17 years later, Seiklus remains the definitive indie game
Note: I began writing this review/retrospective in July of 2018 in response to this AV Club article (at least, more so its click-bait headline than its actual contents), intending to publish on the game’s 15th anniversary. For personal reasons I wasn’t able to finish in time and shelved the idea, but was recently inspired to resurrect it after reading two pieces by LeeRoy Lewin which I will link below.
In February of 2003 an internet user known as clysm (aka cly5m, aka tapeworm) discovered Game Maker, a videogame creation software originally developed by Mark Overmars. Shortly thereafter clysm began working on what would become Seiklus (pronounced “sake-loose”) and released it on August 15th of that year, a mere 6 months later. The game was a sleeper hit among the nascent Game Maker community, gaining traction in the ensuing years via the defunct gamemakergames.com and YoYo Games Sandbox. In its modest ascension Seiklus became a sort of folk-legend for the model of hobbyist development that would soon be termed “indie” — ambitious in scope yet graspable in form — a project rather than a product before that relationship was reversed by digital distribution marketplaces like Steam, XBLA and the App Store.
A NEW ADVENTURE
Within the chronology of freeware Metroidvanias Seiklus is saddled between Derek Yu and Jon Perry’s Eternal Daughter in 2002 and Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya’s Cave Story in 2004 — games which wear their admiration for 8 and 16-bit Nintendo on their sleeves. Seiklus however is cut from a different cloth. As the name translated from Estonian implies, Seiklus is an “adventure” game in the tradition of Dizzy (1987) or Jet Set Willy (1984), where the player is tasked with exploring a multi-linear and interconnected environment searching for a series of miscellaneous objects, all in order to unlock a door and reunite the protagonist with his presumed significant other. If anything the collect-a-thon nature of Seiklus with its color-coded orbs and oddly-shaped trinkets is more in line with early 3D platformers than the haute design of Super Metroid (1994) or Symphony of the Night (1997), though funnily enough clysm is purportedly more fond of the latter.
In the first minutes of Seiklus the player is presented with a series of forks in the road which give the early impression of a vast world, and to my knowledge this was the first Game Maker game to even attempt constructing levels with any sort of cohesion. Once inside the trunk of a large tree, players can choose to go downward and spelunk through a series of anthill-like tunnels or venture up into the canopy, where a defensive mother hawk will hoist the player to the top of a mountain if and when they get too close to her hatchlings. This moment perfectly distills Seiklus, as it wordlessly conveys the game’s sense of ecology that is reactive but non-lethal; the player is only a small part of this larger ecosystem of snails, butterflies, rats and fish.
Seiklus’ background art departs from retro-game iconography in its clean-cut visual style, which eschews both excessive detail and blocky mosaic for a look that is unique and stark, yet familiar and welcoming. Here the videogame medium feels like an organic extension of clysm’s sketchbook drawings, like a carbon copy pressed to the screen, as opposed to an assembly-line of tiled graphical chunks; what you see is very much what you get. The game’s unnamed protagonist is almost comical in his featurelessness — a smooth white nude homunculus making his way through the world the best he can — like a pixelated Adam wandering through Eden. Seiklus also keenly leverages Game Maker’s particle effects system, in fact many of the locales seem to be built around showcasing these in almost tech-demo fashion, from a blustery underground snow cave to a rainy garden to an ash-spewing lavafall.
Clysm’s approach to gameplay is similarly restrained. The player character does not gain any attacks or weapons throughout his adventure — all he can do is walk, jump, climb and duck. There are a few upgrades which make the game easier to navigate, however there is no fanfare or tutorialization whatsoever and it’s easy to go through the game without ever noticing their specific effects. Puzzle-solving is also next to nonexistent, with a couple memorable exceptions like the infamous piano sequence. You really are just meant to walkabout, uncover some secrets and take in the ambiance of it all. This is aided by the game’s stellar chiptune soundtrack, a collection of .MOD songs borrowed from various artists, and recall that this was at a time before Anamanaguichi or Disasterpiece when the now ironclad association between chiptunes and indie games had not yet been forged. As well as the music the use of spatialized audio adds texture and sells the believability of the otherwise hodgepodge fantasy.
A METEORIC IMPACT
By now the indelible influence of Seiklus has been well-documented, however it truly cannot be overstated how much of a torchbearer it was for the shape of indie to come. When I look towards games like Braid (2008) or Fez (2012)— multi-linear puzzle platformers about small nondescript white men collecting geometric shapes in beauteously crafted environments with no fail state — I cannot help but see the lineage of Seiklus over and above the obvious Mario and Zelda touchstones. Yet in some ways Seiklus is a relic of its time. While nowadays digital storefronts are replete with the likes of Ori (2015) and Hollow Knight (2017), the indie scene of the mid-aughts felt less codified when it came to the Metroidvania framework, both in terms of internal structure and outward marketability. Sure there were Cave Story clones (though many were unfinished or not completed until many years later), but simultaneously games like La Mulana (2005) and Iji (2008) riffed on long-forgotten MSX titles, I Wanna Be the Guy (2007) helped pioneer “masocore” and Lyle in the Cube Sector (2006) combined Metroid (1986) with mechanics from the oft-dismissed Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988).
These were the conditions under which the “Seiklus-like” was born; games like Virtanen’s Painajainen (2006) and Kaipuu (2007), Chevy Ray Johnston’s Beacon (2009) and Terra Lauterbauch’s Visit and its sequel (2008). Most notable among this sub-subgenre were Nicklas “Nifflas” Nygren’s Knytt and Within a Deep Forest (2006) and Maddy Thorson’s An Untitled Story (2007), and Seiklus’ emphasis on eco-consciousness over combat can still be seen in their latest respective works Uurnog Uurnlimited (2017) and Celeste (2018). Less explicit echoes of Seiklus can be detected across the fifteen-odd year history of modern indie, from the hand-drawn dreaminess of Edmund McMillen’s Aether (2008), Robin Allen’s Hapland (2005) and Brad Borne’s Fancy Pants Adventures (2006–2012), to the retro re-investigations of Anna Anthropy’s REDDER (2010), Terry Cavanaugh’s VVVVVV (2010) and Arthur Lee’s Escape From Puppy Death Factory (2011), to award-winners like Blueberry Garden (2009), Thomas Was Alone (2010), Journey (2012), Proteus (2013), Gone Home (2013) and others. Even as recent as 2015 Gebub’s Adventure paid homage to clysm’s classic, suggesting that Seiklus is now as formative to young game-makers today as the NES and Genesis libraries were to your Derek Yu’s and Phil Fish’s.
But for all its blissed-out good vibes, Seiklus sometimes delved into dark and surreal imagery. There’s a cavern filled with glowing spirits that dissipate when touched, a dark orb hidden inside the sun radiating deadly energy, a section inside the intestines of a sea creature where the player must evade betentacled viruses, a climbing set-piece with heat-seeking hippopotamuses, a few strange animalistic-looking statues and a mysterious room referred to in a fan-made FAQ as the “Weird Snake Factory”. It’s pure creepypasta potential, but because of the game’s initial joviality it hasn’t really registered as such the way e.g. Yume Nikki (2004) has.
Seiklus can also be seen as a benchmark for GameMaker itself, which has since become an industry standard 2D development suite. When Mark Overmars first released Game Maker in 1999 he did so as an educational tool, and even the most complex of his tutorials showed little indication of the software’s capabilities beyond shameless replications of arcade fare (for many years the official GM mascot was a copyright-distinct red Pac-Man). As such even the wholly-original early Game Maker games had a juvenile crudeness to them — a reminder that the end users were by and large school-aged children. Seiklus has a similar quality, but is more matured, refined and self-realized. It’s earnest and succinct; knows exactly what it wants to be and is simply that; nothing more, nothing less.
A BURIED TREASURE
Tangential to the experience of Seiklus yet still relevant to its cultural propagation is clysm’s website autofish.net, which has been maintained throughout the decades and is an absolute time capsule of when personal sites were more than professional portfolios and everything else on the internet had yet to be folded into the small number of current-day tech monoliths (and yes I see the irony of airing this thought on Medium.com). The site features a swath of catalogued content: book, movie, game and music recommendations, drawings, photography, jokes and song parodies, dream journals, a daring 2002 college essay entitled “Video Games as Art”, a sporadically-updated blog with posts about subjects like comics, surrealist painters and synthpop and of course the requisite guestbook. Clysm was also both an illustrious interviewer and interviewee (having even conducted an interview of himself), and these conversations are invaluable documents which chart the early paths of game-makers like the aforementioned Maddy Thorson, Mark “Messhof” Essen, Tom Sennett and Jazzuo of Sexy Hiking (2002) pseudo-fame. You’d be hard-pressed to find a figure in games who is as enigmatic as clysm yet so candid about all their bailiwicks.
In addition to commercial games clysm has lists of free game picks, further subdivided into Flash and Game Maker games specifically. Here clysm refers to a handful of other sites which at one point in time covered such games, however most of these links either redirect to unrelated pages or are largely inactive, yet autofish.net remains. For many years clysm has also compiled what he refers to as “shrines”, which are sort of mini-review/overview/splash pages of mostly PlayStation and other cult games as well as non-videogame media such as the Garbage Pail Kids and Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984). One particularly meticulous shrine replete with download links is dedicated to RoX, an ultra-obscure Boulder Dash-esque (1984) shareware game from 2001. Clysm himself only released four more games after Seiklus, two life sims under the name Elu (2003, 2004) and two fangames (2004, 2006) of the late Kimberley Kubus’ Johnny series (on which he wrote his own retrospective), though ever the optimist he still includes several works-in-progress among his body of work.
Unlike Seiklus, which at first appears expansive but quickly doubles-back upon itself, autofish.net seems to branch out further with each successive page visit. Like a Metroidvania protagonist when I get equipped with the Wayback Machine the maze only magnifies, as many of the unlinked pages are still online in some variation. Along with some photos taken during clysm’s time living as a missionary in Estonia in the late 90’s, I stumbled across a short autobiographical story entitled “In the Silencing Cold” whose final passage reads:
“As I walk home from the bus stop at night, I kick a misshapen block of packed snow from my path and a shudder passes through my tensely clenched limbs. Even amid the relentless assault of the cold, nature’s most insensitive season remains my favorite.”
This prose immediately reminded of Seiklus’ wintry area, which includes a take on the RPG mimic trope, but instead of turning into monsters the strewn-about chests simply sink into the landscape when leapt upon. They are neither a hindrance nor a penalty, but the player also gains nothing from the act other than their absence. It’s as pointless as popping bubble wrap but with the odd satisfaction replaced with an even odder ennui.
Seiklus is not entirely beyond reproach. The collision detection is off at times and there are some tedious areas which wantonly waste time: mouths that warp back to the start of a cave and an overlong RNG swimming section being the most egregious. And despite what I’ve laid out Seiklus isn’t the definitive indie game, because there should never be such a thing as a definitive indie game; experimentation is the whole point. To quote clysm “If you’re going to take the time to create a world, don’t hold back or get stuck in formulas”. At the same time I do wish more players, writers and game-makers alike would take a chance on the lesser-known, and try to parse an understanding of whose shoulders we stand on in games history. When the piece which I’m aping states that The Witness (2016) has “no immediately apparent references to older games”, what does that say about our collective indie myth-making?
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FURTHER READING
Pitfall II: Scene 3: Cycles of (Non)Violence & And That Was a Lifetime Ago by LeeRoy Lewin (2020)
From Shooter to Shooter: The Rise of cly5m by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne (2011)
Retrospective Monday: Seiklus by Nilson Thomas Carroll (2014)
A Decade Since Seiklus: The World’s First Exploration Game by Ryan Brown (2013)
