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Genre: Game - arcade action

Developer: Chronic Logic

Price: $19.95

Shareware games, while very much independent, rarely qualify among most culturally hip young people as capital-I Indie media. This seems to be because independent games, unlike many indie bands and artists, do not have the luxury of being able to write off any signs of potential suckitude as an artistic statement. By and large, the average gamer sees big glitzy graphics on a shiny EA box and decides that this is the game for him, creativity be damned, and ignores most of the home-brew games and all the innovation that can be found in them.

Gish!, by contrast, is the first game I've seen that is just straight up capital-I Indie, and there's really no way around it. Everything that could possibly be analyzed about Gish! simply smacks of another way of doing things, and I love it.

Gish! has you control Gish, the game's protagonist, in his search for his missing girlfriend Brea, who had been kidnapped right under Gish's sticky little nose while they were out for a walk. Of course, being the loyal boyfriend that he is, Gish dives into the closest manhole, following Brea's cries for help, and ends up in a subterranean sewer city inhabited by all kinds of creepy crawlies. But it's cool, because Gish is a twelve pound ball of tar, and it only takes a few minutes giving Gish! a test drive to figure out that Mario and Sonic don't have jack taco on this sticky, squishy, slippery bad boy.

The most indie thing that Gish! does is with the genre. Gish! is a 2D platformer, but the direct resemblance Gish! has to classics like Super Mario Bros. is approximately nil. It is the physics that make Gish! what it is; appropriately enough for a ball of tar, every level in Gish! is designed to test the player's ability to innovate in a physical environment that is very realistic and internally consistent but far from what we, as humanoids used to having access to arms and legs and other convenient appendages, are accustomed to in our 2D running and jumping—or, in this case, rolling and bouncing. Gish is capable of hardening his body to squish some pesky enemies or gain momentum, relaxing his body in order to fit in tight spaces, and making his body sticky to grab nearby rocks (or enemies!) or adhere himself to the floors, walls, ceilings, and other convenient surfaces. This by itself isn't that impressive until you look at the environments Gish! places you in; each level is a unique combination of elements that lets players think of a solution on their own, and when they do, Gish! rewards them with the feeling that whatever they did was at once both organically designed into the game and a result of their own innovation—and maybe, if they're lucky, Gish will covetously whisper "seeeeeeeecret" into their ear.

But Chronic Logic has a background in interesting physics models, so anyone who has played any of their earlier titles (which include a bridge simulator and a puzzle game that employs realistic impact physics) might not be so surprised by Gish! and its rather unorthodox action. What I am surprised about is the independent quality that surrounds the media in Gish!: the music, the sprites, the art, and so forth. While the visual quality Gish! exhibits demonstrates technical competence, particularly in respect to its detail level and smooth animation, it also retains a unique dark atmosphere—expressed in the depressing sewerscapes and the exaggerated comic book-styled character sprites—that lends a rather twisted vibe to the whole experience. This vibe is fed by the completely bizarre background music. In an earlier article, I praised Derelict's music for making the player feel mysteriously bad-ass. Gish! has music that makes you feel like playing a game featuring a twelve pound ball of tar is making you go crazy. With barely a sentence of dialogue in each section of the game, Gish! nevertheless makes you feel like your very soul is driven to the same madness that Gish reflects in his twisted little comic-book grin. It's something else.

There's more to say about Gish!, of course. I could prattle on and on about how Gish's inability to instantly catapult himself several feel in the air changes the nature of 2D jumping puzzles, or about how the multiplayer games are awesome in all their physics-dork glory, or how the juxtaposition of Gish and Brea and tar in amusing imitations of movie posters from popular culture (see: Gishface, Gish Fiction) takes an ideological stab at the heart of Hollywood. But Gish! has enough to say about itself, if you want to listen. So go get it already.

Download the free demo.