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Tech

Control a Modern Dance Troupe in This Beautifully Buggy Game

“Really dance, get into it, I knew you were a good dancer.”

A few dashes, sprints and sputters of footwork, a couple of beats from the bongo and the piano chords, before my modern dancer, who looks like a bacterial cell illustration with limbs, exploded into a swarm of shapes. It stormed and swooped through the audience pews before vanishing beyond the walls. The camera still tracked the hidden mass like a ghost haunting the theatre.

An Evening of Modern Dance's creator, Joseph Parker, did warn on the game's Itch.io page that "If the physics glitch out you need more dancing practice." I took that advice to heart.

Compatible with one to four player, or artists if you will, An Evening of Modern Dance is a small free game that simulates all of the thrills and confusions of the 20th century's answer to ballet. Your keyboard is now the brain that controls the body. Use the keys to stammer across the stage, float back and forth like a Bozo the Clown bop bag and crouch so low you can see the hairs on the floor. You can dance and entangle with the other players, and you can intimidatingly burst off the stage and into the audience seats which are, realistically, empty.

Video game simulators are a marvelous art. We can be rocks and goats, we can farm and pee pee. And here, we can dance. Or we can watch dancing, as An Evening of Modern Dance simultaneously successfully simulates a date you have no idea how you ended up in.

"Really dance, get into it," wrote Parker. "I knew you were a good dancer."