Help this girl band survive its breakup, a trippy forest, and a wall of Harry Potters

Leigh Alexander 5:33 am Thu Sep 24, 2015

An intensely strange, wonderful and substantial MSPaint adventure lets you switch among friends to solve offbeat puzzles.

Dorothy, Wendy and Alice are frenemies who disagree on everything, and it's breaking up their band, D.S.A (Dynamic Squid Antithesis). In a cool, handmade adventure game, you have to help the friends manage an increasingly surreal and trippy landscape full of rough style and offbeat humor.

D.S.A., by TheWaether, has been five years in the making. I love its intense strangeness (an ancient gramophone threatens to play "Rollin'" by Limp Bizkit at you; a wall of Harry Potters prevents you from entering the enchanted wood, a missile silo alludes to an R.E.M. concert) and its intentionally-rough, unique MSPaint graphics.

But it's just plain good fun as an adventure game; the main mechanic involves you switching among the three friends, with the actions each take affecting the situation of another friend. D.S.A. feels substantial to play, too—I've only just scratched the surface of it, really, and I'm being sucked in to its increasingly weird world.

DSA is available for pay-what-you-want. The soundtrack, which is wonderful, is also available as a separate download.

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