From now until Gamercamp begins on November 25, we’ll be featuring games from our talented speakers! (Catch up on all the games featured so far here.) Today we look at the critically-acclaimed Gesundheit!
Gesundheit! started out as freeware for the PC way back in 2007 (and even made now-IGF Chairperson Brandon Boyer’s top 5 list) but found its stride when it was released for Apple’s iOS devices this year. Filled with joyful art, an adorable soundtrack, and unique stealth gameplay, the puzzle game racked up positive reviews and was named an essential game to own by IGN.
While a lot of attention is given to the game’s signature mucus-throwing mechanic (an ode to his girlfriend, funny enough—creator Matt Hammill shared the whole story with our Jaime Woo over at Torontoist), the best part of Gesundheit! is the beautiful art. If you haven’t seen the trailer for the game, do yourself a favour and check it out now. There’s a sense of an old National Film Board cartoon becoming interactive in the way that the illustrations are filled with life and contain a certain joie de vivre. It’s difficult to look at Hammill’s work without feeling warmth.
Matt has written about the artwork, noting: “In Gesundheit!, I was experimenting with a naive, children’s book-inspired hand-drawn aesthetic to go along with the game’s odd story about an allergic pig battling monsters with edible snot. I wanted to see how the quirks and imperfections of rough hand-made art could be brought into video games, which by nature lend themselves to more technical art methods.”
He will be sharing his perspective on art and its role in games on Saturday afternoon at George Brown College. He’ll be sharing the importance of art and how it can convey the message of the game when sometimes art can be relegated to a secondary, background role. Before his talk, be sure to grab Gesundheit! off the App Store.
We guarantee it’ll charm you!
