I don’t know about you, but modern life feels incredibly fast-paced and hectic; it’s hard to switch off or to think of a life that’s any different that the one that we’re currently stuck in. Pinecone Dreaming is a short Bitsy game, essentially a piece of micro-fiction that’s just detailed enough to set your mind wondering about life in a different way.
Mark Wonnacott has been working with Bitsy for a while now, I’ve played probably a handful of their creations over the last year and recently became aware of their bipsi tool, which is a Bitsy-alternative tool for creating little story worlds, like Pinecone Dreaming. The idea of a tool for creating pockets of space and reality, fascinates me, as I’m one of those people who fully believes that video games are the epitome of escape as a form of media.
Pinecone Dreaming is an incredibly short experience about a world far away from our own, a simple, wistful world of community and harmony. You’ll probably spend less time with it then you will reading this article – not that Bitsy and Bitsy-like games are meant to be speed-run, but they’re often a mere handful of carefully crafted screens. There are a few major takeaways for me here, firstly, brown is a colour of nature, but is often used as a colour for dirt and muck instead of that… similarly green gets a bad rap with mould and the like.
Secondly, Pinecone Dreaming is the perfect example of how you can strip away the context for a piece of audio or art and give it a new home where it can thrive more than its first use. In this case, the familiar tones are from FFIX, and while the woodland and nature themes of an enchanted forest persist between here and where it was first used, now it is warming rather than mysterious.
Pinecone Dreaming can be played in your browser, it’s free.
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