It might begin with a table lamp. Tap the shade, give it a spin. Turn the entire lamp, watching the red of its body blot out the yellow of the shade—and then the other way around until all the red disappears, drowned in yellow. Keep turning, and you have a lightbulb. Tap it, and it blazes with green light. Turn it just right, until the green becomes just a formless circle, and you have a bowl. Or a guitar! Or, really, it could be anything at all.
This is what it's like to play Vignettes, a new iOS game about enchanted objects. It's an intuitive play experience, running on dream logic and awash in bright colors. It's ostensibly a puzzle game: figure out the right way to move things to turn them into other things. The goal, naturally, is to find all the things.
Yet, as a puzzle game, Vignettes can be a bit maddening. You don't know what one watercolor-shaded object will turn into, you just follow color and the movement of your own fingers until you discover something. Often, turning objects until only one color shows and the object itself is obscured will do the trick, but not always. Rules are slippery. The objects of the world are not always inclined to cooperate with you.
But if you're willing to step away from the idea of goal-oriented achievement, Vignettes achieves something almost transcendent. Like its name implies, it feels like a series of short stories about objects, meditations on the secret lives of stuff. What do you really know about a lamp, anyway? Have you ever really looked at it? Isn't it weird, how pear-shaped they usually are? Hey, who first came up with the lamp shade?
In this way, Vignettes might be a good companion to David O'Reilly's Everything, creating with it a small ouvre of games in 2017 about the mysterious and inarticulable thing-ness of stuff. But playing it, I'm more reminded of Metamorphabet, an exceedingly clever mobile experience that gives you access to a transforming alphabet.
Together, these titles feel like a burgeoning new genre of play. The vast majority of mobile games lean into the phone's role as a functional communication and entertainment medium. They offer bite-size jolts of accomplishment, or rely on word games, which feel like texting and Twitter's next-door neighbors. Frequently, narrative mobile games are even pretending to be phones, telling their stories via simulated texting apps or social media feeds.
In contrast,* Vignettes* and Metamorphabet reject the phone as a functional object. They envision the device, however briefly, a window into the impossible. They offer you a plane of reality where things move as they don't in the real world, where they wiggle and transform at your command. Your touch screen becomes a realm of enchanted objects. That might be a good name for them: "object games".
Whether or not these games work as games---and Vignette doesn't always, what with its frustrating lack of clarity or consistent puzzle design---they work as enchantments. Imagination gives way to a quiet reprieve from the noise of the phone. For a moment, it's a door to an impossible place. Don't forget to take in the scenery.