Tonight's Summer Game Fest presentation included a trailer for a game called Felt That: Boxing, which describes itself as "a heartfelt and hilarious boxing game where the charm of handcrafted puppets meets the punch of arcade fighting." It's by a developer called Sans Strings Studio, who say they do "digital puppeteering." All that is very cool, and is also literally my worst nightmare.
Here's an embarrassing confession-slash-unpopular opinion in the grand Riley tradition: I fucking hate Muppets. I hate things that look like Muppets. As a kid, adults were always turning Sesame Street or The Muppet Show on in front of me, and I was consistently horrified, a reaction that was made even worse by the fact that everyone else loved them. Do any of you remember The Muppet Show version of "The Windmills Of Your Mind?" That shit gave me nightmares for years.
Muppets and Muppet-inspired puppets are often weird, unpredictable, and unhinged. That's where the humor is supposed to come from, I guess. But as a kid, I just found it hugely upsetting. There's no way to know what these things are and what they want from you. "Windmills Of Your Mind" captures that to the extreme: here is a thing that seems calm and normal on the outside, but on the inside is completely fucked up. When it inevitably cracks, it rushes at the camera--at you, the viewer; at me. What's it gonna do now? Probably hide under my childhood bed and scream out in the middle of the night and eat my face.
And now here's a game about puppets beating the shit out of you? A series of puppets beating the shit out of you? What the hell, man? Why would you do that to me?
The problem with this phobia is that I respect the art of puppetry a whole lot. I know a bunch of activist puppeteers and I think what they do is really cool. That clip of the guy dragging a puppeteer across the floor? Rad. Avenue Q? I can sing the whole soundtrack. This Canadian vampire marionette show I saw in some tiny Off-Off-Broadway theatre in 2000? Amazing! I trembled my way through all of them. (And did, in a story too long to recount here, say as politely as I could manage to a puppeteer in Avenue Q, "Please get away from me right now.") I know that I am missing out on a wealth of cool shit because I just cannot deal with puppets without needing to make sure none are hiding under my chair.
No offense, Sans Strings: It's not your fault your interests lie in cursed facsimiles of living things that are an affront to god. I bet you're working really hard and doing something really cool, and I wish you all the luck in the world in a brightly-lit locked room someplace far away from me.
