I’m pretty sure there’s a line somewhere in Melville where he suddenly announces he’s not that keen on penguins. In my head I really think it’s Melville – maybe Moby-Dick or The Encantadas. The line, as I half-remember it, suggests there is something uniquely unlovable about penguins, something slightly uncanny and nasty.
The line is always accompanied by a footnote admitting that, yes, Melville was clearly wrong about this one. We love penguins. Take a poll. Penguins are universally lauded. The thing they do with the rock. The eyebrows on some of them. The strong chocolate bar synergy for UK fans. We don’t even feel tricked when their awkwardness on land gives way to muscular elegance in the water. The awkwardness flashing into elegance at the moment of impact actually seems to suggest contiguous virtues.
Nuts reviewDeveloper: Joon, Pol, Muutsch, Char & Torfi Publisher:NoodlecakePlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on Apple Arcade, on Switch and PC 4th Feb
There are no penguins in Nuts – or if there are, I missed them. But I thought about Melville’s take on penguins because Nuts is all about squirrels – and squirrels, I suddenly started to realise, are universally lauded. It seems at times that we can’t decide about them. They are cute and sprightly and move in a lovely fountain-pen ripple, sure, but up close there are those surprising sharp teeth, and so many of them! There are those glossy, inscrutable eyes. And then someone will say, “Oh, you know the grey squirrels killed all the red ones,” and then, maybe a little involuntary shudder?
Maybe not. I think the wayward genius of Nuts is that it harnesses this ambiguity about squirrels – it harnesses the uncertain territory they occupy in our consciousness. The game’s central questions are basically: do you trust squirrels or do you distrust them? When you insinuate yourself into the squirrels’ world, what exactly do you find? How do you feel, instinctively, about a of squirrels?
NUTS – TRAILER (Apple Arcade/Switch/Steam/Itch.io/Humble) Watch on YouTube
These are questions the game answers, but that is beside the point. What matters is how this uncertainty fuels this unusual adventure and helps make it memorable.
In Nuts, you’re a recent graduate student researching squirrels in Meloth Forest. You live in a camper van and spend your days placing cameras in the woods and your nights monitoring the feeds from these cameras. You communicate with your superior over fax and telephone, and although there’s something heavy in the air, the game’s first half is marked by a lazy bucolic sweetness. I finished Nuts a few days ago and I still want to go back, to the cosy camper with its domestic disarray, to the forest and streams and sky, delivered, like everything else in this game, as spectral outlines of the natural world stained the warm shifting colours of a Miami cocktail – hot pinks, dusk blue, reefy yellows and oranges.