These Heavenly Bodies toys with suspense and foreshadowing through every minute spent scanning strange angelic statues (and their disturbing contents).
CONTENT WARNING: Cult/Religious, Cannibalism.
Thanks to movies like The Omen and Stigmata, as well as the religious Thriller/Horror genres, it’s not a particularly obscure thing for me to ask you to summon up the idea of a holy man asked to investigate a recent, suspicious scientific discovery. That’s the starting point for These Heavenly Bodies, ToothandClaw’s lowrezjam 2024 entry, which places you in the role of that holy man as they visit a lab where they’re investigating three angel statues that have been recently uncovered.
The thing is, there’s something very strange — almost alien — about these statues, and it’s not the design of them but the contents. They contain bodies – bodies with traces of strange biomatter in them. Perhaps the sort of thing you shouldn’t look into too deeply, yet we keep coming back. You’ll return day after day, helping with the analysis, the discovery, the revelation, and the conclusion of the investigation of the bodies and their statues. As you might guess from the content warning above, it gets a bit messy in the end. You just HAD to figure out what was in the statues, didn’t you?
What makes it all stand out isn’t the what or the why, but the how. Lowrezjam challenges developers to create a game, or experience, that has a 64×64 resolution. This isn’t the most restrictive jam out there, especially given that there are a lot of low resolution or bit-based engines out there. What’s impressive is that ToothandClaw have managed to convey an incredible atmosphere, and a lot of detail, by pushing that resolution to its limit, creating something eerie even within this visual limitation.
These Heavenly Bodies is playable now (for free) on itch.io.
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