I'm sitting here giggling — partially out of shock — as I press the Up and Down keys to manipulate objects in Tarotica Voo Doo, slowly realising this is the most tangible fictional world I've had the pleasure of engaging with. The trick is deceptively simple: create animations made of mostly just key frames, then make the player hold Up to progress them. If they stop holding, the animation stops. If they press Down, the animation goes backwards. The finishing touch is making the animations in question correlate nicely with the Up and Down input, generally conveying a Pushing/Pulling kind of feeling. The result is a game where you directly feel every frame of your actions, and in hindsight, it's jarring to recognize how unorthodox this is considering just how much inherent enjoyment Tarotica manages to squeeze from this simple one-to-one sensation.

God I wish salamanders were real.