gAmeDHD

Colin Clark
February 21 2025

What kind of game grabs you and refuses to let you go from the minute you boot it? The kind of game you restart as soon as you finish it? Tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine…

I’m 35 years old, and I happen to like pirates, and dangly things, and sharp things, and hats. And most importantly, I like communities. And most, most importantly, I like people who use too many commas. Literally, but also figuratively, I guess. And Cape Hideous is full of commas and community. And holy hell, are both of them cool, man.

Our inhabitable character in Cape Hideous is literally the coolest person I’ve ever been in a game. She just… I mean she’s smoking three pipes at once. Her hair is constantly blowing in the wind and surrounding or framing her sun-dried face until she finds something to use as a hair tie. She helps in ways she knows how for her community and for herself. She cares, I think. As I wandered the immaculately lived-in pirate ship, helping my community prepare for the oncoming storm, I was struck by a sense of nostalgia for something I never had. This is the kind of game that I hope some mother somewhere has on her steam account that her daughter stumbles upon as a child, and it haunts that daughter for the rest of her life. This is the kind of game that makes you feel some idea-of-ideal perfection.

She’s the main character. She’s the main character we all like to envision ourselves as in our day to day life. But Cape Hideous makes us examine ourselves and forced me to determine who I would be on this ship. I’m not her. I’m no main character. I am the dude in the bottom of the ship who lends their flaming dagger to the main character so she can heat her cup of water (no spoilers here). There are so many incredible experiences and characters to come across in Cape Hideous. Each play through will take you 30-45 minutes. My first time took me almost an hour because I was just sitting and staring and watching animations and interactions. There’s something ineffable surrounding this experience. The line-heavy artwork, the angles, the subtle animation loops, they all come together to make you want to just sit and soak in it. It sucked me into its world immediately and had me wildly enthralled from minute one. I loved watching our character spin her knife on her finger. I loved watching the hammerers hammer and the sewers sew. I loved seeing the intricacies of a tight-knit community all cog-and-wheel together to make something magical. I got the sense that every character has some kind of relationship with another. These folx are real. I mean literally. They exist outside of us experiencing them. They exist outside of us perceiving them. That’s what we’re doing when we “play” Cape Hideous. We’ve been given a voyeuristic look into a living and breathing community. And yes, these “people” are made up of ones and zeroes on our hard-drive. But they exist. And they will continue to exist outside of our input and perception. I truly believe that. I believe that somewhere, in some universe, the guy with a million piercings is eating a bowl of soup aboard this ship and thinking about what he’ll do the next time they pull into shore and dock up for re-supplies.

I think our character is sitting with one of the children aboard the ship and teaching her how to embroider an octopus on a black piece of cloth. I think they’re living, breathing, feeling beings that exist outside of our involvement. Yes, they’re made of bits. Yes, they’re programmed by Jake Clover to do what they do while they’re on screen. But developers like this give me such an impression of care that they literally breathe life into their characters.

On the opposite side of this spectrum, I’ve also been playing Avowed. I spent no less than 10 minutes in my early hours of that game watching pairs of NPCs standing, facing each other, and gesturing as if they’re talking. Their mouths didn’t move, they didn’t seem to be reacting to each other, and I simply didn’t get the feeling that they existed outside of my perception. I got the feeling that the minute I loaded out of the area where they would have to be rendered, they would cease to exist until I came back to visit them. In fact, I got the impression that they were trying to express that they were stuck. That they were pleading for recognition. They looked at me out of the corners of their eyes and said “Please. Please don’t leave! This is the only time we exist! I just want to exist a bit longer!” And so I stayed. I let them exist for a little while.

The difference is that the people on the ship of Cape Hideous didn’t give a shit-or-salt about my perception. They would continue on their daily lives whether I was participating or not. That’s what makes these kinds of passion projects – and more importantly, these kinds of developers – special. They put so much of themselves into their game that they literally – and to me, I truly mean literally – will these beings into existence. They exist because Jake Clover cared enough about them to make them real. The guy who sharpened my knife is out there just existing. Because someone cared enough to make him exist.

This is the true difference to me between an awesome game, and an awesome game that is also a piece of art. There’s an argument to be made that all games are art. But like… some times games are art, man. Cape Hideous wrestled control away from me a few times, and surprisingly, I didn’t mind one bit. The game had something to show me. The main character had something to do. She was already on a mission, whether I was there to perceive her or not, and she wasn’t about to let me impede her. Cape Hideous is special. I’ll revisit it often and fondly. It’ll be one of those games I used to have when I was a kid that I would play over and over and over. Putt Putt Goes to the Moon, Little Critter: Grandma and Me, and the like. Cape Hideous is a children’s book CD-ROM for children who have become adults. Adults who treasure community, and characters, and themselves.

Who are you in Cape Hideous? What games did you play over and over and over when you were a kid, just to click on things a million times and experience what they had for you to experience? And most importantly, please tell me what other games like Cape Hideous are out there. I love this shit. Thanks, Jake Clover. You gave me something back that I didn’t know I had lost.