Proteus

You’re broke, your head feels like weather, the one decent club banned you years ago and your favorite spot doesn’t exist anymore. So what do you do? Proteus. Ed Key and David Kanaga made this game where you land on a colorful island and walk through the forest. Full stop. That’s the entire thing.

The colors shift and blur. Tiny pixeled rabbits and bees and birds move around you. The sun’s shining. Music drifts in the air. After a few minutes it goes dark—glowworms gathering at the beach like they’re in the middle of some insect orgy, meteors raining down in waves, you hiking up a mountain to look at the moon, then suddenly it’s light again. Everything resets. You do it over.

It’s basically the Catch the Dragon episode of South Park—the masturbation one—except there’s no dragon. Or maybe there is and I just never found it. Hard to say. Costs ten euros on Steam. Also available for Mac if you need that.

The whole thing is weirdly hypnotic. You’re not playing in any real sense, not solving anything, just moving through these color shifts and listening to the music and letting it all happen. It works.