DIVINATION

I also didn’t realise that A Space for the Unbound is being made by Mojiken Studio. I previewed their pretty adventure, She and The Light Bearer, two PAXs ago. On their website, I found another prerelease adventure, When the Past Was Around, which also looks great, and a prior collection of games that I’ve found myself playing this week.

Divination is quite fascinating. You play as robot hands who foresee the future for four people. This is a dystopian world inhabited by robots, humans and creatures in limbo. All are questioning their purpose and their existence.

The word ‘suicide’ is used (fequently) to decribe how The Mother, an AI, shut itself off. Various cults (human and robot) have formed, to follow suit. In many ways, this feels impersonal, mostly because casualties are simply listed as numbers. Of course, when a robot comes to ask you if it will ever find life meaningful, and you have to tell its future by arranging a sun, a rope and a fish in a cage, the pressure is on. Or is it? It’s unclear how light interaction works, at least initially. At the end of (perhaps) ten minutes of play, you’ll get a chaos score, then the game resets.

I played Divination multiple times. Perhaps there is more to your role than meets the eye. And yet, if you try to manipulate the future, you may find the fates offer a twist instead. An ending is possible, if not easy, or happy. There’s an inbuilt way to track your paths through the game, which will assist in understanding how logic is organised. It’s interesting that Mojiken Studio’s collection is so diverse. Perhaps what ties these games together is that none of them are quite what I was expecting. I like that. And I like that they’re poignant and not too pricey.