29 Optical Illusions
6:22 Goodbye to Gravity
7:53 No Exit
9:18 Curiouser and Curiouser
10:34 Jazzpunk!
13:00 Serious Business
14:49 An Airport for Aliens Currently run by Dogs
16:52 Beyond All Limits
18:25 Everything is an Illusion
20:08 A New Perspective
Media Shown: Viewfinder, Superliminal, Manifold Garden, An Airport for Aliens Currently run by Dogs, Jazzpunk, Cuccchi, Bioshock Infinite, Lord of the Rings, Elf, Brats, Top Secret
Copyright Disclaimer: Under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. All video/image content is edited under fair use rights for reasons of commentary.
I do not own the images, music, or footage used in this video. All rights and credit goes to the original owners.
Sources:
Alice in Wonderland Interpretations, Article by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst: www.theguardian.com/books/201...
Project Acoustic Kitty, Article by Becky Little: www.history.com/news/cia-spy-...
Project Blue Peacock, Kyle Mizokami: www.popularmechanics.com/mili...
♫ Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio:
Galaxy, Home, Floating, leaving earth, alien ruins, edge of tomorrow, lucid dream
♫ Additional music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com):
Beauty Flow, Bittersweet, Floating Cities
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b...
#CuriousArchive #Worldbuilding
You can hear Curious Archive’s computer absolutely howling for help while he’s recording these games.
The archive is sadly underfunded, and cannot afford a good Ryzen 😔
Suuuush... Don't tell him...
Games that break all the rules … narrated in nasal monotone. Smh
I have a VERY deep thought about this video, maybe these kinds of games are depictions of the actual reality! 🫠😵💫
If you listen closely you can hear Help ME A MAD SCIENTIST is USING ME AS A SLAVE FOR ENTERTAINMENT
A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a good example for a satire of the real world. In the beginning of the book the protagonists house gets demolished to allow building a highway, a very real thing, but then the earth got destroyed for a space highway!
Not only that, but a space highway that is immediately rendered useless due to a newly made innovation in space travel.
Ahould have just built a killdozer
@nathanfake9163 which then was rendered useless by a ship run by restaurant mathematics
And then the main character falls and misses the ground…
And then the earth was remade, at least in the movie
"Baba Is You" would also be a game worthy of discussing here. It's a 2D block-pushing game where the rules are defined by the blocks themselves. You start by controlling a rabbit named Baba, and the titular "BABA", "IS", and "YOU" are three adjacent blocks on the screen. But if you push away the first block and replace it with "ROCK" then immediately you are in control of the rock(s) instead of the bunnies. This gets complicated fast...
Make sure you push BABA and ROCK at the same time, otherwise, you will be stuck in the short gap of time when nothing IS YOU.
baba is you is just programming though, i love the game but its not super complicated its just coding
@@box_speedruns I've played a lot of programming games (spacechem, automatachef, exapunks, chr147, ...) and I'm going to have to strongly disagree with this claim. Yes there's a minor programming/rules element of baba but the spatial layout usually puts a heavy restriction on the rules you are allowed to make
@@mlahut i know creating the rules itself is the hard part in baba is you but it just doesnt fit in the same category as this video i feel.
I’m surprised Antichamber wasn’t mentioned. It’s whole premise was disobeying conventional rules to find the way forward.
I think The Magic Circle would have been a good contender, as well.
Antichamber seems like the precursor to all of these games, I'm also shocked it wasn't mentioned
@@suicune2001 Holy shit, someone else who knows about The Magic Circle. It's my favorite game of the 10s that no one else seems to have heard of.
@@jasonblalock4429 Yeah, I think I first learned about it from GT Live years ago. But I've never heard anyone mention it since then. Maybe I should do an LP of it to give it a little attention.
Hyperbolica is another one, where you explore non-Euclidian spaces. I loved the part where I had to serve food to customers in a restaurant whose walls met in corners that are infinitely far away, while wearing roller skates.
I liked this video so much I sent it to my mom, who is an art professor. She doesn't really play video games, but she knows I love them beyond a form of entertainment. Thanks!
I bet she’d like playing that cocchi game.
She likely found it fascinating and such . But she still wants you to get a real job .
Did she liked it?
its a shame you didnt talk about the stanley parable, it definitely fits into the category of games/worlds that break all the rules
too also be fair theres already dozens upon dozens of videos about Stanley.
I'm only hoping that there instead will be a specially dedicated episode to this masterpiece!
@@Particelomen that may be why CA didnt cover it in this video, or at least that's what in hoping
Same but replace the stanley parable with baba is you.
I want to live in a world where the laws that govern reality just fucks off!!
The alien airport run by dogs sounds like it could serve as a fun sort of Autism simulator. Trying to understand what people want or why you’re expected to do something makes me feel like an alien navigating on Earth sometimes.
Exactly what I was thinking! When I heard him talking about Alice in Wonderland I was like: "sounds a bit like autism huh" and then when he started talking about the airport and yup
I was thinking about how much this whole video just sounds like my view of the world and this comment made me remeber I'm autistic
I have an autism diagnosis. It don't be like that. However my inner phantasia seems applicable or at least it's elements analogous to objective reality. It's like the mental tools everyone uses to solve things in the real world, to me, are conceptual and seem much like their real world counterparts. I know. Ravings of a lunatic. I wish I could just wake up in an airport of dogs... but it ain't happening.
Btw, nice to meet a few others on the spectrum in such an obscure place 😊. Kinda how it always happens
You may be artistic.
It’s a good day when Curious Archive uploads
It always is
fax
It's a good day when people don't regurtitate shitty copy pastes for likes
@@HerohammerStudios bro who hurt you man why you mad bro ???
It’s a good day, a lot of my favorite monthly KZheadrs made today a great day
Please make a a documentary video about The Eternal Cylinder! The speculative evolution in that game is crazy as hell! 👽
YES. I remember this was requested a while back!
GUYS GET THIS A LOT OF LIKES
YES I RECENTLY BEAT THAT GAME AND IT IS AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
God I need to play that game. Got it on steam when it was on sale but haven't committed the time to play it all.
@@KrazyKaiser It gives me Neverending Story kind of vibes. Like those old school 80s/90s movies with weird creatures and a narrator with a soothing voice.
Viewfinder feels like someone just really wanted to flex their coding skills and whatever engine it used.
Unity i believe; for how it s done: U can determine the FOV of the player using math and place planes tangeant to it When u take a picture u "grab" every scene object that falls within the boundaries delimited by the planes(=FOV) and save their position in the cone at that specific point When placing the picture, u simply place the saved view boundary in place of the new view boundaris Hope it was clear and helpful; have a great day/night
like usual, the ammount of imaginative power a single video of this channel can give me, can hardly be matched.
The more I watch your videos the more I realise we're fans of a lot of the same channels on KZhead; namely Jacob Geller and, more relevant to THIS video, Tom Scott's Technical Difficulties. (I mean, you could very well be getting these topics and talking points from elsewhere, but that's where I first heard about Acoustic Kitty and Blue Peacock). I think it's really cool how you put your own perspective on them and cross-analyse them in different ways! Awesome video as always!
I think those games illustrate the actual reality.
Would love to see Curious Archive’s take on Outer Wilds.
Great game . Need more games like that one made .
that transition between Viewfinder and Superliminal at 2:56 was beautiful
could've used a warning for flashing lights during chunks of the jazzpunk section. it could be seriously dangerous for someone with photosensitive epilepsy, and even though i don't have any form of epilepsy, the flashing was strong enough to start hurting my eyes.
Honestly that's totally fair and I'm surprised the game got away with it. Stuff like that has been forbidden in traditional animation for 20 years.
feels like antichamber paved the way for a lot of these perspective games. totally worth a play if you havent yet
Ehhhh... Antichamber is definitely its own thing and it's a massive disservice to say it directly inspired any of the games featured here. Viewfinder, for instance, was inspired by Portal, and vibes well with The Witness. Even then, it's better to accept each game as their own thing since they're all uniquely awesome.
It's trippy stuff like this which is why I sleep and dream so much.
Funny. Long work hours is why I sleep so much
@@HerohammerStudios Why is that funny?
@@IAmFromTheYear is trippy stuff the same as long work hours? I suppose it's just really trips people up.
@@IAmFromTheYearit's not, his comment was displaying irony. Funny, depression is why I sleep and dream so much.
(6:48) Funny thing about M.C Escher, he was *not* a mathematician. By his own admission, he had next to no academic understanding of the subject. He simply enjoyed exploring what were, or would turn out to be, mathematically-relevant patterns in his art, and he was exceptionally skilled at doing so
I think I understand how viewfinder works under the hood. Basically whenever you take a snapshot, the game clones the world's meshes, culled to the polaroid's camera's view frustum, and make that bundle its own scene. The camera is cloned too so that it is now independent from the player's further movements and stays still. It takes the view of this camera and renders it onto a surface (the "picture"). (Btw, the last part is how portals and mirrors are implemented too). Now you can move the picture around and the image on it stays still. When the player "places down" the picture, all meshes from the cloned scene is transformed appropriately based on the picture's orientation and cloned back into the main scene. This makes it look like nothing has changed from the player's camera view until their perspective changes. All the concepts and tricks used here are all well known and well supported by various game engines. But to combine them so creatively to achieve such a spectacular effect is a skill that most game developers can only dream of.
That is what i assumed too tho u explained it much more clearly that I did; congrats mate :)
It's really awesome to see just how much Curious Archive has progressed.
Loving the shift to more personal essay content. I still love the objective synopses of fictional worlds, and I came to your channel for the spec evo in the first place, but am always excited by videos like this
I played a few of these in a local art museum. I think it's amazing how far the medium has progressed in just a few decades. Especially manifold garden impressed me. The first time I stood at the edge of my island, I had no idea how to cross this chasm. I just saw these tiny islands all around me. Only when I dropped an item into the depth, and it came back to me falling from above, I realized that everything I see around me is my own vantage point, just from another angle. This was such a mind blow, such a profound change in how I was able to navigate the world... it makes you think what other trivial truths you missed about, well, everything.
Curious Archive makes one of the best game documentaries I've ever seen, good explanations good showcases, and good gameplay.
I am so excited for ENA: Dream BBQ to come out, I imagine it will fit well with these
I think these types of games are by far my favorite conceptually and we need more reality bending games.
Alan Wake 2 does some of the dream world reality bending thing pretty well, Control too. Remedy Entertainment really are pushing this in the AAA world.
Some of these in VR might be wonderfully maddening.
VR would ruin the illusion because it gives a sense of depth so for example you can see when the object switches from something right in front your face to something in the distance despite occupying the exact same field of view.
@@noelvalenzarro Would it really? Most these are perspective illusions and those are fairly popular sculptures. Maybe b the giant pawn door in superliminal might need a slight rescaling. The rest are 3d Geometry and teleportation tricks. Viewfinder could be fun.
I don't remember all the times I tried to un-fullscreen to try to hit the like button, and then realized that I already had. I'm a fan of mind breaking, and this certainly delivered.
I love games like these so much! Superliminal and especially Viewfinder are some of my favorite 'puzzle' games. Also I very much recommend 'There is no Game'!
holy cow this game, these games, this video. these are the tricks and tools and powers gamespaces enable, and we have absolutely slept on as the creep toward dense foliage and algorithmically generated ray tracing and hypershadows. Those effects are beautiful, but they cannot make an experience on their own. Viewfinder explores the actual boundarylines where no other medium can perform, and for that I cherish it.
So many moments in this video were jaw dropping--just incredible. And funny. Thank you, CA, for an amazing video!
All the airport stuff is oddly fitting for me, since this episode was released right as I just passed the silliness of tsa security
I'm surprised Portal 2's f-stop development phase wasn't mentioned. Viewfinder and Superliminal are heavily inspired by that scrapped mechanic!
Keep up the good work!
It's noteworthy that both Viewfinder and Superliminal are in part inspired by a cancelled sequel to Portal involving an Aperture Camera that could warp reality that way -- it was a very adventurous idea so it's not entirely surprisingly that it took until now, with improved graphical hardware, for anyone to create that kind of game, but I find it particularly interesting how both games take wildly different approaches to it with Superliminal having much more of a "Portal" theme with its dream-experiment framing, and Viewfinder going in an entirely different direction with its floating islands. I'd love to try both out at some point, but my computer is old and tired, like me.
Would love to see Curious Archive’s take on Outer Wilds.. It's really awesome to see just how much Curious Archive has progressed..
Viewfinder is genuinely one of the most impressive games I've ever seen
That movie theater moment in Jazzpink kinda’ve stood out to me. Even when a work of fiction is intentionally manufactured to be as bizzare as possible, the creator themself was still able to find something from reality just as weird
That was a beautiful transition from Viewfinder to Superliminal. Well done :)
Awesome video! Echochrome is an old PSP game that was one of the first puzzle games in which optical illusions and MC Escher esque spaces are a core mechanic of the game world
I think Portal also gives you the sense of "illusion". Because you learn that the shiny test chambers are surrounded by ruins of metal and rust
Thank you for including references to external media scenes you use.
Areas in Persona 5 take place in “Palaces,” places in an alternate plane of reality rules by the collective unconscious, and these Palaces are created by individuals that have a distorted perspective of reality based on their corrupted desires, such as an abusive volleyball teacher viewing his school as his castle and himself as the king, a plagiarist master artist who exploits his pupils viewing his atelier as an enormous, gaudy museum, or a mob boss that sees all of Shibuya as his personal bank and the people in it as ATMs.
Manifold gardens is in my top 3 of long-lasting gaming experience along withJourney and Gris. Thanks for listing the other ones, can't wait to try them!
Man so glad I found this video not sure if id found your channel by then but god do I love the Alternate physics of reality genre 🙏 I really hope people keep expanding on these games
These videos are getting better and better with every upload
Manifold garden is an absolute masterpiece. Once you finish, you can replay the game in a whole new way, which is harder than the first time
Viewfinder has been incredible but I can only play a handful of minutes at a time, because it actually makes my stomach flip. But its so incredible I keep going back, and kept experimenting and exploring. So cool. I hope more people give it an opportunity, the changing art styles you can move through in an instant, its just mesmerizing.
I especially love the psychonaughts franchise
haven't watched yet but can tell its amazing
@Fiewfinder: As dev and 3d animator its MAGIC for me the sudden bool operation of very complex objects at runtime without lag is very MAGIC...
Some clarification on project blue peacock, The chicken's weren't supposed to set off the bomb, the chickens were to act as insulation in the winter... See the idea was to plant nuclear bombs like landmines across the entire border region with the USSR so that if they every invaded they would be met with a wall of nuclear annihilation. But during the winter some of the electronics in the bomb could get damaged so they needed a way to keep the bombs warm... so they decided to build a specialized chicken coup into the bomb which would be buried... with the chickens inside. The bombs were meant to be buried as an invasion was starting I guess because they specifically tested how long chickens would survive in such conditions. :) that's all.
I like how the little star appears by jazzpunk 2014, when you misstate the launch date
Hey man, your videos are really cool and I love your voice! You should make a podcast fr
Reminds ya of those videos where you see illusions mixed with portal.
Echochrome is like these. An artist's mannequin walks along paths and your job is to move the camera around to hide gaps or make paths. If you turn the world upside down, he falls, and he can walk along a surface which was previously unreachable. It's on PSP and PS3, and one of the two sequels is on PSV.
Too bad it isn't on PC.
Very cool Who here remembers the time with curious archive posted every Friday.
Man I love jazz punk so much! I played it when it first came out, very underrated
15:47 Curious Archive discovers the concept of a social construct
This feels a whole lot like a Jacob Gellar video. And it's fantastic
Thanks for the list of games in the description. I'll play them and come back to this video after that, because I want to get in blind for these types of games.
That “WAKE UP” scared the shit out of me
the viewfinder tech is actually quite basic, some engines even come with that capability as default feature, but the execution is nothing short of miraculous.
Thank you for making these thoughtful connections between reality and the unusual spaces human minds create.
Love every video! Such great work
I lost it when the secret agent used carrier pigeons to bake a pie
Awesome video! Would have loved to see Antichamber here too
Hyperbolica is another game along these lines that is sort of forgotten. It takes place in like, a 4d space. Everything is non-euclidian. It's worth checking out if you're into these sort of games.
Great video. Thanks for this exploration into strange digital worlds
14:20 this reminds me that in minecraft you can make a redstone randomiser by using a chicken and a pressure plate. Also, pigeon homing missiles for surface/air to ship missiles
Chicken 👍
I completely forgot that Jazzpunk existed. Thanks for reminding me!
I'm so glad you covered jazz punk, it's such a hilarious under-represented game
Have you perhaps also noticed what great similarities there are between flying and a church service? In both cases, you are led through side portals to a central aisle and then take your seats in long rows. The better off, of course, sit in front. There follows a ceremony of set rituals, always the same, performed by uniformly dressed "acolytes." One is referred to the sacred scripture (the emergency instructions), which describes how one should behave and what is and is not allowed. At the very front there is a partitioned "altar room" to which only those initiated into the sacrileges of flying have access. During the "mass", one part of those present is busy praying, while the other dozes off, hoping that it will soon be over. Symbolic meals are served and in between speeches of the highest "consecrated" are heard from loudspeakers. The end of the ceremony is then accompanied by the sound of bells.
This video reminded me of some games that you should definitely check out if you haven't played! Broken Reality, Hypnospace Outlaw, and Hylics all are great in their own unique ways!
Katana Zero as well, I don't want to ruin the story but holy crap it has a good story that had me questioning what was happening.
I was JUST wondering when your next vid was coming out and you blessed us with this. BLESSED. ❤
Wasn't expecting a pile of game recommendations but here we are now, I want all of them.
Have you looked at hyper light drifter yet? Idk if it would fit with your style of content but it might be worth checking out. I feel like a lot of people would enjoy a deep dive into the world, and emotional metaphor of the game - I know I would haha. As always love the content, keep it up man!
how does one even MAKE a game like this? this looks amazing!
for a long time i tried to remember the name of Jazzpunk, lately i started to think that it was just a dream of mine when i was younger.. i was so surprised to finally find it, after almost 10 years of occasionaly remembering something like that existing but never remembering the name, thank you hahah
Apparently the blue peacock project wasn't a plan to have the chicken set of the timer, (which offcourse sounds not only ridiculous but also dumb as hell) But for the chicken to keep the bomb warm in the winter so it doesn't malfunction due to the cold, which is actually a pretty damn smart solution because off a chickens high body temperatures. i only got this from two sources so correct me if im wrong, but it does seem more likely to me
Viewfinder is absolutely mind breaking, glorious, and jaw dropping, even after hours of playtime.
Yo thank you for telling me the name of Jazzpunk, I remember watching a video of someone playing through it as a child and it was such a unique game that I never really forgot it
"an Airport for aliens, run by Dogs" - as imagined by a human
In "The Kangaroo Chronicles" and it's Sequels by Mark Uwe Kling one theme of the short story sequences, later build out into a major plot point is exactly that absurdity of airports and how they not just mirror, but concentrate and exasperate the absurdity of modern life in many aspects. In one scenario a person walks through an entire one of those person guidance systems (those complex waiting line arrangements to organize thousands of people) completely alone. No one in front of him. No one behind him. Just walking in zick zack patterns, spirals, circles and around a thousand unnecessary corners, not because it's efficient, easy or they want to, but because it's "normal", expected and "what you're supposed to do". They're probably not even thinking about it, not even considering to "break a rule", not even aware souch a possibility even exists, so omnipresent is "The System" of learned behavior, social norms, laws, etc. Major Spoiler Warning: The "villain's" ultimate plan is turning the entire world into an airport, with it's constant stress, rampant capitalism and minor to non-existent individual distinction despite blaring claims of "self realization"
Damn that's some deep philsophy stuff
If Charlie Kaufman was a game developer, he would certainly made games like these.
Reasons why real world objects are shaped like we all know starts to become apparent when you think about how it was possible to make them in a different way. And more you think about it, more you understand the answer: no, they can't be made differently. Of course, exceptions exists, but they are rare.
Posted 45 seconds ago? I'm making good time today.
Fantastic as always ^_^
You always post when I smoke a bowl ty
I used to have a bit of an obsession with optical illusions so at about 6:48 in the video my brain just start going “MC Escher? MC Escher? He’s gonna say MC Escher isnt he”. I had a notebook I got from an art museum with one of his patterns all over it and I used it as a diary for years.
i saw the falling guy silhouette in the thumbnail and i was excited to see how the Myst series was gonna fit in. saddened to see Myst was not, in fact, even mentioned 😔 however, you did mention a couple of other games that i really liked watching play throughs of, so it was still a net positive viewing 😁
Can't believe he hasn't talked about the granddaddy of mind breaking games - Antichamber.
The chicken was not the timer, the bonbs were buried with chickens to keep the crappy electronics of the era from getting frozen, the chickens were essentially living heaters for the bombs. If you want crazy stuff checkout the bird homing missiles.
another great video covering something awesome
Great selection of games!
we are so used to watch videos now, that we forget they ARE in fact an illusion
The Swing Wing is the most absurd and implausible thing that's ever been featured on this channel.
OMG I THOUGHT JAZZPUNK WAS A DREAM I CANT BELIEVE ITS A REAL GAME I LOVE IT SM
Another really cool (and very simple) game along these lines is Baba Is You It follows its own rules to a T, but those rules can quite literally be rewritten.
Was kinda disappointed it got no mention.
I really wished Viewfinder went just a bit further than what it did. There's so much potential and it ended up feeling like the developers just restricted themselves the moment they started to really cook with the game.
19:37 There has also been several animated films that make you question this fact. Most of these came from Looney Tunes. For instance, in "Daffy Duck and Egghead" the hunter Egghead shoots an "audience member" who comes late to the theater and refuses to sit down. But probably the most famous example is "Duck Amuck", where Daffy Duck complains to the animator all through the film how he isn't treated with the respect a "star actor" like himself deserves. This is implying that Daffy actually acknowledges that he IS, in fact, just a hand-drawn character, and the film's director is his boss who he demands to see. This director (spoiler) turns out to be Bugs Bunny, who was animating Daffy's shenanigans on the drawing desk the whole time!🤯🖋🖌🖍