Dora, thank you so much for posting pictures. Since I never even got one world to open up enough to make any sense of it, I could not for the life of me figure out what the big deal was about this game. I asked and asked, but never got any real response. Now that I can see the pictures, I can see why people called it art. My 20 frustrating minutes of going back and forth, up and down with no result will probably keep me from trying again (I'm not a fan of platformers), but at least now I can see why the game won so much in this past competition.

I hope David is generous in sharing some of the prize money with Kevin... just try playing this thing without the sound, and see just how much, er, smaller the worlds are for it.

absolutely brilliant! i've never played anything like this before.

I have a theory as to what happened.

I think that he is

the perfect balance of art and game ... thank you, it's been enriching!

First of all: this is GREAT game, and I'm happy it won. Yay for the author.

Then, to all the people wondering about "the meaning"... Did you actually watch the title sequence and the ending one?

I don't really think it has an actual story - more an atmosphere you're supposed to explore - but my best bet is:

One guy in a space station had to watch as the people in the underground launch facility unleashed armageddon upon the world - maybe while trying to kill some monstrous creature (we see the remains in the "blue" world). There has been some problem on the space station, as we can see from the cracked domes and such, but now the teleporters are back online and our guy can check out what has happened on Earth.
Unfortunately nobody remains, not even the monster. Only some machinery is still going, but the ecosystem is doomed, as the water supply is obviously polluted by green radioactive stuff. The once luxuriant planet is no more: its last beauty is a Christmas-like snowfall which is actually nuclear ashes fallout.
Humanity had a mining colony on an asteroid belt, but even that is now gone. So, to keep the voices (of the dead ones?) in his head quiet, our guy does the only possible thing and jumps with his escape pod right into the sun, maybe restarting a cycle.

Or it is a very very nice experimental game. You pick.

I like to think that Mr. Red was observing these four worlds, and when each of them failed for different reasons (Pollution, Nuclear War, No livable land, Being stuck inside an ugly purple thing), he decided to end the experiment and move on to a different galaxy to continue his experiments elsewhere. First, however, he had to reclaim his observation orbs from each of the worlds, so he can reuse them for the next ecosystems he works with.

Splendid! Love these experimental pieces that create a whole new world – in this case, quite literally.

@ OfficiallyHaphazard: interesting interpretation... especially yours is the first one I've read that tried to explain the orbs we have to look for in each level XD

and as a game of exploration... I feel the two pictures in the review should be under spoiler alerts... Although I guess that'd be weird.. and it does look very nice and appealing =P

Doesn't seem to work for me... Only a black rectangle turns up, with not a trace of a flash program in my browser window (FF 3.5.3).

[Edit: This is most likely a browser extension conflict. Try disabling your extensions until you find the culprit. -Jay]

The platform element to Small Worlds put me off quickly during the competition, but now happy to say I've played the whole game. Music was beautiful, and really added to the atmosphere of each small world. I don't know that interpretation is needed, it's nice to be able to excercise the imagination. But in saying that, here's my take:

Mother Nature has been killed in her sleep, and it is imperative for mankind to construct underground machinery in order to maintain the cycle of seasons and ultimately the precipitation of water.
Sadly, the new sciences of stem cell research, biomechanics and genetic engineering have created the unholiest of unholies, and essentially, mankind's attempts to prevent annihilation have resulted in the end of civilisation itself. Before joining the vessel of survivors, one of the few remaining sentient beings traverses the silence and wonders where it all went wrong...

Very beautiful game! Deserves to win in my opinion. And great music too.

This was my top pick and I'm so glad it won. But I have to say again, I really wish there was a save game feature.

My initial interpretation is that you are nothing more then a explorer (exploring the universe), but its entirely possible that this is a doomsday scenario, I mean

its not totally farfetched
(clicked submit too early, this place needs an edit button)

I absolutely enjoyed every second of playing this game. What really cinched it for me was the music. It put more personality into the simple pixels.
I actually played a second time through just to fully explore the maps and to listen to the music again!

Awesome game! ...just wish it was longer. Maybe a sequel? [^_^]

It's wonderful! I had my doubts at first, but after everything got clear it really was beautiful.

The replay value allows you to play it twice (both times uncovering all the worlds) and the music really adds to the ambiance of the whole thing.

Escaping to space, our hero, a general in charge of the United Peoples' Army, may have outran the unwanted war, but at what cost? The solar powered ship that he held his base of operations on, conducting meetings via teleporter transport, are no longer in any use now that everyone is gone.He slowly starts to lose his mind, knowing that his friends, his family, his country is all dead. He has never dared to venture down to earth, but to collect the necessary power cells needed to fly the escape pod, he must. Down on earth, he knows what he is going to find. Carcasses of horrible engineered monsters, monsters that he helped to create, designed to fight wars and demolish cities. Cities so overgrown with vegetation that they are almost unrecognizable, but still navigable. Bomb shelters and nuclear missile launchers that have suffered the longest-lasting damage-nuclear winters that could go on for decades. But the worst part is the cities. Once mans greatest achievement, buildings built to touch the sky, are now riddled with holes and so covered up in debris that no buildings are any longer habitable. Not that anyone would live in them anyway. Any people who were not killed by the monsters and nuclear missiles soon died from famine, disease, and radiation poisoning. So many nuclear attacks had been made that Earth's source of life, its' many oceans and streams and lakes, were now poisoned by a radioactive green sludge that seeped from every building left standing. An engineered virus that went horribly wrong. When our hero returns to his ship, knowing once in for all that everyone on earth had died because of a war that he helped create, what else is left for him to do? He detaches his escape pod and flies directly into the sun.

Obviously a successor of the idea behind Knytt. (Can't go wrong with that.) Great imagery and music. It's simplicity is very well done.

Congrats. I now copy my original comment.

I finally remembered that my username is not the same as my display name. Doi.

This was a very well made game, but it is surprisingly dark.

VERY DARK.

My very dark interpretation that is similar but may be darker and more fleshed out then everyone else's.

Woah, woah, woah. I put forward an interesting suggestion to you all: Who said those glowing light beam thingys were teleporters?

For me, figuring out the story wasn't as important as figuring out how exploration was used as the primary theme of the game.

In this game, exploration is sort of a placeholder for the general idea of discovery. Let's say that the camera--the view available to the player at any given time--is representative of the mind. In the beginning, there's not a whole lot there; you're limited by the things you already know. In the effort to broaden your horizons, you go out to discover new things, learn more about the world. As you do, your mind begins to grow.

There's a few noticeable things that come about as a result of this. First, although you start off with a limited view, just a single piece of a larger puzzle, you gradually add more and more pieces to the puzzle until you have the full picture. Similarly, though you may not start off fully understanding something with the limited information you have, adding to that information will eventually allow you to understand the entire process for what it is. You go from seeing the tree to seeing the entire forest, as it were.

Second, as you explore the world, your character becomes smaller and smaller in proportion to the rest of the picture; similarly, as you learn more about the world, you start to realize how small you are in comparison to the rest of it.

But I think the main point the game is trying to get across is this: Once you've discovered something, you can't undiscover it. Once the player has come across those particularly morbid pieces of the map, you can't wipe them off the face of the map again. They're always going to be there, staring at you, even as you try to focus on exploring the rest of the level. And even once you've closed the game, you're probably not going to have forgotten that they're there. Kind of like when you make similarly morbid discoveries in real life, right?

(It's probably silly to spoiler this next bit since people have mentioned it several times already, but I'm going to anyway.)

For me, this game made quite a few comments on the idea of exploration, more than the other games in the competition did. But even putting the messages aside, it really managed to set a heavy atmosphere, even with such simple graphics. So yeah, I think it's pretty appropriate that this won the competition.

(As a side note, did anyone else get the feeling of stop-motion animation from the way the character moves around? That really enhanced the disturbing tone for me. Old-school stop-motion is creepy.)

A hint to make gameplay a bit easier on the eyes (and you'll make fewer mistakes) is to use the zoom function of your browser. It's very helpful on a small screen. You don't get quite the same view of your surroundings, but I used it a lot because I just couldn't see where I was jumping.

Thanks, jay. Disabling adblock did the trick for me.

Great game... Beautiful environments, excellent presentation, and awesome music by Kevin MacLeod (how does he do it every time?).

Regarding the red level

Supremely creepy, steeped in melancholy and rather beautiful. I'm neither a fan of obviously pixelated games nor platformers and I loved this. I also enjoyed reading everyones thoughts about the backstory. A deserving winner!

"It's easy to be underwhelmed by the simplistic look of Small Worlds' visuals upon encountering the first screen"

Isn't it though?

"...and those who let themselves be put off by it are missing a real treat."

Oh well. These things happen

There's one problem with the "Apocalypse" interpretation of the plot:

By Noise... perhaps Radio Static, or the lack of communication?

Cool game.

@ Sylocat
Perhaps he's crazy.

I really like this game.
But it's not 'just a game'. There's a kind of story behind it, a sad story.
About a war or something.

I read a book:the macanoscript.In the book happens something that also is like the game:
there fly ufo's over the world and al live is gone. just two persons survived.

the music makes the game even better. i give it 10/5!!!

hm... After reading all the comments,maybe it was he that caused this apocalyptic situation. He said "There is too much noise."
So maybe he unleashed the nuclear missiles, he created the monster(mutation by radiation?), he polluted the cities, and he ultimately destroyed things to bits. So, after being lonely for so long, he realizes he is still making noise. And he ends that noise. Forever.
But, it is all a theory. But the game is sad. Solidly melancholy.

I absolutely loved this game. The atmosphere, the depth, the music that goes so well with it all. My favorite world was the one with the carcass, which had very fitting music imo.

As for the meaning behind it, I don't think it tells us a story, but it shows us the many faces of death. We see barren space, where life is near-impossible, we see the death of a creature, vicious, but silent, we see the death of a city, which fell under its own pollution and at last we see death as a nuclear winter, where man destroyed himself, he didn't even have to use all the missiles he produced.
In shrill contrast with this is the space station, which is much more complex than the four places it sends you to. The station is life, there's too much noise, it's too busy. The station is filled with everything you need to stay alive, the antenna can be used for communication and tables (and possibly beds) can be seen throughout it, which depict food and sleep. But our little guy doesn't want this. He doesn't want to be in this busy place, he wants to find peace. And this peace can be found only in death.

PS: Also note that there are 4 glass domes that can be found around the station, but if you were to look through it, you would see nothing but darkness. If you want to see more, you have to go deeper into the station, where you can find 4 other 'windows'.

PPS: This may may sound a little far fetched, but I think the domes each represent a stage: the two smaller ones are the asteroids and the carcass, they're small cause it's hard to envision the vastness of space, or to position yourself in the creature's mind before it died. The two bigger ones are the two stages which are closer to us humans:
The broken dome is the nuclear winter. It's broken, nobody is fixing it. The damage is done because of a mistake from the past.
The other dome is the city stage. It sits there, slowly decaying, eroding, and nobody thinks there's anything wrong with it. This is what caused the downfall of the city when you visited it, they didn't know how much harm they were doing to themselves. It's also where you start, thereby telling us that this is the situation we're in. We're polluting our planet and will eventually leave behind an empty city, such as the one shown here.

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