Full transcript:

I found Skeleton Rebellion through a bot on Mastodon called Steam Trailers in Six Seconds. The bot performs exactly as promised, posting silent, automatically edited, six-second highlight reels from games’ promotional trailer videos, shortly after they’re published on Steam.

The bot’s creator, Ichiro Lambe, ported it from the former Twitter at the end of 2023, almost exactly one year after I first purchased my Steam Deck. I quickly saw it not just as a great channel for discovering interesting new work, but specifically a spotlight on how the Steam Deck itself provided me an access-pass to magnificently bizarre worlds otherwise invisible.

This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick.

After following Steam Trailers in Six Seconds for a while, you might start to become aware of a certain self-similarity among all the trailers for most new games. This came as no surprise to me, as one who has always had Sturgeon’s Law close at hand: “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” The majority of the bot’s posts almost seem like clips from the same two games: either the prematurely released work of a precocious student, or a competently photogenic game about guys running around doing ordinary video-game stuff. Little pixel-folks bouncing around platforms collecting gems, a paranoid first-person view of a flashlight bobbing down a dark corridor, sharpshooters jogging around a gloomy battlefield. It all looks extremely familiar. Titles and blurbs and the occasional review score burst in and fly about, energetically listing game features as if you don’t already have a dozen or more entries in your Steam library with precisely the same qualities.

But all this is necessary, it turns out. All this gruel, all this chopped-up trailer mash of undifferentiated game-stuff, serves as the bed of bland grain on which the most extraordinary colors and flavors might be set. One that writhed and glittered for me within the first few days that I followed Steam Trailers in Six Seconds was Skeleton Rebellion by Joe Renwick.

This game is a very short JRPG that chooses anticapitalism off the menu of de rigueur indie-game themes, and implements it through a story of undead minions who are sick and tired of necromancers ordering them around under lousy conditions and worse pay. A typical trailer would probably tell you exactly this, in so many words, over some gameplay footage. Skeleton Rebellion’s trailer does not do this. Instead, it opens with a wonderfully bespoke fifteen-second-long animation where a wizard mumbles his claymation lips and wiggles his greenscreen-composited fingers, causing a stop-motion pile of bones to spontaneously form into the game’s protagonist. After the wizard points expectantly to a pile of trash, the skeleton slaps him upside the head, and only then to we segue into the montage of gameplay clips. But none of these have explanatory titles. And yet, all of them show, clearly, that this is a gonzo single-developer Final Fantasy clone fueled entirely by the same sort of joyfully kitchen-table animation that the opening cartoon showcased.

The trailer combines taste and restraint with the wisdom to waste no time before establishing the game’s tone using that brilliant animation, laying down context and mood before getting to the unavoidable business of showing gameplay examples. It’s perfect, and remains perfect when ground down to six seconds.

According to its store page on Steam, Skeleton Rebellion runs on Windows only. I don’t expect that to ever change; this is the default state for strange little indie games created with a shoestring budget. But, thanks to the emulation layer that powers it, the Steam Deck runs the game superbly. I began playing Skeleton Rebellion while reclining on my couch within minutes of seeing it blip by on Ichiro’s Mastodon bot. And as someone with no interest in building or maintaining a gaming PC, this is simply not an experience I’ve ever quite had before, this freedom to see a beautifully bizarre little Windows game for sale, and having it run in my hands moments later.

I’m happy to say I’ve applied this freedom time and again since then, buying or at least wishlisting obscurities that sparkle and glint from the vast and otherwise grey terrain that is the Windows gaming world. Another game I found through the six-second bot at around the same time is Sunflower Pie, a short visual novel by ThePenSword. Not a genre I normally go out of my way for, but again, the game’s trailer looked so arrestingly strange and stylish against the majority of the bot’s content that I couldn’t resist exploring it further.

So, while the Steam Deck can act as a hand-held pass to a whole and ever-growing world of strange and unique work, it leaves to you the challenge of finding the good parts. Eventually I did start to discover that tools for this purpose exist outside of what Valve itself provides, rewarding patience and curiosity with the joy of completely unexpected discovery.

This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show at Venthuffer.com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.