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During a recent house clearout I discovered a cache of creative writing from my teenage years. Naturally, I now consider most of it to be unbearable. Reading certain notebooks makes me feel as though my stomach is mounting an upwards assault on my brain. BURN IT, scream the parts of said brain that have learned the perils of starting poems with “O Muse”. BURN IT ALL. Nonetheless, I felt bad about being mean towards my adolescent self, so I popped all those misbegotten papers in a giant suitcase. It squats next to me right now as I type these words, like a mausoleum filled with dead albatrosses.
Similarly mixed emotions appear to inform Amphora Hell, in which you play an amphora (read: ancient species of vase) with legs. The amphora is the work of the Kilnmaster, a terrible Olympian force who is one part Hephaestus to one part shmup villain. The Kilnmaster has just decided that he hates his amphora with legs and wishes to destroy it with flying hammers. “No evidence of my failure must remain,” he bellows in the Itch preamble. “Prepare to be scrapped!”
What follows is a sort of arcade pisstake of neurotic perfectionism and the way projects we deem write-offs may refuse to let go of our imaginations. It’s a simple play, so simple that my previous sentence feels desperately overloaded.
As the amphora, you run right or left on a stack of lanes and moving platforms, trying to avoid twirling hammers that appear at random from either side. The challenge increases rapidly: stay intact for 40 seconds or so and the Kilnmaster’s nightmarishly disembodied head will appear and coast towards you, purring threats like a demon vocoder. The unspoken objective is to last long enough to hear the entirety of the game’s pulsing background track. I have yet to manage this.
I like this game because it’s a self-deprecating introduction to creator June Flowers’s other experiments, which range from “the first gunk-type game” to a game of stick and hoop played using interactive fiction mechanics. All of this is summarised as “brain poison for your brain poison”, which describes a lot of the art I like.
You can download Amphora Hell for free on Itch. If you get past the floating head stage, do let me know if there’s anything weirder to report, and by all means share any of your own projects you now wish to destroy with flying hammers.
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