The Brave Little Abacus, and their latest release - Masked Dancers: Concern in So Many Things You Forget Where You Are - strikes me in exactly the same way as that game did. Out of every game I’ve played, before or since, this one stands alone as not just a distraction, but as an experience in imagination.

Still, there was something intangible about it that hit me in just the right way the child-like sense of wonder, the humor over an almost invisible background of melancholy, and most of all the feeling of at once being completely original and strangely familiar, as if it was something that had come from my own head. This kept it mostly out of the mass consciousness, and left it as kind of a footnote in the SNES catalogue at large.

It looked kind of rough around the edges, and it wasn’t nearly as pretty at first glance as a lot of the other games I’d been playing. Despite whatever that may imply about my social life, it was a game that seemed like it spoke directly to me. Since then, I must’ve played through it twenty times – a feat, considering that it takes around thirty to forty hours each time through. When I was about twelve, I stumbled across this game called Earthbound for Super Nintendo.

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