Kowloon's Gate was sadly a little too dense for me. Not in the other senses of that word, but of layered and ornate. Overwhelmingly so for me -
For this is a game that boasts a cornucopia of influences - weird philosophy and psychology guys like Deleuze and Guattari, Carl Jung and the like; Not to mention steampunk, cyberpunk and according to this article (http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/kowloons-gate/) gothic architectural concepts. They wanted to create a whole new concept of "Asia Gothic" - very few games that I can think of have the ambition of creating a whole new aesthetic paradigm.
The game elaborates on the idea from Chinese spirituality - "Feng Shui". Of course, we might have the bastardized idea of Feng Shui which makes it simply a matter of modern interior design. Feng Shui is kind of about design - but not simply of furniture, and not simply about peaceful modern living. It's about arrangements on the Earth in general, and applied to Kowloon Walled City - finding meaning in dark and claustrophobic spaces full of suffering.
A game that tries to tackle the 'mystique' of this historical community, and does it in fantastical terms, seems to me pretty rare. The Kowloon Walled City of this game is a place where dark, sunless places are where everything is possible - not just in the optimistic sense, but in the sense of going beyond what is 'natural'.
It's a double-edged sword - Kowloon Walled City presented through this games wonders that a neon-lit, uncomfortably compact and self-contained city can nonetheless be deeply connected to some kind of possibility for our lives. What can a cramped room teach us, what is the poetry there? Even if it's that we float towards the sunlight, like shrimp. Yet it's far from romantic about these ideas - and this is the other side of it. It presents the problematic of Kowloon in a way I've never seen before. Nuanced, and only because it presents things in a fantastical lens.
Reading up on Feng Shui, and how it was intertwined with the architecture of the family unit (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui, under "expression of identity) and being used to analyze dualisms; I can also see the political side of it.
I'm grateful, because there is a translation team working on this game, and I've heard they are pretty much done with the translation part.
It's gonna be awesome.
For this is a game that boasts a cornucopia of influences - weird philosophy and psychology guys like Deleuze and Guattari, Carl Jung and the like; Not to mention steampunk, cyberpunk and according to this article (http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/kowloons-gate/) gothic architectural concepts. They wanted to create a whole new concept of "Asia Gothic" - very few games that I can think of have the ambition of creating a whole new aesthetic paradigm.
The game elaborates on the idea from Chinese spirituality - "Feng Shui". Of course, we might have the bastardized idea of Feng Shui which makes it simply a matter of modern interior design. Feng Shui is kind of about design - but not simply of furniture, and not simply about peaceful modern living. It's about arrangements on the Earth in general, and applied to Kowloon Walled City - finding meaning in dark and claustrophobic spaces full of suffering.
A game that tries to tackle the 'mystique' of this historical community, and does it in fantastical terms, seems to me pretty rare. The Kowloon Walled City of this game is a place where dark, sunless places are where everything is possible - not just in the optimistic sense, but in the sense of going beyond what is 'natural'.
It's a double-edged sword - Kowloon Walled City presented through this games wonders that a neon-lit, uncomfortably compact and self-contained city can nonetheless be deeply connected to some kind of possibility for our lives. What can a cramped room teach us, what is the poetry there? Even if it's that we float towards the sunlight, like shrimp. Yet it's far from romantic about these ideas - and this is the other side of it. It presents the problematic of Kowloon in a way I've never seen before. Nuanced, and only because it presents things in a fantastical lens.
Reading up on Feng Shui, and how it was intertwined with the architecture of the family unit (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui, under "expression of identity) and being used to analyze dualisms; I can also see the political side of it.
I'm grateful, because there is a translation team working on this game, and I've heard they are pretty much done with the translation part.
It's gonna be awesome.