I suppose our boss Jared thought I was on a meta puzzle game roll so he went ahead and popped this one on me. Calendula describes itself as a “game that doesn’t want to be played”, but then when the challenge of the game is just getting it to start I suppose that’s the gameplay model itself. So in not playing it you are in fact playing it. My head hurts.
Calendula is essentially a puzzle game. It starts off with a clever little trick of misdirection. It asks you to input your name, your age, your birth month and then it asks you to input the “day.” Whatever your birth date might be, the game will laugh at you. Its instruction was very clear after all. It wants the exact day. It gets those logic gears a-turnin’ and sets you up for the next hour of adventure.
Calendula isn’t the most difficult puzzle game I’ve ever played. In fact, before jumping into it I had just cleared Pony Island and Lakeview Title, and I feel as though Calendula is a bit easier and less opaque than those other similar fourth wall breaking adventures. In fact the game drops a relatively easy to decipher clue each time you jump into the start menu. There’s a little bit of opening trial and error that happens early on with the game, but once you get your bearings it’s progressively easier to figure out what the title requires you to do. Most of the gameplay actually occurs in the options menu, adjusting different values and properties for a nifty little effect that reveals a password that allows you to access the next part of the game. These bits of “gameplay” are broken up by parts of what is supposedly Calendula’s “real” game world, corridors and stairwells with bleeding walls and spinning 3D shapes. Occasionally you’ll get full motion footage containing lots of cryptic imagery.
Twin Peaks and Silent Hills’ PT are cited as major sources of inspiration in this game, though for me personally it felt more like Evangelion meets Tale of Tales. I did feel the David Lynch dripping into this title at least, Calendula skips right past the “art game” genre and goes straight for experimental film. It took me back to the days of film school watching people cut into cow eyeballs and having leather biker orgies. Calendula doesn’t exactly carry the most visceral imagery, but it’s just haunting and poetic enough to keep you engaged. Or, and truthfully, for other audiences it’s just going to be straight up odd and head scratching. There doesn’t really seem to be a clear narrative, but it’s not quite an experience that begs a lot of existential reflection. It just “is.” it really feels as though the experience of Calendula is just getting the game to advance, and really, that’s a video game distilled down to its purest form.
The game has its fair share of glitches, which is always a problem with video games centered around glitching the game. Saints Row 4 and Hack ‘N’ Slash come to mind, where you would occasionally get a real bug and have to question whether it was intentional or not. I’m also forced to recall the Souls community, most recently Bloodborne, games so opaque it was easy to extrapolate that unintentional exploits were intentional mechanics. Bringing the focus back to Calendula, I met with one major bug in particular, I was stuck in a room with several dozen eyes staring down at me. I couldn’t move, only stare back. Since I had resolved most of the other puzzles in relatively quick succession, this portion of the game stumped me enough that I finally had to give in, alt tab, and cheat with the google search bar. Only to find out this “puzzle” was in fact a known bug where the game would actually freeze up in this room.
I did ultimately manage to defeat the game, only running against one puzzle that was more frustration than challenge. I feel that with a lot of art games, puzzle games and “walking simulators” often you run the risk of coming up against an ending that feels a bit anti-climatic or far too opaque. I’m going to go ahead and say Calendula has the opposite problem. The ending felt very on the nose, and worked to make a lot of the imagery and metaphors you had experienced before feel heavy handed. It didn’t feel very insightful or thoughtful, and all came off as a rather inelegant wrap up to the game.
I suppose I would describe Calendula as an “experience”, and if you’re one of those sorts that enjoys the recent trend of art games and meta game experiences, Calendula will probably scratch that itch. That said I’m not sure it’s the most complex thing I’ve ever seen, the puzzles are relatively simple to work out, and the game has an inverted difficulty curve, starting off hard and getting progressively easier. The narrative it attempts to get across could have been better explored, and there’s no kind of reward model other than wanting to advance the game for the hell of it. Finally game breaking glitches for such a simple title drag down the experience. But hey, they do describe it as the game that doesn’t want to be played, and nothing accomplishes that better than impassible bugs. Ultimately I don’t feel as though I can enthusiastically recommend this game, even at the fairly low price point, if you’re a fan of puzzlers or art game experiences I just feel there’s stronger than Calendula.
