One of my favourite studio names of the last few years comes from the team that made PinOut. PinOut was basically Tron: The Pinball Game. Against a humming, buzzing, looping backdrop of glorious retro-futurist dance music, you raced across the highways and gutters of an endless swooping, arcing table, ricocheting off bumpers, finding secret paths and feeling like you were the single most vital part of a luminous living machine. It was a rush, a trip. And the studio? The studio was called Mediocre.
Such a brazenly inaccurate name speaks to a great and quirky seam of buried confidence, I think. It's intoxicating. Who wouldn't love a studio that made a classic and still named itself Mediocre? And now - nobody, as far as I'm aware, from Mediocre involved - who wouldn't love a brilliant pool game called Subpar Pool?
Subpar Pool. The thrill of it. Incredible Pool? No thanks. Brilliant Pool? Move along. Subpar Pool? My cheeks grow flushed. My hands sweat a little. The night, as the poet says, opens its eyes. And all this before I'd discovered that Subpar Pool is the work of Martin Jonasson, who bent resource management and puzzling into such ingenious ludic pretzels with games like Rymdkapsel and Twofold Inc. And who, with Holedown, gave us a preview of what we're getting here: playful physics, confidently weaponised. Nothing Subpar about it.