Indie Game of the Week 437: Discolored

Back when I was a wee tyke in, oh, let's say the Late Triassic I was very fond of an unusual shoot 'em up called Wizball. The main goal of this game was to re-saturate a monochrome world by finding colors in different RGB values (which is also where I learned about RGB and additive colors, since I wondered how you managed to get yellow out of them) and the effect of having these worlds slowly fill with color after getting used to seeing gray everywhere was striking. Since then, I've always had an appreciation for games where color—especially introducing or reintroducing it to a somber, hueless world—is a major component of its gameplay focus, or even an incidental byproduct of whatever else you might be doing. Discolored, by digital artist and designer Jason Godbey, takes the concept and applies it to a vaguely Twin Peaksian surreal mystery first-person adventure game where a lonely truck stop diner along some unspecified road of the American southwest has been drained of its chroma and it's your task to figure out how to fix it.

Discolored makes its inspiration clear early on with a toggle that lets you either roam the environment like other first-person adventure games made more recently or a more discrete form of movement by way of a point-and-click interface. That is, you're effectively choosing between the original Myst and the modern incarnations of Myst that lets you look around more freely at the cost of adding to the amount of time it takes to find relevant hotspots. You'll quickly locate an empty green triangular indent—the only splash of color in this diner, found upstairs on a plant vase—but finding the concomitant green triangle to slot into it takes a little more sleuthing. After you do, it's simply a matter of solving a few other puzzles for its blue and red siblings and then you get a little bit of plot happening as you trot towards the game's conclusion. Even accounting for any puzzle-afflicted brain farts the whole game probably won't take much more than an hour and its small batch of puzzles are somewhat limited by the scope of the game's ambition.

Discolored is also one of those games where the active area is so small that it greatly ameliorates any confusion you might have about where to try next or where any of your carried objects might fit into (within reason and decorum), yet effectively expands that small space by having it subtly alter itself after restoring one of the three main hues. For instance, there are objects fully of one color that just vanish whenever that color isn't active: a green crank collected after restoring the green hue will more or less disappear from your inventory (there's like a blurred silhouette left behind, like the mere hint of what was once there) if you remove the green triangle from its resting spot. Some of these colored objects exist to impede you, however, like a couple of green padlocks on a cupboard in the attic that is revealed to contain something of great value, so there's instances where you'll want the colored triangles in place and not in others. In this fashion, you're not so much dealing with a single small location but four variants of it (or more if you factor in combinations). Like I said, though, the game doesn't really have the space nor inclination to take this aspect far enough to generate some real brainteasers, for better or worse.

Even in spite of its brevity, I quite enjoyed Discolored. Perhaps it'd be fairer to say I appreciated the potential it has for a more more confident expanded sequel—which exists, so that might be something to check out; that it looks far more ambitious than this game adds to the hypothesis that this is more a proof of concept demo—but all the same there's some bold worldbuilding here that's a little reminiscent of Control's combo of surreal paranormal discovery meshed with a very quotidian and dry federal bureaucracy with all its redacted documents and found artifacts sealed deep beneath secret military depositories: the sort of juxtaposition The X-Files was very fond of as well. The color stuff could've gone way further, say with combinations of its RGB triumvirate to create puzzles where you could only interact with magenta objects which meant removing only the green hue from the world, but what little exists is made all the more visually arresting with the colorful '60s/'70s diner aesthetic once more of its coloration is restored.

Despite not caring for Myst a great deal (sorry Mike) I've always appreciated the sort of less BS-intensive Indie equivalents that have popped up over the years hence, and in many cases it's because this genre feels simple enough (though obviously they only make game design look easy) that it's able to entice those whose fortes are in the loosely related fields of art design and narrative fiction, allowing these visionaries to create video games that are more memorable for their aesthetics and themes than they are deeper gameplay features to unpack. That's also partly why I continue to love the adventure game genre as a whole, at least in small doses before I'm right back into some manner of RPG with all its elaborate systems to decipher. Discolored didn't really offer much in way of a skill challenge or a mental exercise but it did work as a glimpse into the mind of an artist with some neat ideas, and perhaps more confidence now working with video games to take those ideas even further. As it is, it's an eerie bite-sized delight that leaves you wishing for much more.

Rating: 4 out of 5.