Through your transdimensional socket connection, you now begin to interact with the desert world. The cute crayon graphics, the beautiful music by Helen Trevillion and the excellent writing build a very atmospheric world you don’t want to leave easily. I had to force myself to quit and write down some lines to communicate this to you, fellow reader! Oh, yes, and TSASSTOTHADB (as insiders call it) is also an adventure game which features one of my all time favourites: A well-filled bookcase. Seriously, you should play the game for the bookcase alone.

There are different chambers to be explored. The double mouthed ventriloquist spits out completely indegestible techno-jabber. The fracture room wants to make you think about the futility to resist computer time, which is much more accurate, constant and productive than human time, with its petty diurnal and circadian rhythms. The pantheon of misinformation deals with the concept of technology and progress becoming obsolete so quickly that nothing but a wire frame of memory lasts, while technology glides into ridiculousness soon after it has been invented.

Stunt Dummies is the kind of game gamers despise and artists celebrate. It is, however, able to bridge the gap between these two pretty well. You can enjoy it as a work of art, but you must also at least acknowledge that it works as a game and follows most of the rules a game should. And it succeeds at creating a strange universe that is actually fun to explore.

You keep on walking through hell, be it of cardboard, of watercolour or purely digital. Through strange sounds. You have to mutate, from a handsome young man to a suitcase-wielding zombie salesman.

3j, the Lithuanian team who created Pragaras, have already sent players on explorations of strange worlds before, but of strange and nice worlds. This time, you almost can not believe that somebody who is able to create something as beautiful as this creates it for the sole purpose of showing hell. A bit like the late medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch – they use fantastic and creative imagery to illustrate their own moral concepts. Which are: Everything pretty bad, but you can’t change it. But please at least be aware of it.

The first reaction by many was: This guy can’t draw, and he can’t spell. Ergo, this must be an attempt to waste my time. The more perceptive people decided that although he can neither draw or spell, he is a kid from Norway who loves to draw Disney characters, and even though it all went terribly wrong, you should not blame the fella for chasing that star and following his dream.

And then there were some who felt that this game, these two adventure games, were something very big and important, and although they could not really grasp what it was, they knew that they were probably about to witness their Disney socialization being decomposed and put back together, and they saw it was right.

Bjørnar B’s broken Duckburg has its own set of rules, and they all seem like little twists of the formalized Disney original. Fat uncle Jubalon enjoys his carbonated beverages by the dozen and thinks little of healthy porridge (which helped D. Duck win the Duckburg marathon, after all!). The nephews, going by names as varied as Ooie, Huie, Loouie or Dewi, listen to their degenerated modern C64 music. D. Duck’s arch nemesis is a crocodile called “Charls”.

In any case, it is up to the player in which way he wants to understand Bjørnar’s games and his whole universe. It could be criticism of the commercialisation and sell-out of “family values” by Disney. It could also be food for thought for those of us who have grown up with mainstream comic books and remember all the valuable lessons about education, friendship, love and money. But Life of D. Duck could also just be a set of characters thrown into a blender with marvellous doodle graphics, lovingly hand-crafted animations, brilliant and consistent storytelling and puzzles that can definitely compete with the genre classics. For those of you who don’t want it to be anything else.

If Salvador Dalí would have been executive producer of a Beat ‘em Up, this is what it would have looked like. The level design often contains human body parts. Level bosses have (with some exceptions) exaggerated genitalia and use them to attack you mercilessly. On your way through the levels you fight giant floating heads, controlled by miniaturized people. There are enemies with huge surreal animations and contraptions to fight you, but there are some who just don’t have any animation at all, but rather glide through the level awkwardly without moving their feet.

The greater purpose of our fighting gourmets remains unclear, but as usual, it involves a mad scientist with a fancy hat, some vials, some green liquid, cloning and generally evil biomechanic experimental menace. This has to stop, no doubt!

So, what’s with the power up and the health, crucial elements of every decent fighting game? Is it pizza, or burgers? No, because this is the Gourment Squadron on the way to, well, on the way to victory. Some of your opponents carry ingredients such as garlic, soybeans, lobster, seafood or tofu, and after you have given them the pounding they obviously deserved, you can collect them. But! To draw maximum health and power from those ingredients, you also have to combine them in a proper way after each level by feeding them into your robo chef. If you haven’t spoiled it, you’ll have a healthy seafood salad, regain your strength, and then on to the next level of sexually charged ass kicking and mushroom foray!

Well, Jazzuo is a guy who is obviously taking seafood cooking classes in Japan and dressing up as a yellow ninja. Now, imagine Sexy Hiking to be the creative outcry of a sensitive soul, caught between seafood and ninja masquerade. You are exposed to a world of wrongness and pain, and despite the salacious name of the game you are chastely equipped with nothing but a 3D hammer, 3D boots and your ability to glitch gravity. The author does little to help or guide you on your quest:

use the humer as if u were really climbing something and ull see

to hang on rope u have to have the left mouse button pressed!

Now all there is left for you is to hike, hike with your hammer, hike over trees, stone walls, waterfalls, and all the while be careful not to violate the boundaries of this hiking universe: The floor is not always what it seems, and the set of rules to be used against you can be stretched ultimately.

To hike all over to my introduction – again: Lots of people have already praised the surrealist potential of this game, while others still fail to see it. In my opinion, if I were to name a single game that is honestly kafkaesque in its game mechanics, graphical presentation and general feel, oppressive in its set of rules, yet still giving the player a deceptive feeling of control, it would have to be Sexy Hiking.