Brutalism serves one of two purposes in games: either as a source of concrete projectiles, or much more commonly, as a backdrop to quietly wander around, feeling morose. Personally I’m a fan of both, hence Lullabies Made of Static – which is out today – tickling the same neurons as my favourite grey walking sim, Fugue in Void.
I’ve only played the demo so far, but it feels suitably off. You’re less mobile than you’d be in a Babbidi or a Lorn’s Lure, which makes the towering walls and peculiar architecture of Lullabies’ dead city all the more imposing and dreadful. Although not every building looks like it was built by cement-pouring extraterrestrials, there are plenty of odd sights – a block covered in tall glass flute shapes, a vast double-tiered concrete mushroom, a lonely staircase leading to a rooftop quarter-pipe that Tony Hawk might flip off if he was sad – and ample time to take them in, given your goal is simply to find a cassette tape, somewhere.
Where exactly? That’s for the game to know and for you to stumble across. As permanently as the words “0 / 1 CASSETTES COLLECTED” are etched across the screen, Lullabies isn’t as interested in fetch quests as it is with nurturing its gently unsettling atmosphere. Few sounds exist beyond the wind and your gently clodding footsteps, and the city’s openness lends itself to walking in increasingly confused loops. Your enjoyment may therefore depend on where you fall on the destination-versus-journey scale, though I will say I tracked down the missing tape well before I got bored with those eerie streets.
Insofar as you could call them streets, anyway. One less successful quirk of the city’s layout is how every building is sprinkled across a featureless brown plain, which comes across as a technical shortcut rather than a knowing attempt to undermine my comfort in the familiar. I agree with Edwin that the few snippets of dialogue don’t land, either – sometimes it’s Philip K. Dick-quoting abstraction, sometimes it’s casual Whedonisms.
It’s still moody and mysterious enough in the quieter stretches, mind, to be worth a look. The demo’s still available on Steam.