Dive into a sci-fi game anthology full of stars and weird games
Game jams are marathon sessions where game makers put together a game in a short period of time, typically just one or two days. Naturally they're unpredictable -- as likely to conclude in quick interactive jokes as they are substantive games. Sometimes 48 hours of game development ends with Broforce. Other times it ends with Kitty Punch. Rather than invite all game makers to come together for a non-stop creative session, Antholojam founders Zoe Quinn and Alex Lifschitz invited creators to pitch ideas based around a theme and then gave them a month to complete their vision. Now there's Antholojam 1: A Golden Age of Sci-Fi Anthology, gathering together 15 beautiful and strange games resulting from the first of these curated jams.
How strange is the set? Consider Killing Time at Lightspeed by Gritfish, an old-style adventure game that has you traveling from Mars to a distant planet on a commercial ship over 30 years. You pass the time reading email, news stories and talking with other passengers to fill in the gaps on who you are and why you're making a trip that requires you to live a third of a life in transit.
If you still want to ponder how space and time travel go hand in hand, you can also check out The Lost Chrononaut. Watercolor illustrations and ambient electronic music straight of a '70s sci-fi movie count among its charms. Chrononaut's story, meanwhile, sends you to the year 2060 to explore and the whole thing is presented as card game. Once you've wrapped it up there are still 12 more games to explore in the anthology. It can be played for free at the Antholojam homepage.
