AGAINST THE DAY

a hollow earth tale

The year is 1899. You are an aeronaut, and the only way down is through the hole at the top of the world.

Pilot a hot-air balloon through four hollow-earth strata — the Inner Sea, Shamballah, the Vril-Ya Warrens, and Hyperborea — searching each procedurally generated cavern for a key, a hidden door, and the chamber-thing waiting behind it. Pick up artifacts on the way: extra hearts, a compass that points to what you need, boots that move you faster.

Don't fall too far. Don't graze the ceiling. Read the dispatches.

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CONTROLS

PICO-8, so anything goes — keyboard, gamepad, the buttons in the corner on mobile. The game treats them as the standard six.

On foot

• ← → walk
• ↑ jump (and stomp bosses)
• ↓ board the balloon when you're standing next to it

In the balloon

• ↑ burn / thrust upward (gravity does the rest)
• ← → drift
• ↓ step out once you've landed

Anywhere

• Menu → easy: on if a long fall keeps killing you
• Menu → restart level / skip level if the cave generator gave you something cruel

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INSPIRATION

Let's get the big one out of the way first.

Campanella 2, from UFO 50. I basically stole this game. The balloon-and-cave loop, the burn-to-rise physics, the hop-out-and-platform, the alcoves with treasure behind them, the locked door at the bottom — that's all Campanella. If you've played it, you've already played the skeleton of this. What I tried to add was a Pynchon costume, four biomes with their own palettes and pacing, procedurally generated caves, and a small boss at the end of each. Consider this an affectionate cover version. Full disclosure: I haven't actually beaten Campanella 2 yet, so if my version ends up easier, harder, or just plain wrong about something, that's why. Go play the original — it's better, and it's part of one of the best things in games.

The other two on the desk the whole time:

Thomas Pynchon — Against the Day. The Chums of Chance and their airship, the telegraph cadence ("STRUCTURE DETECTED — STOP"), Shambhala under the ice, the idea that the polar opening is real if you take the right boys' adventure novel seriously enough. The whole game is shaped like a chapter from one of the books the Chums are supposedly the heroes of — a descent, a dispatch, a wonder, a door.

Wolf Parade — Against the Day. Yes, the title is also a Wolf Parade song, and I'm pretty sure it's about the book too — the lyrics keep brushing up against the same stuff Pynchon was circling, light and time and the people we send out into them. Or maybe it isn't and I'm just doing what fans do. Either way, it's been on loop the whole time I was making this, and the cutscenes are reaching for that particular Krug/Boeckner register where the expedition is doomed and beautiful at the same time, and the narrator is alone in some enormous cold place and still singing.

Other ghosts in here: Bulwer-Lytton's Coming Race (the Vril-ya), Ossendowski's Beasts, Men and Gods (Agartha, the King of the World), Stapledon for scale.

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CREDITS

Made for Mini Jam 210 — theme: astral — in PICO-8.
Game by Chris Moles. Produced by Mindless Turtle.