Space Funeral
| Space Funeral | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Stephen "thecatamites" Gillmurphy |
| Engine | RPG Maker 2003 |
| Release | September 17, 2010 |
Space Funeral is an independently created role-playing video game and art game by developer thecatamites. The short game was created using RPG Maker 2003, and centers around a boy named Philip, who leaves home to save his world from a mysterious corruption.
Space Funeral is notable for its parodies of the horror game genre, its crude art style, and frequent use of blood in dialogue, graphics, and thematics.
Gameplay
Players control Philip (and during sections following the game's first major area, Leg Horse) as he departs from his home in Scum Vullage [sic] to search for the City of Forms, a city described as the origin of everything within the game's world. Throughout the game, players repeatedly encounter twisted, and often bloody creatures which take the place of NPCs in the game's world.
The game plays like a typical turn-based RPG,[1] although a "Mystery" function that can only be used once per battle, having effects dependent upon which enemy the function is utilized on.
Plot
Space Funeral begins with Philip, a perpetually crying pajama-clad purple boy, seeing a wizard in Scum Vullage [sic] who tells him that his world has been "corrupted" and it does not have long left. He says that the only hope for survival is to find the City of Forms, a perfect city from which all things in the game's world originates. Philip departs the village, and soon meets up with Leg Horse, a horse made of severed legs who is later revealed to have formerly been Prince Horace, the prince of Space Funeral's world. The player eventually passes through the Blood Cavern, a cave housing the game's first boss, the Blood Ghoul, and arrives in the City of Thieves.
Philip notices that certain objects appear as graphical glitches, which the denizens of the world are cognizant of and call "errors", but do not remember what they once were before the "Great Change". Once players defeat the King of Crime, they make their way to the City of Forms, which is intensely glitched, and resembles a video game debug room, with the "forms" referring to the game's sprites. There, they discover Moon, a former artist who sought out the City first in order to be inspired, but realized that it was so perfect that she no longer had any more purpose as an artist, so she decided to corrupt the world to allow her to create again.
Upon defeating Moon, the game is restored to the default appearance of an RPG Maker game, and the characters return to their normal selves, implying that its former appearance was the result of the corruption inflicted upon it by Moon. However, a corrupted house from the original world still remains there, implying that it is not completely gone.
Development
During an interview with tumblr blog fuckyeahspacefuneral, developer thecatamites stated that the game's artstyle was "based on the weird chunky pixel gore from Monster Party especially the way it could be hard to figure out what a wall of tiled bloody heads was meant to represent in game space." The music selection of Space Funeral was stated to have been selected by "pulling together things based on kind of superficially similar tendencies and almost creating a fake tradition in that way which could change how you progress from there."[2]
Space Funeral was stated in the same interview to have been largely inspired by the video games Bat Castle and Monster Party.
The game's focus on "corruption" versus the "perfect" graphics of the default RPG Maker was used by the developer to decry what he believed was a modern form of classicism for the RPGs of the 1990's, where people believed they were the "peak" of video games and wanted to copy them as much as possible, instead of experimenting and trying new things.[2] He believed that when RPG Maker games break from tradition, they are more interesting.[2]
Reception
Space Funeral received positive critical reviews, citing the game's unusual art style, music, and setting.
Filipe Salgado of Kill Screen rated the game 75/100, saying that its "messiness" went in contrast to the tendency of most games to tie up loose ends, despite the fact that its underlying systems are the same as any JRPG.[1]
Quintin Smith of Rock, Paper, Shotgun described the game as "Final Fantasy directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky", calling the art "disturbed" and the music "awesome".[3]
Chay Close of Snacked Up compared the game to the works of David Lynch in its surreality and willingness to combine multiple genres.[4]
Following the release of Space Funeral, several fangames were released to the public, two of which, Space Funeral Earth Birth and Space Funeral 2, impressed developer thecatamites so much he claimed them to be canonical. Although there have been a few more notable fanmade additions to the series, thecatamites has stated they are noncanonical to the series.
Space Funeral quickly became one of developer thecatamites most recognizable games, alongside Magic Wand, and Goblet Grotto.
References
- ^ a b "Review: Space Funeral - Kill Screen". Kill Screen. 2011-03-24. Retrieved 2017-07-01.
- ^ a b c "BLOOD CAVERN, MORE To the bloody lakes, cryptic NPCs, and..." BLOOD CAVERN. Retrieved 2017-07-01.
{{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|dead-url=(help) - ^ Smith, Quintin (2010-10-14). "We Have Many Criminals: Space Funeral". Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Retrieved 2017-07-01.
- ^ CClose (2013-07-16). "Review: Space Funeral, and the Lynch Effect". Snacked Up. Retrieved 2017-07-01.