What Linus Bruckman Sees When His Eyes are Closed

What Linus Bruckman Sees When His Eyes Are Closed was released in 2006, before we launched -- but if you missed it at the time, it's eminently worth playing.

Linus Bruckman is two games that you play at the same time -- sort of. The upper game is Kami, and is the story of a Japanese goddess seeking her freedom from imprisonment. The lower game is DocMcVonSpaceburgers, in which you play a goofy little alien guy trying to run a burger franchise and get his Dad out of debt (he lost everything playing poker online).

In other words, the games are utterly unlike each other in art style, story, or emotional context -- and yet, as you move your mouse, the cursor moves in both games, and an action in one game often (though not always) produces an action in the other.

Text in the lower game is in English; text in the upper game is in Japanese. This is a problem for those of us who don't read Japanese -- but if you solve the lower game, translations appear in the upper. Thus, despite the conceit that you're playing two games at once, almost everyone actually plays them sequentially.

Neither game depends on inventory puzzles; though Linus Bruckman is coded in Adventure Game Studio, it's essentially a slider puzzle. Or two, really -- one in the bottom game and one in the top, and solving one may interfere with solving the other.

Or to put it another way -- the games are completely different in terms of art, story and emotion -- but essentially identical in terms of formal gameplay. Which perhaps is an important point to make about the nature of games.

(For more about the game, see Vince Twelve's post-mortem.)