Escape From Pleasure Planet Free Download
Malena Bower
Escape From Pleasure Planet is a glorious return to the hilarious and obscure adventure games of old, this time with stunning layers of gay culture. As Captain Tycho your mission is to traverse the galaxy in search of handsome-yet-dangerous criminals.
Escape From Pleasure Planet is a fantastic mix of classic adventure gaming style and queer culture. The characters and settings are colourful and funny, the puzzles often amusingly obscure, the art and music perfect for such a weird and wonderful.
Luke: Thanks! I tried to push it to 11 out of 10. I love scifi and I love gay men. Growing up I wish this game had existed so I had to make it so I could play it. I thought it would be fun to mashup gay hedonism and repression with the classic scifi concept of a pleasure planet.
Luke: We need more games that say gay men are beautiful, that put gay men at the heart of the world building, and that allow anyone of any persuasion to experience it. That means more gay men as protagonists. A lot of games have a player-sexual lead character and optional queer side content but I consider that super bland, a form of ghetto-isation and a new invisibility for LGBTQIA+ folk.
Played from a third-person, 2.5D perspective, the game will use point-and-click controls with various puzzles and tasks for players to confront throughout the game. The hand-drawn graphics feature a cartoonish, colorful style depicting 30 locations across 5 different planets, populated by 35 different characters designed by illustrator Joe Phillips.
Escape from Pleasure Planet is scheduled to land on Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms in both DRM-free and Steam versions in January 2017. Interested gamers can head over to the official Kickstarter page for more information.
Emer Martin (EM): When I was growing up my mother always told a story. She came from a small town in Ireland...and there were people that lived opposite that had a mad daughter, and they always kept her locked upstairs to they only ever saw this face in the window. Rumor had it if you went to the family and were in their living room, that she would appear at the top of the stairs and shout "More bread or I'll appear," and they'd run up and feed her rather than have her come down and embarrass them. So this is a story we were always told and we loved it as kids. When my parents had guests we would stand at the top of the stairs and shout "More bread or we'll appear!"
I heard other people from other parts of Ireland tell it and I realized that it was a sort of a folk myth about madness and the attitudes to madness and since More Bread Or I'll Appear is a book about genetic madness and how a family copes with it, I thought that she [the girl in the story] was an appropriate figure. She doesn't appear in the book, [except as] a ghostly figure that haunts them...an image that the children all have of this madness that they know is their lot in life, too.
THC: The first indication in the book of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is in the father. It later manifests itself in different ways in the other characters. Did you study OCD before writing the novel?
EM: It was English and Studio art--painting and sculpture. In my painting and sculpture, I would always do themes from the book as well, you know, so I'd get completely obsessed. Obsessed! There's that word again. Maybe writing is an obsession. [Laughs]...I kept taking classes that would help me with the book. So when I had them down in Mexico I signed up for Spanish 101 so I could put in a few Spanish phrases, which I did, for the four Spanish sentences. I wanted Fatima to be African because I wanted to include a lot of the continents. So I took [a course on] 19th and 20th Century African history. I was also taking Anthropology 101 which was my forced science--nothing to do with the book--but it became almost the most important class in the book...Aisling is fascinated with evolving into something--what humans will become next. If we've come this far from fish, if we don't destroy the planet, blow it up in the meantime, we might end up as something as strange as fish is to humans as humans is to what?
EM: The book is a kind of odyssey, a moving around between five continents. And it's Keelin's journey. Aisling disappears from the family. So at first you think it is about Aisling and about finding Aisling, but in the end the book is about Keelin's journey. Aisling is a figure that really scares people. My editor hated her, really hated her. And I was thinking, "I loved Aisling." I thought she was very strong and wild. And okay, she did disappear and not contact her family, but in a way that was her prerogative. And in a way, Keelin is the presumptuous one, going out looking for someone who doesn't want to be found. Aisling...is a person who escapes. She doesn't have a set gender, she doesn't cling to her past--she just blows off her past. She doesn't have any country or nationality. She doesn't stick with one lover. She is really someone who is escaping the boundaries of our bourgeois existence. I think she's an adventurer, a mad prophet.
EM: It all started when I was nine years old. And I wrote a poem about a horse who played golf. It all rhymed and I thought it was great...I walked around in the schoolyard reading it, and people liked it. I was the most popular person in the class that day, and I thought "this is a racket." So since then I've been searching for that one moment of greatness I had when I was nine. [laughs]
After that I sort of just wrote every night. I kept notebooks and I'd write a poem every night and draw a picture at the end from when I was nine. For years and years and years. And it was lot of bad poetry when I was a teenager, of course. Thank God my mother threw it all away she's very neat person. When I left Ireland I was 17--I led a sort of wild existence--I traveled to all these different places. I always say I've cleaned bathrooms in every European capital in the world. I lived in Amsterdam, London, Paris and went to Israel, Egypt, and just kept traveling continuously. And all the time I would write, I had notebooks, and I'd never keep them because I was traveling. I think it was just the act of writing that I really enjoyed. I would write constantly. And I never really kept anything until my first book, Breakfast in Babylon when I decided that I needed to keep some of it. But I was ready then. I was preparing the ground. It didn't matter that what I was writing wasn't any good. I was writing for my pleasure.
Before going further, I need to state my very simple and general definition of the religious mindset: allegiance to an ideal without question. Thus, this definition includes nationalism, which is responsible for the remainder of major human conflict not due directly to theistic religion.
On the other hand, idealization can be a valuable part of our imaginations. What other institutionalized mindsets are available that involve idealizations? It turns out there is an important one that has arrived on the scene relatively recently and is the exact antithesis to the religious mindset. This mindset starts with an ideal, called a hypothesis, but then questions it like crazy using independent investigation. The hypothesis is promoted to something called a theory if it passes the questioning, but it is accepted only provisionally until something better comes along. In its relatively short time of existence, that described mindset has left a legacy opposite to the awful legacy of religion by improving the human condition with medicine and technology and by promoting humility rather than dogma. And as this occurs, ever more questions are generated by the method. That mindset, of course, is called the scientific method.
While I have never been religious, I certainly admit to adhering to ideals all too often that generally get me into trouble. Some personal venues that have worked best for me for releasing ideals by reaching for the sweet spot are shared below. All of the experiences involve puzzlement.
For those of us who drive, there are sweet-spot opportunities available to us literally at every turn. While it is not a primal fear, the fear of being injured while driving is a valuable fear to work with if only because it is so readily available, and entering its sweet spot has such obvious rewards. It is also particularly illustrative of the benefit that entering the sweet spot has to other people around you. Those who drive a motorcycle are usually already acquainted with the sweet spot of this fear. Those who talk on cell phones while driving a car are not, since they are stuck in the complacent zone. The trick to engaging this fear enough to find its sweet spot is to first feel vulnerable to the very real potential for injury that driving motor vehicles presents to us. The speeds at which motor vehicles propel us were not part of our evolutionary history, so the threat of injury that these speeds present to us remains an intellectual abstraction unless we can do something physical to remind ourselves of our vulnerability.
But the greatest threat of injury to us as drivers, whether they be of motorcycles or cars, comes from other vehicles. In the sweet spot, we adopt a mindset of preventing the accident rather than of protecting ourselves from the effects of the accident. We cannot enter the sweet spot of any fear without feeling some degree of vulnerability. Who would you rather have driving next to you: a driver who feels protected or a driver who feels vulnerable?
Motor-gliders are sailplanes with small motors that allow us to launch without having to be towed into the sky by a powered plane. I never thought that I could soar my motor-glider here in the marine air of the northwest, especially on a solid overcast day. However, the convoluted shoreline of the Olympic Peninsula generates interesting local convergence zones that I learned I could use if I accepted the low cloud base of only two to four thousand feet.
7fc3f7cf58