BITSY IS THE SMALL VIDEO GAME ENGINE WITH A BIG COMMUNITY

IN the video game Under A Star Called Sun, players wake up alone on a spaceship. There are only a handful of things to do: make coffee, water the plants, gaze out upon the cosmos. Walking along the ship’s winding corridors, you come across a room with a machine that lets you re-create memories. Suddenly, you’re transported to a pixelated sidewalk, then to brunch, and next to a quiet park. It’s a snapshot of two friends hanging out together on an ordinary August day — a memory, but one that’s likely to fade, to corrupt, as the protagonist says, “like a JPEG saved over and over.”