Welcome to the Crystal Mall

I’ve spent the last seven weeks working on a video game called Escape from the Crystal Mall. It’s a tiny thing, jammy and a little crumbly, designed to be played in a browser in a single session. It’s also the first official game release from Studio Iskotaa, the indie game studio I founded with my partner, Lars. I’m really pleased with this game and would love it if you gave it a try. You can play it here.

The last time Lars and I worked on a game it was a micro project called Fresh Wizzy’s Radical Tower, a text adventure that runs in a simulated AIM window. I wrote Wizzy over a weekend and Lars coded it in about a week. It was intended to be a bit, an elaborate one-off joke created for the Mayllennial art challenge. We’ve now joked for the last two years that we should make a sequel, a Fresh Wizzy 64, and this year we decided to give it a real try.

Escape from the Crystal Mall is not that game. Wizzy makes a cameo and there are jokes about Wishbone and Beanie Babies, but Crystal Mall developed differently from Fresh Wizzy. Wizzy is all 90s childhood touchstones—Capri Sun pouches, suspicious Furbies— but Crystal Mall is young adult ennui dipped in Y2K chrome. You play as Robin, a music-obsessed 20-something trying to forestall adulthood via retail therapy. You might find your way out of the mall or decide to stay inside forever. The choice is yours. This might make the game sound like a downer, but this isn’t the case at all. To keep things light, there’s an all-you-can-eat frozen yogurt dispenser and a quest to rifle through fart-dusted couch cushions to make some money. Good luck finding this kind of cutting edge narrative gameplay coming from a AAA studio.

As someone who lived through the late 1900s, I understand why people yearn for Motorola Razr phones and wi-fi free MP3 players, but I wouldn’t want to permanently live in that world again. It’s tempting to take shelter in nostalgia given any one of the concurrent calamities happening in the world. But I wanted to write against guileless Millennial nostalgia and poke fun at my own generation’s youthful missteps. We wore the terrible emo bangs and JNCOs first, goddamnit. Crystal Mall is intended to be nostalgic, but wryly so, and I hope I’ve succeeded in capturing that tone.

I wrote Crystal Mall from scratch in seven weeks using Yarn Spinner, having never used Yarn Spinner or any other dialogue manager. The only ideas I had for this game at the start of April were “frozen yogurt start menu” and “salty mall employee.” Now I have an entire game about that salty mall employee, she has salty mall co-workers, and the whole thing plays alongside an enthusiastically amateur soundtrack I composed myself. No GenAI was used in the creation of this game. AI tools that are wedged into modern software were disabled at every opportunity and non-AI infested software options were preferred. Making fun stuff is well within reach, no tokens required.

On some level it’s outrageously indulgent to spend several weeks writing a browser game that I expect about 10 people to play. You can make this a less indulgent exercise by playing it yourself and telling 10 of your friends, otherwise you’ll be cursed with 7 years of bad luck and acne. Pass it on.

kthnxbye!