Lately I have been finding myself wandering the internet, digging through various sites trying to discover indie games. Luckily enough, I'm starting to have friends suggest games for me to check out. On such an instance where I was checking out a suggested game, something else caught my eye and sparked my interest. There are times when there has been a game that I've never heard of, so when I came across something called Blueberry Garden I wanted to figure out more about it after reading the description:
“Congratulations Blueberry Garden! Winner of the Seumas McNally Grand Prize for 'Best Independent Game' at the 2009 Independent Games Festival. Also a winner for 'Best Innovation' at the 2008 Swedish Game Awards. Blueberry Garden is a short and experimental game about exploring a strange world.”
Created by independent Swedish game developer Erik Svedäng and released in June 2009, Blueberry Garden is actually a puzzle platform type of video game with instrumental piano work by Daduk. Since then, he has brought into being Kometen, Shot Shot Shoot, TRI-TRI-TRIOBELISK, Clairvoyance, and is currently working on else{Heart.break()}. After taking a look at the short trailer and the different screen shots, I was struck by the charming innocent nature of the style of the world and characters in the game. Even the premise of assisting the character in gathering various odd objects to add to his home, all the while attempting to avoid having things eaten by little tiny party hat wearing imp creatures that when they kiss end up reproducing seems innocent and even comical. Taking a closer look at the style, there was something about it that reminded me of something but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. With an almost children's book vibe, I was getting a sense of just a little bit of illustrator Sun Young Yoo in there or even perhaps a splash of Jockum Nordström. Of course that is only my personal opinion so I had to ask what his inspiration for the art style was. Within a few days of sending out my emailed inquiry, I was happy to see that he sent me a response:
“Hello, and thanks for the interest in my game and its art style. Unfortunately I don't think I know where the inspiration is from, it's the only way I can draw so I just did it like that because I couldn't do it any other way. So not very interesting to hear about I guess :) “
Looking at the email a moment, I couldn't help but laugh at myself for the simple fact that perhaps my work on installments for the 'A common influence... maybe' series I have on the blog caused me to see a little more into the style then what was really there. The game's style itself is still wonderfully whimsy, however.
If you're interested in checking out the game yourself, you can find it here:
store.steampowered.com – Blueberry Garden $4.99
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