Last week I was installing the latest Ubuntu (8.10 so far, time flies…) in a computer, for a relative of mine. Once I had finished, I took a look into the gnome-app-install application to look for new programs, and I was happy to found Passage in the games section. I knew about this game about a year ago; sources are available in the web page, as well as binaries for Windows and MacOS X, but I hadn’t found a user-friendly way (I mean, packages :P) to install it in GNU/Linux before.

Passage is a game about the flow of life and death. I think that it was born with the aim of demonstrating how a videogame can also be a work of art, in a classic way. Its graphics have the symbolism of a painting (built of huge pixels, of course), its gameplay has hidden meanings, just like poetry, and its crappy 8-bit music will stay in your head for ages. When the game ends and the screen fades off you stay for some seconds looking at that black screen, silent, shocked. I personally felt some kind of anxiety, and sadness.
I don’t want to reveal all the content of the game, so I recommend you to give it a try. A game lasts only five minutes, and installing it takes even less. After that, if you’re interested, you can read the creator’s statement to know everything he wanted to say in this game, and compare it with your ideas. Until I read it I couldn’t figure out why the punctuation system works as it does :S .
But at the end, I have noticed a curious contradiction: Passage is a game, but it isn’t fun. It’s all about feelings: you can play it once or twice, for some minutes, to try it and feel what it has to communicate. But, at the end, you won’t play it anymore. Don’t misunderstand me; it’s art, I have no doubt; but for me, Super Mario Bros. is also art for different reasons; and I still play with it every now and then 😉 .