You are caged in a giant pit with Soviet apartments looming over you. In the middle of the pit is an obsidian crater, and inside the crater is a cacophony of pulsating images that track your every move. Strange purple sparks float upwards all around you, and muddy shipping containers orbit in a drunken dance, veiled in swirling sprites. You are drawn to the images in the crater, hypnotized, and as you approach a droning bass vibrates into your tissues, growing louder with each step towards the center. You see images of men in military uniforms. You see images of breakfast cereal boxes. Models of proteins. Car crashes. Trash in overgrown parking lots. Laboratory test equipment sold as is. Murderous gore. Annotated dissections. A woman on Omegle wearing a pancake on her face. A fossilized Nokia 3310. There is no commonality between these images save their contradiction with one another. You back away from the spectacle and search for a way out. Each wall presents a tunnel, each tunnel promises an exit. Which way will you go?
Earthworks is a game in development purgatory built around the Unity engine. Originally developed for VR during an undergraduate paper in 2018, it was heavily inspired by Osamu Sato’s LSD: Dream Emulator, an avant-garde conceptual video game released for the original PlayStation in 1998.
The current build of Earthworks was unarchived and resurrected in 2021 for a sweep of revisions and upgrades. It is currently in lukewarm storage, gradually losing heat, and its ultimate future is as yet unknown.
