Although there isn't much more context, given the title's incredibly short length, the plot of Discover my Body takes place twenty years in the future, in a dystopian society where a strange medical procedure was developed to enhance human consciousness, which is being used by people to escape their miseries and existential despair. You play as a medical student who will be examining this process on the character that you'll be interacting with, and for that purpose, you'll be assigned a scanner to look for and inspect specific instances of the procedure's evolution on this patient's body.
I must confess that I "hated" this guy for all his deviancy. It's one of those characters that you would like to stab repeatedly, only to find out that it's futile, because he would be enjoying the torment. And while you might think that I disliked the game because of this fact... on the contrary! It's the living proof that the developer got it right. Apparently reminiscent of David Cronemberg's horror filmography, Discover my Body is a title that with incredibly minimal elements manages to feel nihilistic and repulsive, and while you never get to see it, you won't help but imagine how horrific and miserable that futuristic world must be, with any remnant of human dignity and decency absolutely obliterated.
There are two issues to mention, though: the first one is the small window where the game is executed. Basically, you can't go fullscreen, so if you aren't using a dark background then your immersion may be considerably compromised. And secondly, most likely you'll inevitably think at the end: "Is that all? I wanted to see more!". This is due to the minimalistic gameplay and the fact that, objectively speaking, the procedure that is depicted is shorter than expected, so the ending feels very abrupt. At least that's how I felt, and while I can't say that I was amazed by this minigame nor can I assure you with full certainty that you'll like it, I do think its premise has a lot of potential, therefore if the developer manages to keep the vision and perspective for future releases, we might be up for a very interesting and original saga. Even more, considering the tone established, there could be room to feature philosophical, bioethical and even political considerations without making them feel forced or pretentious.
You might be thinking why I'm allowing myself to speculate so much, and that is because after the positive reception the title had among the users who tried it, there is already a sequel on the works. Also, the developer can be seen being very responsive to people's comments and feedback, so if you want to request him to keep Linux support or suggest features that you'll like to see, along with Twitter he has a CuriousCat account where you can contact him.
One final but important note regarding the support on our platform, which was posted on the store page:
!!Attention Linux Users!!
Discover My Body requires the following dependencies:
libcurl4
libopenal1
Download Discover my Body from itch.io, for free.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Argh, went to try it but the lib requirements are a bit messed up. I suppose it really is intended for Ubuntu.
Used GameMaker by the looks of things. I've no experience with that, but I wonder if that's where the build particulars are coming from.
Runs fine with Wine.
Argh, went to try it but the lib requirements are a bit messed up. I suppose it really is intended for Ubuntu.Seems to load fine here on Manjaro.
Used GameMaker by the looks of things. I've no experience with that, but I wonder if that's where the build particulars are coming from.
1) This is interesting with some real creation behind it, and
2) It is almost exactly what I would want to avoid experiencing, so like why would I deliberately go experience it?
PublicNuisance Mar 29, 2020
"error while loading shared libraries: libcrypto.so.1.0.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"
Trying to find that lib on Pacman with no luck. May try it on a debian based distro on a spare SSD as I can find that lib in .deb format.
Argh, went to try it but the lib requirements are a bit messed up. I suppose it really is intended for Ubuntu.Seems to load fine here on Manjaro.
Used GameMaker by the looks of things. I've no experience with that, but I wonder if that's where the build particulars are coming from.
Probably the right lib names then. I'm seeing complaints about libcrypto.so.1.0.0 (symlink to libcrypto.so might work there, though I have 1.1.0), wants libcrypto-gnutls (not sure it needs the gnutls, might work symlinking to libcrypto.so), and libssl.so.1.0.0 (again, might work if symlinking against libssl.so, which in my case is libssl.so.1.1).
More of a frustration that GNU/Linux suffers these problems still. They are easily avoidable, with a bit of care, and I don't know why development tools haven't progressed to the point of making this much easier for developers.
I'll poke around more with the libs, see if I can get it to run.
--edit: yeah, does actually work if I do it right. In my case, create a lib folder to copy & rename into, and use LD_LIBRARY_PATH to load them from there. Hacky, but works.
It's a frustration but I'm happy to see the developer trying to put it on our platform. Got to walk before you can crawl.
Edit #2:
Launched on Trisquel out of the box so i'm in business !
Last edited by PublicNuisance on 29 March 2020 at 5:09 am UTC
Sunburst, I'm delighted to see you bringing little gems like this to light from itch.io! There's so much real experimentation and devotion to creativity at itch.io, so many worldviews and alternate realities packed into that website that would go unsung without folks like you pointing them out. Thanks for your efforts. I look forward to your future discoveries.Thanks for your positive comments, as always. I'm glad you enjoy reading about these overlooked titles as much as I enjoy finding them.
I have enough material to write approximately 150 more articles, but obviously that may take some time (that is, years) due to my outdated PC, extremely limited budget and, above all, considerable time restraints. But in the meantime feel free to go back in time. :)
It is almost exactly what I would want to avoid experiencing, so like why would I deliberately go experience it?Because it's just a game, and nothing is real?
One thing the article makes explicit is the need for these dependencies on the user's end:
libcurl4
libopenal1
This may be a moot point, just thought I would point it out again considering the that these instructions are sort of toward the bottom of the page/not immediately apparent on Discover My Body's itch.io page. The one previous instance someone mentioned a libcrypto error code to me regarding the Ubuntu build, they did not have the required dependencies. I was hoping to hear back from them confirming that they installed them and that the game was working, but they are away from their Linux machine now because of the pandemic :(
It may be the case that the game can only run on Ubuntu, if so, please let me know so I can more prominently specify that on the game's page. Thanks.
PublicNuisance Apr 4, 2020
For People where the game doesn't start: I use Manjaro and i had to install openssl-1.0 and libcurl-gnutls (pacman -Fx helped me find the packages).
Thank you for that. I had been searching for those but Pacman wasn't finding them. By copying and pasting exactly as you had them typed I was able to. I'm not sure why Pacman didn't think to bring up openssl-1.0 when I typed in SSL or openssl but all's well that ends well. Game works on Manjaro for me now as well.
Hi, I made "Discover My Bodies", someone alerted me to this article from my CuriousCat. first off, thank you so much for featuring my game. Secondly, I've been trying to get feedback on the Ubuntu build, I have seen that people have downloaded it for Ubuntu (and hoped that no news was good news) but this is the more or less the first I have heard of people experiencing trouble getting the game to run. I'm not super experienced with Linux but I thought I would take a shot at building for Ubuntu using this guide, which I am posting for the sake of clarity (https://help.yoyogames.com/hc/en-us/articles/235186168-Setting-Up-For-Ubuntu).
One thing the article makes explicit is the need for these dependencies on the user's end:
libcurl4
libopenal1
This may be a moot point, just thought I would point it out again considering the that these instructions are sort of toward the bottom of the page/not immediately apparent on Discover My Body's itch.io page. The one previous instance someone mentioned a libcrypto error code to me regarding the Ubuntu build, they did not have the required dependencies. I was hoping to hear back from them confirming that they installed them and that the game was working, but they are away from their Linux machine now because of the pandemic :(
It may be the case that the game can only run on Ubuntu, if so, please let me know so I can more prominently specify that on the game's page. Thanks.
I can say that I have gotten the game to run on Trisquel; Manjaro; and Linux Mint. Trisquel and Mint required me to do nothing but run the game normally without installing anything extra. On Manjaro I had to install dependencies. Trisquel and Linux Mint are both based off of Ubuntu which is based off Debian so in my experience anything Debian based should be a smooth experience out of the gate as the dependencies seem to be already installed by default.
Last edited by PublicNuisance on 4 April 2020 at 4:43 pm UTC
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