Tag: gooseworx

Sundry Sunday: The Amazing Digital Circus, Episodes 1-3

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

We try here to introduce people to things they may not have seen. This means having a certain mental model of our audience, a guess of what you have and haven’t seen before. And since you’re a bunch of people, a clowder of individuals, even the best guess I make could be wrong for many of you.

(Clowder is a term for a group of cats, not people, but it seemed appropriate in this case. Meow.)

I’d expect that today’s presentation is already known to some of you, it’s very popular on Youtube, with the pilot, from a year ago, having racked up a third of a billion views. But if I asked a random person on the street, “Hey, isn’t the Amazing Digital Circus great?” I’d get blank looks. But then, here in the US, I think certain political choices are beyond obvious, yet I personally know people who choose otherwise. We all have our intellectual ruts.

Let’s not veer too far from the subject. It should be enough to say that even very popular internet things may not be known to those who are not “very online.” So it is with the Amazing Digital Circus. Created by Gooseworx, who also created the animation Little Runmo (previously here, and again in playable game form), The Amazing Digital Circus is about human characters who get transported into a digital reality and are left stranded there. While it’s not explicitly a game, we do consider all forms of electronic entertainment within our sphere of discussion, and the A.D.C. is very game-like.

At first, the Amazing Digital Circus looks like it’s a crazy-fun kind of cartoon, but it doesn’t take long for the lore to set in, and reveal that there’s a lot more going on than there may seem at first. In the Circus, the humans have a whimsical representation that they didn’t choose, and none of them are much pleased to be stuck there. The circus is overseen by a ringmaster, Caine, who has godlike powers. Caine is an interesting figure, he creates adventure situations for the humans to overcome, and is antagonistic, but isn’t a evil figure. He’s not responsible for the humans being in there or stuck there. Humans in the Circus who give in to despair tend to become abstracted, becoming big and mindless glitchy eyeball monsters, so Caine tries to give the surviving humans things to do to preserve their sanity, even though he’s not really all that sane himself.

The main character though is Pomni, the Circus’ newest inhabitant, and the least content with her predicament. Will she find a way out, or will she eventually manage to make peace with being trapped in the Circus’s virtual world? My own theory is that the human characters aren’t really humans, but copies of humans, that think they’re the originals, so it doesn’t really make sense to “escape” the Circus. But that’s just a guess, and a really big guess at that. Let’s see where it goes.

So far, there are three episodes, each about 25 minutes long, so set a little time for each one.

The pilot is episode one, where Pomni enters the Circus and we meet the other characters:

Episode two is Candy Carrier Chaos, which focuses on an “NPC,” a character who isn’t a human:

Episode three, just a couple of days old as of this post, is The Mystery of Mildenhall Manor, which reveals some off the backstory of one of the human characters, Kinger:

Little Runmo: The Game

Last year for Sundry Sunday we linked to Gooseworx’s video game-inspired cartoon Little Runmo. In summary: a platforming character discovers that the peril-filled world he’s tasked with traversing is part of a system designed to support the life of a grotesque ruler. They turn it off, but other circumstances happen, and in the end things don’t go too well. Here’s the video, again (16 minutes).

A little green person off on a dangerous journey.

Little Runmo was made four years ago and has amassed 30 million views. Much more recently, a month ago Gooseworx made a pilot for a show to be called The Amazing Digital Circus, which in that short time has gotten an incredible 147 million views. Presumably it’ll get a series, but who really can tell these days? We have one major media company that thinks it’s worthwhile to make complete expensive productions then purposely kill them before release for a tax writeoff, but these are not the pages to discuss that.

Pointy things: the bane of all runny jumpy people

Over on itch.io JuhoSprite has made a platformer game inspired by Little Runmo, constructed in Godot and (it seems) with Gooseworx’s permission. Here is the trailer (2 1/2 minutes):

You might think it’d be a simple recreation, in game form, of the original, but it’s got its own things going on! Its platforming is pretty sharp. In addition to basic running and jumping, pressing an action button in the air gives Runmo a forward dive that gives a slight bit of extra height and some forward distance. On the ground while ducking, this move turns into a forward dash that can get through low ceiling passages.

Even with all the thematic deconstruction happening in Little Runmo, we never find out why Runmo has to traverse dangerous worlds. Presumably the evil king their deaths supports has set up some social pressure to convince his people to traverse spiky obstacle courses. Maybe the local rulers are in cahoots with him. BTW, it’s fun to say “cahoots.” Cahoots!

The game is divided into levels, but they aren’t clearly announced, and to a limited extent you can explore the areas as you wish, in a different order than as presented in the cartoon. The game world isn’t exactly as the cartoon presents it either, with the areas much larger, and containing a decent number of secrets to find! It’s usually worth it to poke around out of the way places if you can figure out how to get to them.

There’s a section with Mario-style timed alternating blocks, although here, if you’re inside a block when it appears, you just die.

The game starts out fairly chill, but gets pretty difficult. It doesn’t seem like an unfair level of difficulty, although it may take you a few plays to build up the skills to conquer it. Here is some advice to playing it:

  • If you haven’t seen the cartoon, you should know that the above ground area is only a small part of the game. The wide pit, the first one with the alternative spike wall over it, is the entrance to the rest of the game. Pikit’s message hints that that’s the way to go (press up to listen to it).
  • Unlike as seen in the original cartoon, you have to use the midair dive move to get past the pit, it’s too wide to cross with wall jumps alone.
  • Get used to hugging walls on the way down, to slow your descent. This can be used to scout out pits for secrets, to see if the scrolling continues.
  • If you press towards most walls but keep jumping, you can climb them easily. Get used to doing this all the time.
  • If a ceiling has a one block overhang, you can get around it with a jump off the wall and a dive back towards it.
  • Watch the cartoon, and think about ways to explore regions that the animated Runmo doesn’t go to.
  • There is at least one place where there are extra lives hidden off the top of the screen.
  • While running out of lives doesn’t erase your metaprogress, it just sends you back to level 1, the game does not save its state when you exit it. If you quit out and reload, you’ll be at the very beginning.
The Meatball Man is one of the funniest parts of the cartoon. It is possible to complete his room, but it’s optional in any case.

If you don’t care to see the game yourself, this 100% completion speedrun shows off the locations, although of course it doesn’t waste time talking to Pikit or exploring unnecessary places. There don’t seem to be any unnarrated longplays around yet, so, best to sharpen those skills if you want to experience it all.

Little Runmo: The Game (itch.io, $0, Windows & Linux)

Here is a secret room. What is this place? A possible reference to The Amazing Digital Circus?

Sundry Sunday: Little Runmo

Gooseworx’s Little Runmo has 24 million views on Youtube, but it’s amazing how many things with a ton of views are still obscure to most people. Here it is in the likely event you missed it.

Little Runmo is a platforming character in a video game world who begins to question the metaphysics of his existence. Who benefits from him running through this deadly obstacle course? And what happens if he doesn’t just run to the right, but actually explores his world? The answers are funny and disturbing! But mostly funny!