Californium
Release Date: February 17, 2016
Developer: Darjeeling, Nova Production, ARTE France
Publisher: ARTE France
Price: $6.99
my playtime: 3.5 hours
One of my favorite books is Schrodinger’s Cat by Robert Anton Wilson. A book that roughly 150 pages in the world ends followed by a new Chapter One. The characters are the same but… different. Genders flip-flop, careers take vastly different paths, enemies are friends. The book continues this way slowly growing more erratic. You begin switching between these “alternate universes” until reality becomes wet clay, open to the mold of impressing hands. This book is also the longest setup to the funniest joke I’ve ever heard. Wilson was friends with another writer named Philip K. Dick, a prolific science fiction author whose books would go on to be the cornerstone of sci-fi movies to this day. Both men experienced odd things in their life, along with a decent bit of recreational drugs, which made them question reality.
Californium is a “walking simulator” inspired by the works of Philp K. Dick and very similar to the Schrodinger’s Cat book I described above. You play a failed writer in the 1970s, drunk druggie degenerate whose spiral may have begun after he lost his daughter (she died). This behavior then causes his wife to leave. As you explore the bustling city you will meet a wide range of colorful characters with a visual aesthetic of paper cut-outs. But… what is that.. a tear in reality? Inspect and it grows, clashing with the current world. A peek into a new dimension. Discover enough and the whole world changes. The characters are the same but… different. You’re the most successful writer of all time now. Continue looking for rifts. Rinse and repeat.
7/10
CM 4/14/25
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