Seven Simple Wonders
is a freeware bitsy game for PC, developed by Candal for the August 2018 Bitsy Game Jam. It's a really short, 5-minute "interactive poem" RPG where you have to find seven things and ponder their worth.
Due to the extremely short length of the game, it is highly advised playing it first before resuming reading this page.
Seven Simple Wonders contains examples of:
- A Friend in Need: the Bat's analysis concludes that it can always count on its big family/pack for help in times of need.
- Alien Abduction: Averted. The main character simply analyzes the MacGuffins instead of taking them.
- Ambiguous Robots: The player character and their helpers.
- Benevolent Alien Invasion: You play as the invader.
- Bioluminescence Is Cool: Powered by the love of a firefly.
- Color Contrast: Every room has a contrasting color scheme between its Object and the scenary. For example: Red Apple in green orchard, yellow Firefly in purple cave.
- Commonplace Rare: The things the alien character find wondrous are common things often overlooked by humans, like an apple. In a more direct example, the last item you analyze is a flower, of which there were many at the very first screen of the game.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: The Goldfish is now thriving in the wild after being abandoned in the sewers.
- Humans Through Alien Eyes: More like Earth through Alien Eyes. Your character is an alien invader captivated by the beauty of Earth's mundane things.
- MacGuffin: Through the story you find an Apple, a Goldfish, a Firefly, a Palm Tree, a Hummingbird, a Bat and a Flower.
- Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism: The player character and their helpers rank very low, but their 1-bit representations leave much to the imagination. They could be robotic, tentacled, insectoid...
- Matryoshka Object: The Apple's analysis. How many more apples can you grow from its seeds?
- Missing Secret: In the Palm Tree area, there is an unreachable cave entrance right behind the tree, leftover of early development.
- Mundane Made Awesome: The premise of the game. The mundane items' analyses make them more wonderful, simply by pondering their worth.
- No Focus on Humans: Humans are implied to live near (or have once lived in) the starting area of the game, where you can find a basket under an apple tree and an abandoned fish that escaped the sewers.
- Rainbow Motif: You find seven items, colored in the order of the rainbow. You start with a Red Apple and end with a Violet Flower.
- Sliding Scale Of Linearity Vs. Openness: Completely linear. You're not locked from going back to previous areas, however.
