Obey the Insect God is a surreal glimpse into its developer's mind
There's nothing that looks like Obey the Insect God
Every once in a while, I stumble across a game with an art style so unique, so unprecedented, that I stop in my tracks and marvel. These games are often heavily stylized in ways that aren’t immediately appealing, like the clashing colors and blocky models of Cruelty Squad — and that’s the point. In a market where everyone’s striving for cozy, inviting, impressive, or epic, it’s automatically intriguing when someone goes off the beaten path.
Enter Charles Davis and his studio Chunkle Freaky's Movies Games, who released a very unusual title called Obey the Insect God on April 10th. The game sat on my backlog for a little bit, but eventually, its overwhelming weirdness pulled me in. It’s a 2D action platformer with live performances from Davis and other actors, inspired by a Finland legend. I’ve played many a video game in my day, but I’ve never seen anything that looks like this.
The game loads up with the usual warnings: best played with a controller, an epilepsy warning, but there’s also no auto-save. The loading bars are in a weirdly low resolution. When I get into the actual game itself, I’m controlling a man dressed in red and black, with a cool staff that’s on fire. The character models are all based off FMV footage converted into digitized sprites, which are then set against these low-res, strangely scaled photographs.
My first run ended in disaster when I went left instead of right, fell off a ledge, and found there was no fall damage after plummeting a hundred feet. A skilled player may have found a short cut there, but I had to sheepishly start my game over because I got stuck. This game is a 2D combat platformer, but it feels more like the old Prince of Persia games than something like Silksong. I use my staff to battle past enemies like “masked guy” and “masked guy with insect wings”, platform past barriers, and throw levers.
The whole experience feels like I’m trapped in the mind of Charles Davis. The game begins with a dedication to a random cashier who made fun of a fourteen year old Davis. The studio logo has Davis giving this awkward grin and thumbs up, as if he’s saying ‘I know. We’re in this together.’
Every solo dev game is a passion project, but this feels especially true of Obey the Insect God, a game that is wholly unique, even in ways that work against the genre’s design. It’s not a game I can easily recommend — it’s opaque, awkward, and takes up nearly sixteen GB on my hard drive despite being relatively simple.
But there’s also something really charming about playing something that so clearly expresses the developer’s vision, even if that vision is comically weird and kind of off-putting. Obey the Insect God is available on Steam and has a free demo, so if any of this sounds appealing to you, it’s easy to give this one of a kind game a spin.