HOLLOW PONDS

A meeting in a pub led to a decades-long conversation, and games unlike any other

- BY CHRIS DONLAN

The games made by Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg are hard to talk about - much harder than their appearances might suggest. Their latest, Wilmot Works It Out, could be described as a game about making jigsaw puzzles, for example. But that would fail to capture what makes it work: the way an idea that starts in one jigsaw is developed in another, or the manner in which a picaresque narrative is filled in through regular visits from the postie.

Likewise, 2020's I Am Dead is almost a hidden-object game – but one where the objects you're seeking are often hidden inside others, and the manner of their discovery encourages you to consider the relationship between the living and the ghosts of old friends that surround them. You might file last year's Flock alongside other creature collectors, but as you venture out to collate a series of oddball birds, doesn't the focus shift slightly towards the wordless pleasures of losing yourself in the wide open world, and towards nature's endless ability to provide distractions?

Return to the start of the team's collaboration, meanwhile, and words scatter entirely. In Hohokum, you move an arcing snake through a series of colourful 2D dioramas, each of which is revealed to be its own world, with its own rules. In one, you must rescue an albino orangutan; in another, a group of snakes mirror each other's movements, like synchronised swimmers doing a Spirograph. And yet the real fun might lie in working out how the spaces are connected, and sounding out this landscape for promising gaps.