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.

Full transcript:

In the text file known as Merlin’s Wisdom Project, we find the following: If you have cool stickers, use them. Put them on things. Be carelessly joyful about using your stickers. If you die with a collection of dozens of cool stickers that you never used, you did it wrong.

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

The Steam Deck offers an admittedly limited canvas for decorating with stickers. On mine, there are three, which I have affixed in a left-to-right pattern at the rate of about one per year.

First is the logo of the podcast The Short Game, in the shape of a stylized game controller. It fits smartly above the air intake grille on the left side of the console’s back. The back, I should say, is the only surface of the Deck I’ve considered decorating in this way, as it offers the most contiguous real estate. The sweet fumes ground out from the vents on the top edge of the console, for which is this show is named, could not exist in their fullness with any tampering done to the intake grille, so I leave it wholly uncovered without complaint. Anyway, the podcast’s logo in this position looks a bit like a domino mask that transforms the grille into an accidental toothy rictus grinning out beneath it. I like that.

Moving to the right is a small sticker for Fogknife, my personal blog, on which we needn’t dwell on today, and is the least visually interesting of the set anyway. It’s just the letters of the blog’s title in a typeface whose name I no longer recall, tumbled into a pile and resting below the Valve logo that is carved into the center of the console’s back panel. I definitely feel a resistance to covering that logo, not dissimilar to the reluctance I still have against obscuring the Apple logo on my laptop lids, decades after the first time I slapped a sticker on a chunky white iBook. I don’t have the holy fear for the Valve logo’s untouchable sanctity that I once held for that bitten apple silhouette, it’s more that I’m cautious the doubtful adhesion implied by that unevenly raised surface.

Recently I visited the Pacific Northwest for the first time, and you know I fell it love with it, and I bought… so many stickers, from all of the cities and towns that we stopped at. But it’s a tall, black-on-white representation of a douglas fir, purchased from a Seattle coffee shop, that alone found its way behind my Steam Deck. It stretches from the bottom of the back panel to the top, filling out the whole right third.

For the sake of its majesty, I did allow this tree cover up one other piece of the Deck’s pre-existing decor, the blob of faint gray FCC statements and license numbers and QR codes and such found on the lower right of the back panel. Where the Valve logo seems to demand a modicum of respect, the square of gray ink has no such veneer of core identity. Rather, it commands all the authority of a legally required mattress tag. I did consider other ways to fit the tree onto the surface that would have dodged the question. Arguably, it might have looked better, from a raw page-layout perspective, to lay the tree horizontally along the top edge, above the Valve logo. But its representation of a living thing—a massive living thing, a reminder of the unique and wild-green nature that I got to experience first-hand—called for more respect than that. I pushed past the resistance put up by that smudge of legalese. I let the tree’s roots grasp and bury it, and I knew immediately that I had made the right choice.

I can’t see the tree when I’m playing games on the Deck, but I know it’s there. When I watch my spouse play—we share the Deck, you see—I do get a chance to admire the way I’ve arranged these three smartly monochromatic stickers, offset against the black plastic, and I do especially admire that Doug fir. It’s a strong image. When I hold the Deck in my own hands, I can feel the power of the Cascadian overgrowth entangling the pixels, pushing the images outward at me. The microscopic LEDs vibrate with resonance, remembering the earth from which they were drawn. And that feels so wild and blessed.

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