The Stack

Like many games, Puzzle Dimension introduces new game elements one by one over the course of play. Except it kind of introduces them in pairs. The levels are grouped into “clusters” of ten, and all of the earlier clusters introduce two elements. If you play the levels within a cluster in order, you get the new elements one at a time, but you don’t have to play them in order; unlocking a cluster makes all of its levels available.

Most of the clusters have titles that play on the things they introduce — for example, the first cluster, “Broken Ice”, introduces first breakable tiles, which crumble after one use, and then ice tiles, which force you to keep moving in a straight line. It’s a pairing with a great deal of puzzle potential, as the ice tiles make it important which direction you move onto them from and the breakable tiles limit your opportunities to approach them as you like, but there’s still something peculiar about it. Because you can still jump when sliding on ice, and indeed sometimes have to in order to solve a level, ice tiles represent the only realtime element I’ve seen so far. Breakable tiles, meanwhile, really emphasize that this is at heart a turn-based game: you can sit on them for as long as you want, and during the entire time that they bear your weight, they play a wobbling, crumbling, just-about-to-collapse animation. But they don’t actually collapse until you move on.

The second cluster, “Jump in the Fire”, gives us springboard tiles, which catapult you forward three spaces (one space farther than you can jump), and then fire tiles, which start off dormant, but become deadly after you use them once. This is a similar pairing to the previous cluster: you get one thing that lessens your control over where you go and requires you to approach them from the right direction if you don’t want to go flying off the edge, and one thing that eliminates tiles from use. In fact, in practical terms, fire tiles and breakable tiles are usually equivalent. There are differences, but they’re subtle ones. Occasionally, you might want to drop through the space left by crumbled tile to a floor below. Also, remember that some levels loop around so that you can reach the flipside of your tiles. The reverse of a lit fire can be a normal tile; the reverse of a hole where a breakable tile used to be can’t.

Cluster 3, “Toggled Blocks”, is sort of an exception to the two-new-things-per-cluster pattern: the one new concept introduced here is switch tiles that turn things on and off. (Each togglable element can start off in either state, and if there are multiple switches, each switch toggles everything.) It’s still treated as introducing two elements, though, both of which are toggled by the switches: tiles that appear and disappear, and tiles with spikes that retract and extend. As with the breakable and fire tiles, these are mostly equivalent, just two different types of obstacle, except on levels where you need to pass through a disappearing tile space. But then, it seems like the levels here employ that trick a lot more. One notable thing about the switches: they’re the first element such that touching them can alter the board in a good way. Sometimes you roll onto a switch and immediately want to press it again to get things back into the state they were in before. It took me a while to realize that you didn’t need to roll off the switch and back on to accomplish this: you can do it by jumping in place.

After that, we get “Shifting Sands”: teleporters and sand tiles. Teleporters come in pairs, each sending you to the other — in fact, I’m not sure it’s possible for a level to have more than two. At any rate, they don’t seem like a very interesting trick to me. They’re not so much a thing that creates new puzzle opportunities as a convenience for the level designer, a way to avoid figuring out how to create a physical connection that doesn’t interfere with the puzzle. Sand tiles, now, that’s a thing to build puzzles from. The metaphor here seems to be drawn from sand traps in golf, which can only be got out of with great force. Likewise, you can’t roll out of a sand tile here: you can only jump out of them, leaping over the tile between. A grid composed entirely out of sand tiles would thus be broken into four mutually-unreachable sub-grids. Throw in a few ordinary tiles to permit crossing over and you have a very unintuitive sort of maze. Navigating sand feels a bit like a Knight’s Tour or something, forced by the rules to skip over the places you really want to go.

The fifth cluster, “Hidden Blocks”, I’ve only glanced at. It introduces tiles that are invisible until you get close to them, and then tiles that are visible from a distance but disappear close up (until you’re actually sitting on them). Both are rendered, when visible, in a way that suggests the reflections of light on glass. I can’t say I really like this addition to the game’s repertoire, adding hidden information to a puzzle type that was getting along without it before, and was otherwise quite good about letting me view the entire structure of each level freely. It may make for difficult puzzles, but it’s a cheap difficulty, and doesn’t make for better or more interesting puzzles.

That covers the first half of the game. After that, the introduction of new elements seems to stop, and the remaining clusters focus on different ways of applying what we’ve already seen. Based on what I’ve said above, I think I’m coming to the conclusion that the elements aren’t really all that varied. Not that this necessarily matters — sometimes a designer can do a lot with combinations of a minimal set of stuff. But it kind of seems like the designers here want to make it seem more varied than it is, which suggests a lack of confidence in their game elements.

Steam had one of its big sales over Thanksgiving, including a different five-dollar “indie [adjective] pack” with multiple games each day for five days. I wound up buying four of them. I really should close this loophole in the Oath. Anyway, now that I have all these games, I feel like I should at least give some of them a try. Finishing Bioshock can wait for the weekend, when I have the concentrated attention to spare. Weekday nights, I’m coming to believe, are for little indie puzzle games with self-contained levels — things where I don’t have to track a lot of state.

Which brings us to Puzzle Dimension. This is a puzzle-platformer about rolling a ball around on a grid, skirting obstacles and collecting flowers; once you have all the flowers on a level, an exit portal opens. Now, I say “rolling a ball”, but that’s only skin-deep. There’s nothing about the mechanics that suggests ball-rolling. What you’re really doing is moving an avatar in discrete steps in cardinal directions, and sometimes jumping over tiles. The gameplay seems designed not for keyboard and mouse, not even for a modern gamepad, but for an Atari joystick, a four-direction controller and one button. (Even the menus don’t recognize the mouse.)

I suppose that’s not quite true. It does support an additional button to toggle “camera mode”, which lets you get an overview of the playfield and rotate it freely to view it from any angle (again using four-direction digital controls to do this). This is important because most levels are intensely three-dimensional, and just grasping the geometry can be the key to solving them. The surface you’re on can go through 45-degree bends; sometimes it’s possible to wind up on the opposite side from where you started. The world is always presented so that you’re upright, but it partakes a little of the same gravity-reversal theme as VVVVVV. In particular, if you roll or jump off the edge of a pathway, you fall straight down — relative to your current orientation. Some levels require you to exploit this.

Also of interest is the use of pixelation. Every tile, and everything on a tile (flowers, teleporters, springboards, etc.), starts off rendered in blocky voxels. They become fully-rendered smooth objects when you move onto or adjacent to them, as if your presence is finishing something rough-hewn. This lets you visually keep track of where you have and haven’t been, and also apparently works into the scoring system (which I haven’t paid much attention to yet). Now, obviously there are a lot of games out there that use deliberate pixelation as a stylistic thing, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen it used to denote a marked state, like italics.

And so we’re finally caught up to the present. Terry Cavanaugh’s VVVVVV was released in January of this year, and I immediately knew that it had to be the final game in my chronological run-down. Its Commodore-64-like pixel art and chiptune soundtrack are a good way to come full circle and bring us back to the beginnings of the exercise, and at the same time perfectly representative of modern trends. For this is very much a modern game in its design sensibility. It uses retroisms to set a mood (and arguably uses them better than the genuinely old titles it imitates, which fought against their limitations instead of using them as strengths), but it’s full of practices that only became commonplace long after the Jet Set Willy era: infinite lives, optional collectibles (here wryly identified as “shiny trinkets”), nonlinearity without artificial gating. Relating to that last point, it even features a newish development that isn’t common yet — apparently a couple of other significant titles have experimented with it — but which I suspect will be, at least in indie titles: optional unlocking. Achieving certain things in the game unlocks stuff like special challenge modes or the ability to play different background music in your main base, but you can also just unlock stuff from the main menu. You don’t even need a cheat code; the philosophy is that if you like unlocking stuff through gameplay (which a lot of people clearly do), you can do that, but if you don’t, it’s not going to withhold content from you.

VVVVVV (pronounced “vvvvvv”) is basically a minimalist 2D platformer (although sometimes it takes on the aspect of a puzzle game, in situations where platforming across a room appears impossible and requires some special insight). Regarding the genre, I more or less agree with a recent essay at The Brainy Gamer: “Platformers are our purest gaming expression. Unlike shooters, strategy, or sports games, they draw from no real-life analogue. Their inherent absurdity defines them.” It certainly defines VVVVVV, anyway. The central absurdity: instead of jumping, you turn upside-down and fall upward, then walk around on the ceiling. (You can only invert like this when you’re standing on a surface, so you can’t just fly horizontally by tacking.) This mechanic means your path through the whole game is essentially a series of zig-zags, one of the things that the shape of the title refers to — the other being the rows of deadly spikes all over the place.

This is one of those games that takes one simple novel idea and hammers it into the ground, exploring the gravity-reversal mechanic for all it’s worth. There are sub-sections, series of levels with their own special environmental features, like conveyor belts or wraparound, and those sub-sections explore that mechanic in combination with the gravity-reversal. (The endgame puts all of these elements together for the first time.) As such, it’s something of a game-designer’s game. Like Portal, it demonstrates what the system is capable of and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

But that’s ignoring the emotional side, which is considerable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game that’s both so cruel and so good-natured at the same time. There’s a lot of mutual goodwill going on. As Captain Viridian, your primary goal is to rescue the crew of your spaceship, who have been stranded in a strange dimension by a teleporter accident, and each crew member expresses both happiness to be rescued and concern for the remaining members. In the very end, they return the favor by rescuing you when all seems hopeless (rather like the ending of Space Channel 5, one of my all-time favorite videogame endings). The characters’ dialogue suggests distinct personalities and relationships, but everyone has a face that reminds me of the “smiling face” in the DOS-era IBM extended character set, and that suggests a childlike simplicity. They can either smile or frown: like Tinkerbell, they have only room for one emotion at a time. At one point, one of the characters cheers up Viridian with a lollipop. It makes it feel like your motivation isn’t so much to save everyone’s lives as to keep them from being sad.

And with these simple souls you explore a world of spikes. Nothing does permanent harm, mind you — death just means immediately reappearing at the last checkpoint. But getting past the spikes can be very difficult, especially towards the end. The game keeps track of how many times you’ve died. By the time I won, I had racked up well over a thousand deaths. And I hadn’t even gone after all of the shiny trinkets. There’s one sequence known as “Veni Vidi Vici” (from the titles of three of its rooms) that’s achieved quite a reputation for its cruelty, making you fall upward through a six-screen twisting spike-lined tunnel, land on a crumbling platform, then fall back downward through the same tunnel — all to reach a shiny trinket that’s separated from your starting place by nothing more than a tiny block that Mario could have got past trivially.

Speaking of Mario, the typical platformer scenario ever since Super Mario Brothers is of course the rescue-the-princess plot, in which you have to defeat an enemy in order to obtain a woman, which is a fairly obvious metaphor for rivalry behavior in courtship. Just by giving you multiple people to rescue (and letting you do it in any order, so no one is the ultimate rescuee), VVVVVV avoids this, and makes Viridian feel more like a nurturing protector than a jealous lover. But there’s one more thing that reinforces this: the lack of rivals. There’s nothing in the gameworld that actually bears you ill-will, nothing for you to defeat and therefore nothing to spoil the complete good-naturedness of the characters. There are monsters of a sort, moving objects that kill you if they touch you, but they’re all very abstract, sometimes literally made of words, and they don’t chase you or anything. They just move in set patterns, another environmental obstacle like the spikes. Even the backstory, discoverable from scattered computer terminals, doesn’t have a bad guy of any kind. It tells of how the space station where much of the game takes place was evacuated after a laboratory accident that rendered Dimension VVVVVV unstable. So basically there’s no enemies, just danger.

Except, of course, that the world itself hates you. I’ve mentioned a few times now that specific rooms have titles, displayed at the bottom of the screen. Sometimes these are just dry descriptions of the room’s shape (“Ascending and Descending”) or alleged purpose (“Atmospheric Filtering Unit”), sometimes they’re commentary from more of a point of view. And when there’s a point of view, sometimes it’s mocking or hostile. For example, there’s one level titled “Plain Sailing from Here On”, immediately followed by a level titled “Ha Ha Ha Not Really”. One of the levels with a teleporter back to your ship is titled “Murdering Twinmaker”, a bit of a shock to see on the verge of a rescue. But it adds to the game’s dual personality, of kind people in a cruel world.

A lot of reviews describe VVVVVV as “Nintendo hard” — a term of fairly recent coinage, it seems to me; I’d be interested in finding out where it originated. But it’s worth noting that Nintendo’s reputation isn’t just for ridiculously difficult games, but for cuddly, child-friendly ones, and they’re the same games. For all that it takes its style cues from a different branch of retro, VVVVVV takes this paradox to a greater extreme.

Gumboy‘s final level, titled “The Hell”, takes place in a system of caves with lava-drips and hovering, fire-breathing Thai demon heads (which, curiously, breathe their fire from their noses, not their mouths). I think Gumboy died more times in this level than in the rest of the game combined, but fortunately, there’s an abundance of save points. The save points are mostly situated in places where you can’t go backward, or at the very least have no reason to do so, and thus the level is effectively chopped up into a number of mini-levels.

As a whole, it’s something of a recapitulation of all the special tokens and powers you’ve become familiar with over the course of the game — tokens that let Gumboy jump, make him smaller, make him stick to walls, turn him light as a balloon. There’s even a new token that turns him temporarily fireproof, something that would have had no practical use outside of The Hell. One fairly common token from before is notably missing: the one that turns him into “water”.

Eventually, you come to an empty chamber with no way out. As you roll across a particular trigger spot, a number of those demon heads suddenly appear and start firing at you. Again, I stress that there’s no way out. You can dodge the blasts — there’s a nice curved bit on one wall that you can use to get over the fireballs that move horizontally — but this just prolongs matters, because they’re going to blast again, and there’s no way out. I mean, okay, there is after a while. It’s a survival challenge: after you’ve spent a certain amount of time in there without dying, the heads disappear and are replaced with the final exit portal, which takes you back to the sunny arboreal spaces of the tutorial levels, where the game’s first non-interactive cutscene plays. Your reward for passing through The Hell: you meet Gumgirl! I laughed out loud at this, which is something few games indeed have made me do.

Still, while you’re in that chamber, there is (as usual for this game) no indication of the rules. You’re expected to just catch on. And yeah, that did in fact work. But for a while, I contemplated the possibility that this was it. An ending without triumph, where your temerity in entering The Hell is rewarded with an impossible challenge. There’s no mechanical reason why this couldn’t be the case; it’s not like it had to let you finish in order to unlock the next level, because the level-selection UI made it clear that there wasn’t one. The main thing that made me think this wasn’t the case was the thought that news of the resulting player outrage would surely have reached my ears.

It’s the most intense action sequence in a pretty tranquil game, and you know something? It’s still pretty tranquil. It’s still far from a twitch game. The heads move and fire in a regular pattern, a cycle that lasts a matter of seconds. Once you’ve found a sequence of moves that lets you live through such a cycle, all you have to do is repeat it without mistakes for enough iterations to convince the game that you can repeat it indefinitely. And that’s something best accomplished with meditative calm.

Can I just say how much I love this game? It seems like I’ve had to force myself, against my will, to make time for a lot of the games I’ve been sampling lately, even if the game is enjoyable once I’m playing it. Not so here. I’m so eager to play, I’m finding the time to get in a level or two in the morning before departing for work. I think the last time this happened was with DROD.

I think my reaction has a lot to do with the way that it just lets you play the game, without interrupting it with cutscenes or dialogue. I think of my recent experiences with Killer 7. There, a lot of the dialogue, particularly Iwazaru’s, was padded out with contentless verbiage: you’d press a button to talk to Iwazaru, and he’d say “Master!” (pause) “We’re in a tight spot!” (pause) “A very tight spot indeed! (pause)” and then he’d maybe say something important or maybe just babble nonsense at you. But I dared not skip any of it. So I suspect that when I went for a couple of days without playing, it was at least in part because a portion of my mind recoiled at the prospect of talking to Iwazaru any more.

I don’t think Gumboy will appeal to everyone the way it does to me. Some will be put off by the cutesy factor — I personally find it understated enough, and diluted with enough weird, that it doesn’t bother me. Some will dislike the gameplay. The more difficult levels produce a golf-like frustration, where you know where you have to go but can’t manage it because you can’t put just the right amount of spin on the ball or whatever. There’s a vicious cycle there: frustration breeds impatience, and impatience makes you drive Gumboy around too fast and fail even harder. This is why it’s so important that the game is so fundamentally calm.

But it’s also worth noting that the frustration and impatience produced by Gumboy‘s difficulty is of a different kind than that produced by Iwazaru’s longwindedness. The one is imposed on you by the author. The other is a consequence of the player’s actions, and therefore can be overcome. Some of the pleasure of the game comes from exactly that: the relief of overcoming frustration. This is why I prefer Gumboy‘s brand of frustration to Iwazaru’s, even though the former can actually block your progress in a game and the latter can’t.

Gumboy isn’t always a rubber ball. Certain tokens, when collected, change him. Some change his substance, turning him into what the game calls “air” or “water”, although this seems to mainly just affect his density, not his resistance to deformation. (Possibly the “air” form is more vulnerable to death by puncture, like the balloon it effectively is, but I’m not entirely convinced of this.) Others change his shape, turning him into a square or a five-pointed star, which affects how he rolls (or, on a slope, resists rolling).

There’s at least one other way to change Gumboy’s shape, and it’s a little disturbing.

I said that there were no enemies, but this turns out to be not quite true. There are caterpillars. At least, they’re first seen in a level titled “caterpillars”. They’re a little too small for me to identify them clearly myself, and their behavior is uncaterpillarlike in some ways, such as the way they can jump a little. They’re capable of moving around under their own power, but tend to be basically subject to gravity anyway, sliding down slopes and getting caught in depressions. Gumboy’s repulsor field affects them, which is a good thing, because you need to get them out of the way. The caterpillars appear in a series of levels where you have to shepherd a number of glass spheres around, or possibly soap bubbles — whatever they are, they’re fragile, liable to break (and respawn at their starting locations) whenever they hit a surface too hard. They’re also killed by the caterpillar’s bite.

And caterpillars do bite. You notice this the first time you hear Gumboy’s little squeals of pain on rolling over them. What I didn’t notice at first is that they were actually eating him, from the chin up. By the time I caught on, he was downright gibbous.

Now, healing Gumboy is easy. Hitting a checkpoint seems to take care of it, as do the shape-change icons, and possibly even teleporters. I can imagine situations where being partly or even mostly eaten is even an advantage, letting you squeeze through smaller space. Nonetheless, the thought of bugs eating my face is disturbing enough that I cannot allow it. Are the caterpillars even capable of eating him completely? I don’t know, and I’m not about to find out. I’ve seen characters in videogames killed in a great many ways, including excessively gruesome ones, but this prospect is just worse somehow. I guess it shows that the decision to make him into a character rather than an inanimate object really has allowed me to identify with him.

Recent years have seen the rise of the indie game, and Gumboy: Crazy Adventures is indier than many. It’s a very beautiful game, with a richly-textured environment that looks like it’s made of pieces cut out of expensive paper, embroidered fabric, and dried leaves. It’s also a very tranquil game, with no enemies, no dangers other than static environmental hazards (and many levels don’t even have that). It doesn’t even have background music to give it dramatic oomph, instead letting the gentle ambient sound of wind and water set the mood. Apparently it’s been compared a lot to Gish, which makes sense: they’re both quirky 2D physics platformers where the chief challenge is in navigating the environment. But they couldn’t be more different in tone.

The protagonist, Gumboy, is essentially a rubber ball, and moves by rolling. He has a face, but most of the time, he’s rolling too fast for you to see it. I kind of wonder why they designers decided to make this ball into a character, rather than just a ball that you roll around, but I suppose it gives them an excuse to make him mutter endearingly from time to time. Your controls are limited to rolling left and right, rolling left and right faster, and sometimes jumping, although that requires a special powerup. (Usually jumping in this game means rolling up a slope fast enough that you go flying off the end.) But rolling means accelerating, and sometimes you have to accelerate just the right amount to hit an aperture without overshooting — for example, landing on a tree branch. Trying to do this in a confined space complicates things, and most surfaces are sloped and curved. Getting from point A to point B involves a lot of trial and error, but the game generally doesn’t punish you for your mistakes, or at least doesn’t add more punishment beyond natural frustration, which it tends to defuse with its lush and peaceful ambience.

The most striking thing, especially in contrast to big-budget titles, is the absence of explanation and context. There’s no opening cutscene explaining the story and who Gumboy is and why he’s having crazy adventures, no real statement of your goals beyond an arrow pointing at the next important location. There’s a series of levels in which the player has to hit a point to release a quantity of luminous dust, then another to surround Gumboy with a reddish field that repels the dust, then use this to herd a sufficient quantity of the stuff back to the start of the level, where it sticks to the exit portal and activates it. The player has to figure this out by observation and interaction, and the game has to be clear enough in its presentation to make this possible. The first time I tried playing it, I thought for sure that there must be some documentation that I didn’t have, but no. None is necessary. This makes the game a very pure example of the sort of thing that ludologists like to write about: the game as a means of experiencing the pleasure of learning mechanics through interacting with them.

My first thought on reaching 2004 was to make a try at completing Gish, which I’ve left in world 3 since last December. Alas, the intermittent crashing seems to be even worse than I remembered, sometimes leaving my entire system unresponsive and forcing me to switch it off. I don’t think I’ll be continuing until I have a solution here. Every once in a while, it freezes for several seconds with a speckling of white pixels, then comes back with a notification that OpenGL had to reset the hardware. Perhaps it’s ultimately an OpenGL problem? Most of the other games I’ve been playing lately use DirectX.

The basic injustice of this blog is that the amount of attention a game receives is proportional to the time it takes me to finish it, not how significant or interesting it is. In fact, the less interesting a game is, the more likely I am to play it in short sessions, dragging it out. Thus, a sprawling mediocrity like The Humans gets two full weeks of posts, while its fellow puzzle-platformer Braid gets only one. But I have vague plans to return to Braid someday, to give it amore thorough analysis, whereas I’m pretty sure that this is my last post about The Humans.

Towards the end, the Witch Doctor pretty much disappears, presumably because it makes things too easy if you can have a rope at the very beginning. The rope is definitely the one tool that has the biggest impact on where you can go in this game. Most challenges can be reduced to alternately stacking Humans, and using the rope to haul everyone up to the platform that the stack let you reach (or, conversely, using the rope to let everyone down to a lower platform, then forming a stack to get the rope bearer down.) The only thing wrong with this approach is that it’s so time-consuming, and many of the later levels attempt to create difficulty by making their time limits low.

In fact, I found the hardest level in the game to be level 159, the second-to-last one, simply because it had such a tight time limit. The last level has a limit of 9:59, the maximum the game is capable of displaying, and seems to be included more or less to close things off with a nice pleasant experience, a reward to the player for coming that far. 159’s limit, even on Easy difficulty, strains things enough that I honestly wonder if it’s a mistake. There’s an obvious route to victory, and I suppose it might be possible to execute it in time given lots of practice and clever optimizations, but this would make it take time and effort way out of proportion to the rest of the game. Instead, I hit on the gimmick of leaping halfway into a bush from a platform slightly higher than it; once there, I could walk the rest of the way through it, which spared me the time I would have needed to fetch a torch. There was an earlier level that involved jumping over a bush in a similar way, but there, I cleared it completely. The messiness of winding up embedded in an obstacle makes it seem like a glitch, but who knows? It could just be the game’s last mean trick.

And yes, the needs-more-QA moments continued to the end. There was a level that exhorted me to “find the idol”, but which instead used the queen as a reward. There was a level that ended with the pet-dinosaur cutscene, despite not having any pet dinosaur in it — this was the only cutscene I had seen in the Jurassic levels, so it seems like the mistake is that it’s there at all, rather than that it’s the wrong one. Also, there’s one major glitch I failed to mention in my post on glitches: on Swamp-themed levels, where the floors are uneven, one sometimes falls through them when jumping. I wonder if the Amiga version had these problems too, or if it’s all a matter of hasty porting.

Speaking of cutscenes, there is in fact an outro scene, despite my doubts. Predictably, it riffs on 2001. And, having seen it, I’m well and truly finished with this game. It’ll be a while before I get it out of my head, though; I’ve played enough of it this week that it’s started haunting my dreams. I’ll have to try to choose as my next game something capable of muscling it out of my head.

Christ on the crapper, he thought. Africa. For the ghosts of dead tribes. Wiped out to make a land of — what? Who knew? Maybe even the master architects in Berlin did not know. Bunch of automatons, building and toiling away. Building? Grinding down. Ogres out of a paleontology exhibit, at their task of making a cup from an enemy’s skull, the whole family industriously scooping out the contents — the raw brains — first, to eat. Then useful utensils of men’s leg bones. Thrifty, to think not only of eating the people you did not like, but eating them out of their own skull. The first technicians! Prehistoric man in a sterile white lab coat in some Berlin university lab, experimenting with uses to which other people’s skull, skin, ears, fat could be put to. Ja, Herr Doktor. A new use for the big toe; see, one can adapt the joint for a quick-acting cigarette lighter mechanism. Now, if only Herr Krupp can produce it in quantity…

— Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle