Shelves are partially collapsed, pages are spilled onto the floor, and I think there's the odd skeleton lying slumped in a corner as if they died while reading. The Hyper Light Drifter library is so special I think because its order is giving way to entropy. I think of this library often - along with a library in Solar Ash, from the same team. The higher I got, the more the chill was evident in the air, the more I started to see bookcases, until I was in a proper mountaintop library. I was climbing a mountain in Hyper Light Drifter, which meant flitting between the exposed face of the cliff, ancient steps, and odd little caverns where structures had been built into the living rock. Bookshelves can be evocative! They can do more for the lore of a game, I think, than a dozen nicely conceived audio diaries. It was around this time I encountered Hyper Light Drifter, I reckon, which is one of the very best examples of the bookshelf as set-dressing. Watch on YouTube Like Hyper Light Drifter, Solar Ash has a great library. Just recognising it got me closer, it felt, to the other side of the game - the side where everything was being constructed for players to enjoy. It was one of the fundamental atoms of the Life is Strange cosmos. And they made that Expedit work for them - cloning it, standing it on its side, hanging it on the wall, partially obscuring it. They had a set number of pieces to deploy in the world, a limited art budget, as it were. The set dressers for this game were ingenious, and they were thrifty. Once I started spotting it I couldn't stop, and along with all these bursts of recognition, I felt like I'd had an insight into Life is Strange I wouldn't have otherwise had. There it was in the principal's office in a break-in scene. It was like having a very dull superpower. Recognition had made it visible to me all of a sudden. That fascinated me at the time - I am boring as well as weird - but what I really loved, looking back, was all the times I then saw this Expedit unit elsewhere in the game. Weirdly, Max's Expedit was a 2x3, a form that did not exist in the real world. In Max's dorm room, over by the computer desk, I once spotted what looked very much like an Ikea Expedit, the classic book/record shelf unit that was so beloved that it made the front page of the Guardian when it was replaced with the similar, but not identical, Kallax. And this is a strange case, as it happens, because it's not the books but the shelf itself that stood out to me. Let's go bookshelf snooping in games.įirst stop, Life is Strange. But you might get something else: a hint at what the developer values, a suggestion of how much time the team had to lavish on the little things. You rarely get that flash of recognition - the Shopsin, or that classic '70's Tolkein with the memorable yellow spine - from looking at a bookcase in a videogame. Games are great for this too, but in quite unusual ways. On CNN I can't help but scan what the people being interviewed on Zoom have stacked behind them. In movies, I always lean forward trying to see what the heroes and villains have on their shelves. But the bookshelves of people I don't know feel like fair game. Not in friends' houses, necessarily, which always feels like a bit of a step too far. I've always been a bit of a bookshelf snooper. And seeing the book there on that shelf was a chance to spot a new, illuminating connection between two things I already loved.Īnyway. Shake Shack and Shopsin made a lot of sense. I emailed Shake Shack about this, because I am weird and because I am always hoping for an invite to a test kitchen, but even before they got back to confirm that they loved Shopsin as much as I do, I knew I was right in my identification of that book. The book was Kenny Shopsin's life-changingly great cookbook Eat Me, which I absolutely recommend, and the shelf it was on formed part of a cookbook library in Shake Shack's test kitchen. The spine of it, anyway: a perfect bolt of cheery gold, stacked neatly on a shelf by some plants. A few years back, browsing on Instagram, I was delighted to see a book I knew.
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