Bydlo; or the Ox-Cart, by P.B. Parjeter
I’m a reasonably confident critic of several things: writing, first of all, but also characterization, plot, and puzzle design (whether I’m a good critic of these things is a separate question). But when it comes to things like graphics, movement-based gameplay, and music, I’m anything but, often struggling to feel like I have anything interesting to say – heck, I play most IF, this game included, with the sound off, so I’m especially at sea as to that last bit. As a result, I’ll take a page from this near-wordless micro-length game and try to keep this short, to avoid embarrassing myself with too much aimless flailing.
Bydlo is a second-order bit of ekphrasis – that’s a work of art that describes or deeply comments on a single other work of art, Ode on a Grecian Urn being the canonical example. Here we’re told the game is based on one of the movements from the classical music suite Pictures at an Exhibition – the gimmick of said suite being that each movement was based on a single painting from a posthumous exhibition by a now-obscure Russian artist. I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of either the music or the painting (and actually it turns out many of the paintings are now lost, including this particular one so far as I can tell from Wikipedia), so that doesn’t provide much in the way of context for me to grab onto; fortunately, the itch.io page does directly say what the game is about, albeit with a spoiler warning, so I’ll likewise spoiler-ify it here: the triumph of art over drudgery.
Does the game incarnate that theme? Maaaybe. This is a Bitsy game with a simple set of mechanics: your little guy starts out in a fenced-in field, with an ox-cart at the other side of the screen. Shiny lights at the exit of the field and then a path leading off-screen indicate destinations towards which you should walk; when you reach the latter, the screen resets, with the field being encumbered with incrementally more obstacles and the cart moving one square over. Over the course of subsequent iterations, the field becomes a maze, clogged with pixel-art squiggles that might be bales of hay, fallen crops, and the bones of other oxen (I think? I have a hard time decoding them); finally, the cart exits stage left. You’re allowed to follow its tracks; a new set of screens open up, empty space filled only by the one track, which is then joined by two others running parallel to it. Musical notes begin to fill the tracks, which have becomes a musical score; you reach a last screen where an orchestra plays, with the word “FIN.” printed across the top.
I can try to venture a few interpretations of all of this – if I’m right about what the graphics represent (and I’m supremely unconfident that I am), perhaps the protagonist is a farmer who’s neglecting their work because of their fixation on music? If one part of the theme is meant to be drudgery, I’m guessing that I wasn’t supposed to enjoy running through the mazes (they weren’t super fun but the worst of them only took five seconds to solve)? I did feel a sense of relief and possibility at finally seeing a new screen after doing the same thing twelve times in a row, though I can’t help but feel that moving to the left four times isn’t substantially less drudgery-y than doing a maze a dozen times. Does the fact that I can run straight through the orchestra members and the “FIN.” at the end indicate that they’re a hallucination? If so, what does it mean that the notes seem to be solid? Was coding this game a triumph of art over drudgery, or was it drudgery in service of art, and if that’s the case, is composing a symphony or painting a picture any different?
These are not questions posed for rhetorical effect: I really don’t have a strong take on Bydlo. It seems like a unified aesthetic object that’s aimed at questions I find important and interesting, so I will say I’m happy it exists – in fact I think it’s kind of neat to engage with something that’s coming at these themes from an entirely different frame of reference than those I’m more used to. And I think it’s meant to be open-ended and unbothered by whether or not I “got” anything out of it – like a placid ox tilling its furrow, I suppose, though I still can’t help but feel it deserves a better critic than me.