If you played Illusion of Gaia on the SNES then you’re bound to be familiar with the raft sequence. Will and Kara spend days in the middle of the ocean, fishing to survive, and slowly falling in love.
Game designer Richie Hoagland certainly remembers it. He decided to make a “love poem” to that sequence, as well as the SNES Final Fantasy games, with his Ludum Dare 31 game Peter Padder Pauleypop.
“Consider the experience the sashimi version of a video game,” Hoagland writes. So, yeah, it’s a short game created in a wonderful pencil-shaded art style.
You play a strange little creature that, for some reason, must sit on the end of a plinth and fish, endlessly. When you catch a fish, it is fed to a twisted behemothic monster that reveals poetic lines with each meal.
It certainly touches on some of the tedium and disbelief that so many players did or did not enjoy about the monotonous raft sequence in Illusion of Gaia.
You can download Peter Padder Pauleypop for free on itchio. It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
