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Freedom of expression is a fine thing, but I'm sure everybody reading this has, at some point, gazed over the face of the internet - all those clashing feeds and interpretations, that perpetual shimmer of New - and yearned for some way of clubbing and stomping the whole, gorgeous mess back into Stone Age silence. It's a yearning Quote, an unusually well-spoken isometric brawler from London-based Vindit, tackles with bruising force.In Quote you play Novella, a pugilist princess enslaved by Bliss, velvety-voiced god of Ignorance, and turned loose on a hand-drawn fantasy world in search of renegade thinkers to rough up and books to feed to an obese AI accomplice known as Tatters. These books, tucked away in separately loading dungeons scattered across a series of lurid, fractured environments, are also your means of unlocking new combat moves - a familiar process made ghastly by an upgrades screen that shows you the inside of your ally's stomach, where captured tomes moulder gently till selected for digestion.
It's a nasty little structural critique of the sausage-factory conveyor belt that is "levelling up" in any given RPG. It's also, suggests coder and designer Robin Lacey, a meditation on how we often value knowledge more as ammunition than for its own sake. While exploring you can gather trails of letters to form throwaway sentences that lower an associated dungeon's difficulty, filling glands in Novella's hollowed-out cranium with fizzy fluid - a mechanic that evokes the magpie way people debate online, ripping the odd useful phrase or datapoint from a book to hammer an argument home with small regard for its context.
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