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My story, and I'm sticking with it, is that Islands is the best video game I've ever played about LA. The reason that this is only my story is that I'm not actually sure if Islands is meant to be about LA in the first place. No matter. Whatever conclusions you ultimately draw - and you will definitely draw conclusions - Islands, which is currently working its way through Steam Greenlight, is worth keeping an eye on. It's beautiful, mysterious and rather menacing. Like I said, it's the best video game I've ever played about LA.For me, it's about the way LA - or any modern urban place - exists in the mind when you aren't actually there very often. Islands presents you with a series of shadowy dioramas that evoke the stark, separated manner that memories of places sometimes seem to be stored. These dioramas are angular and lit with little squares and circles of sodium light that might stand in for a window, say, or a streetlamp, or the face of a clock. You view all this through a cloud of smog, these little dioramas of urban shapes, so human in their design but stripped of actual humans. Palms swing in the breeze. Cars and buses idle. An airport carousel sparks to life and the dark hulks of luggage begin to circulate. Everything is waiting for something - for people? For you?
Sure enough, this is a world that responds to clicking, each jab of the mouse cursor potentially bringing part of the diorama to life in an unexpected way. Islands is a singular game, but if I had to rope anyone else in as an indicator for how it makes me feel when I play it, I would bring in Vectorpark, another designer with a knack for stark mechanical contraptions, who understands that once a lever is pulled something absolutely beyond prediction should happen, and who knows that things can be at once childlike and filled with shifting menace.
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