Format: Flash
Developer: David Shute
jayisgames.com/cgdc6/?gameID=9

Small Worlds doesn’t feel like a small world. Despite the tiny, pixelated intricacy of its handful of environments, it feels vast, echoing, and lonely: a universe – or perhaps several – stuck inside a bottle. It's a half-hour of non-game that has continued to unravel in my waking thoughts ever since I first played it, and has probably started to intrude into the squawking chickens, treasure maps, and runaway trains of my dreams too.

David Shute’s offering won Jay Is Games’ sixth Casual Gameplay Design Competition, which was based on the theme of 'explore'. There are lots of obvious things to praise – Kevin Macleod’s soundtrack is a miserablist wonder (and due to Firefox glitch, one that I couldn’t turn off even after I’d closed it down), while the art design does much with little, its strands of shimmering colour suggesting gentle waterfalls and broken stone, and its dead skyscraper windows hinting at an eternity of dereliction.

But what’s more noteworthy are the things that players appreciate but can’t seem to pinpoint precisely. Writing about Small Worlds at Jay is Games, contributor Dora sees it as a dense thicket of possible interpretations, arguing that Shute’s work "is [a] tricky one to discuss, mainly because so many people have different interpretations of the experience. And, in this case, how can you say one is right over all the others? The ability to explore the worlds at your own pace, and in any order, means there's no real cohesive narrative except for what you interpret from the scenery. Is our hero the last of his kind? A madman? A villain?"

Even more interesting is the way the game gently nudges your interpretations with its tone, suggesting at a downbeat and menacing world through the barest of means, and turning your own character – who is essentially a little tube built from two colours – into a brave adventurer who feels both fragile and quietly foolhardy.

Throughout the short experience, Shute’s most compelling trick is the constant pulling back of the camera as you move about: a micro-to-macro journey that seems reminiscent of Ray and Charles Eames’ dazzling 1968 short film Powers Of Ten, but, as a videogame, also seems redolent of the ever-expanding mini-map beloved of the backtrack-heavy Metroidvania titles. And it’s here that Small Worlds is at its least ambiguous, showing how games are unique in their power to allow people to explore strange new environments, but all too often waste people’s time – and narrow the scope of their interpretations – by constructing flimsy fictions to coax players into action.

Shute’s game needs none of that – no ancient evil, no kidnapped royalty – and is, in fact, all the stronger for its absences. With such an unaffected knack for ambiguity, games like Small Worlds can work as a powerful form of writeable text: a glinting shard of half-story that serves as a jumping off point for its audience's own, probably superior, narratives. That means flutters of the imagination that can spin off in any manner of hazy and unlikely directions, and it means oddball, rather private adventures that never have to truly end.