How to spot a face

Concept

[: This game was first inspired by "Pareidolia", a tendency we have to impose meaning over noise, a common example of which being to interpret random details in objects or environments as faces :]

You play as a 2-dimensional character who drinks a strange potion that messes with your mind's pattern recognition mechanisms, inducing an extreme version of pareidolia, allowing you to hallucinate your way into other dimensions, where you can gather meta clues on how to beat the levels, as well as sending you into an indefinite timeloop.

The Level

The gameplay is a puzzle anchored in the 2D world that is represented by the 6/8 motif. Each time you return to it from your halucinations, the world state is altered in some way.

You first get to peek into a 3D world, your POV from this dimension and beyond switches to first-person. Here the things you could see suddenly have shadows and depth, although everything still looks a bit plastic in texture. I try to create a "I can never get used to this" feeling in this part, with the sound design of the bass, and odd rhythm switch-ups, as well as moving from an ionian tonality intro phrygian, slightly foreshadowed by the melody that I grouped in the tail of the motif phrase.

This spicier tonality carries over when you return from your halucination back into the 2D world. Although the motif itself is unchanged, the grouped melody, along with the new flute instrument now imply an altered minor sound.

Around the 48s mark, a slightly smoother transition from 2D into 4D begins as the sun begins to set. In 4 dimensions, the world becomes distorted with all sorts of bizarre geometry quirks that are hard to wrap your head around, as the music goes off into another tangent, and the time signature turns to mush for a while with all sorts of rhythms happening at once.

Waking again in the 2D world, it's already nighttime, and glitchy artifacts from 4D seem to have carried over. Returning to the motif, now adapted, along with the flute, and the electric piano playing the swung groove transposed from C to D# minor. Not long after though, you get the rug pulled from under your feet, as the groove skips over a beat, alongside a bpm change, plunging you into the 5D realm without warning. 

Opening your eyes to yourself, sat in a couch in a room dimly lit by the blue light of the old TV, a surreal yet comfortable vibe. Your vision is grainy, everywhere but within the confines of the boxy screen. Here, with a remote controller, you can fast forward and rewind time, as well as switch the HDMI port to show you a freecam view of each dimensional world to gather information before the timeloop kicks in and the world resets.

There's an overall sense of fullness that I wanted to have increase for each higher dimension you went into, I knew that the 2D world would be in a retro kind of genre, and the 5D would be ambient and surreal, being represented by a stretched out version of the second motif over suspended chords, while the other two I arrived at more randomly from experimenting with making something weird and interesting, I just knew that the transitions from genres had to feel jarring or out of place at least.

Ending

Solving the puzzles in the game results in the player creating pareidolically (is that a word?) recognizeable face-shaped arrangements of the objects. As you progress through the levels, these start to become more and more detailed. A growing mystery from the narrative gets resolved at the end, in a 5D world cutscene, where solving the final puzzle rewards you with a mirror. Yes. These were your self-portraits all along, in a way your subconscious had been searching for itself, and upon remembering what you really looked like, the timeloop is finally broken, waking you up from a very long coma.

Other Stuff

In electronic music, some hate quantization, others swear by it. My approach to microrhythm is usually a mix. Some things I clicked in, others I perform and manually adjust to a sweeter spot, and some untouched, like the groove in the E-Piano that I felt had a weirdly cool swing to it.

I might expand the soundtrack at some point, leading it down a more serene ambient path which I felt was missing from this, but as an introduction to the idea I think it does the trick.

I selected both as the motifs used but it's mainly One (6/8) representing the 2D world. The Second motif appears to represent the 5D realm and in some other small bits.  

The dimensions (+some rough doodles):

• 2D: As in Terraria

• 3D: As in Mario Odyssey when going in and out of the walls

• 4D: A mix between Superliminal and 4D golf

• 5D: As in TOTK, the rewind mechanic, at a small scale

Scope? Never heard of it.

• "A strange brew" is the music for level 1, channel code 377 when you need to find it again.

• Cover Art: Abstract faceless head (side profile), by me.
• Session:

I hope this made sense haha  
Thanks for checking it out :::)))) 

-fishe