Jason Nelson has made games that are weird, laden with text, and obsequiously obsequious obsequity. They are enjoyable if you're into that. His latest isn't so heavy on the light gameplay but it does lampoon the joys of Christmas well enough. You roll a slot machine, lining up modular bits of text that combine to tell a funny and dynamic story. Certain combinations yield secret videos similar to videos hidden in his other stuff.
So this is a simple Christmas goof, not much to see here. There is some light to be reflected in comparing Nelson's work to Pedercini's, whose stuff various from highly replayable and mathematically nuanced systemic explorations to one-off aesthetic postcards. They both seem to have the "edge" but Pedercini's tends to have a thesis. Nelson's thesis, if he has one, may have to do with the freedom of IP, something Pedercini touched on in one of his more shallow projects, but it'd probably amount to a more absurdist take not just on reality, but in how we cope with reality by creating media. In that sense, all his work involves taking discrete chuncks of data, text, video, magazine cut-outs, and scrambling them, often while subverting the genre assumtions of platform or shmup games. This title isn't trying too hard, it doesn't bother with videogame genre subversion, if anything it subverts the structure of casino games into its post-modern Christmas melee. Perhaps the holiday is no longer merely a degenerate fiesta of pagan consumerism, but a literal gamble, and if that means the drinks are free, I say Merry Krishna.
