Sluggish Morss/Sluggish Morss: A Delicate Time in History

It’s easy to understand, while you’re being chastised by a pair of psychedelically coloured elephant-like beings over your inability to collect enough coins, why this new game from indie developer Jake Clover has been described as the most WTF game ever.

Aboard the spaceship Sluggish Morss, bound for a planet called Sedno Keir, your character (a pink mole-like being who is constantly smoking and languidly lounging) is disturbed from their reggae reverie by a pair of Technicolored elephants, who order you to collect coins which will lead you on a journey to find out just WTF is going on.

As you travel through the ship in search of these symbolic coins, you encounter various bizarre creatures whose interactions with you vary from the apparently mundane to the possibly profound. How else can you describe a giant rat with flaming eyes criticising your table manners?

Jam-packed with symbolism and references to mathematical philosophy, this game is a cerebral assault which takes patience to withstand and understand. Jake Clover’s visual style is an eye-stabbing sensation of colours and retro pixilation, whilst Jack King Spooner’s wonderfully chaotic soundtrack - fluctuating between reggae, babbling and distorted electric guitar, and delicate tinkling chimes - is enough to make your ears run and hide.

There are a lot of ideas in this game but they’re somewhat garbled, and lost amongst the crazy. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a bizarre glimpse into the unfettered imagination of a unique developer, which will leave you distinctly unsettled.

Sluggish Morss: A Delicate Time in History

“Shit just got real Jazzy Belle!” exclaims one of the crew of the Sluggish Morss inter-temporal passenger carrier. A "space expression" has occurred on the ship, releasing a part of the human psyche which has been dormant for millennia – the id. This rampant Freudian freak-out is beginning to spread through the ship, and the only person who can stop it is your character, Widok, the mathematical projectionist and premoniser of the end times.

SM:ADTIH takes the form of a journey, where many rooms contain many different AIs for you to interact with. These interactions come predominantly in the form of philosophical musings on the origin of Man, and the fate of human sentience. Gnik – the first of the super babies - informs us that history has reached a delicate stage, where psychology and maths have combined in the massive human population to create a system whereby all chance has become an exact science.

Epic themes as per usual, but not without its moments of horrific hilarity. For example, you’ll never forget the music hall moment when a half-Barbie/half-lawnmower intones a piece of ancient poetry – and then you realise it’s a Beyonce song.

Whichever game came first, the fundamental concepts they are both toying with are more comprehensible and therefore more appreciable in this vision than in Clover’s. By utilising and building on ideas only hinted at in Clover’s world, SM:ADTIH creator Jack King Spooner has built a far more rounded narrative. But even for him that’s still no guarantee it will make any sense.

Watch a scene from Sluggish Morss: A Delicate Time in History

Though they both had significant input in each other’s games, Sluggish Morss was developed and published primarily by Jake (Normalen Baren) Clover, and Sluggish Morss: A Delicate Time in History was developed and published primarily by Jack (King Spooner) Spinoza. They are free and available now on PC

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