The creepy world of Creatures

Creatures, if you’re unfamiliar, is an artificial life-raising game (not unlike Wobbledogs, heehee, you guys remember THAT one?) where you raise little – well, creatures – known as Norns. They eat, they drink, they talk, and they have a surprisingly comprehensive biological simulation running inside them.

There’s three games in the series, give-or-take a few games people choose to not acknowledge, and whether or not you consider Docking Station to be its own game or merely a free hanger-on to the much more robust Creatures 3. Whatever. Three games! But today I am focusing on the first one.

This game occupied an interesting niche in my life, not like any other game I can think of. I liked pet games, sure; Petz was my favorite computer game, second to none. But something about Creatures was so… meaty. There was so much to do in it, so much to poke around in and chew on.

But it was also unrelentingly terrifying. What was up with that?

GAMING: Hylics

Hylics is a JRPG-style game made by Mason Lindroth and released on August 29, 2015.

The concept of “hylics” is taken from Greek gnosticism, where it was the basest portion of what made up a living person: their physical body. This was the evil portion of a person, the part of them that demanded to eat, to have sex, to do anything that would keep a person away from perfect spiritual enlightenment. Hylics doesn’t portray itself as an evil game, but it is an intimately physical one where the entire world is molded out of malleable, changeable clay.

After the jump, we’ll sculpt our opinion out.