It is not unusual for steady rain to fall in the video game worlds of Studio Oleomingus. And it is easy to see why if you visit the studio’s lead writer and designer, Dhruv Jani, at his home office in Vapi, a small city on the western coast of India, at the height of the monsoons.
“This is the only season where it gets so gloomy outside that I feel right at home no matter what time of day it is,” Jani said with a laugh last month, on a day when it had been raining continually for more than a week. “Like you’re living in an Edgar Allan Poe story.”
The rain-soaked video game on his computer screen, Folds of a Separation, is just one of many that Studio Oleomingus has created about India’s postcolonial history and its contemporary political climate.
Inspired by political prisoners, particularly a group known as the Bhima Koregaon 16, the game uses a maze as its central mechanic: The player alters each screen’s layout to help two tiny figures escape. Upon the completion of each puzzle comes another section of a poem that Jani wrote from the perspective of a person writing to a lover in prison.
I will come see you when they let me.
Until then close your eyes
and I will walk with you,
even if it is only through
your memories of a country
we no longer recognize.
As with all of Studio Oleomingus’s games, the visuals offer a playful contrast to its melancholy themes. The backgrounds are piled high with impossibly oversize household objects — pressure cookers, spray bottles, teakettles. The bright color palette, Jani said, was inspired by cheap gum wrappers, screen-printed matchbox covers from the 1990s and “those Lux underwear advertisements that got painted underneath bridges.”
It was this distinctive use of color and scale that first caught the attention of Jamin Warren, a founder of the video game magazine Killscreen who now runs Gameplayarts, a Los Angeles gallery and education center focused on video game art.
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