Returning to The Catacombs Of Solaris, a nascent “artsport”
Stansław Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris places its protagonist, Kris, alongside several other scientists on a base orbiting a mysterious planet that features an amorphous, strangely sentient sea. The book captures the uncanny feeling of encountering and attempting to understand a sort of alien intelligence that is completely incomprehensible from a human perspective. The forms the planetary sea makes appear aboard the ship are just off enough, a naïve reconstruction of Kris’ dead lover, for instance, that there is an obvious attempt to communicate coming from the planet, but also a gap and unpredictability that can make it unnerving, or uncanny.
The reference in the title of Ian Maclarty’s Catacombs of Solaris is not unearned. The game initially seems to drop you into a fairly standard 3D dungeon crawler space, albeit with walls covered in bands or mosaics of bright colours. Every time you stop to turn your head or decide which branching path to take, though, the space shifts around you in an enveloping optical illusion that draws attention to how the human eye is always tricking us into thinking a flat screen is a 3D space to move around. It can also produce some stunning visual art.
Read more
