Indie developer Robert Yang, creator of games like Hard Lads and Rinse & Repeat, has a new release out today called Logjam. It’s about a lumberjack who is just trying to make it through a very hot, sweaty day.
You can download and play it here, but if you’d like to see a trailer first, here you go:
Please note that while that trailer manages to keep things SFW, the full game does not, so bear that in mind if you’re going to be playing it. Yang’s official description pretty much sums it up:
Logjam is the latest in my gay sexuality series — a short small game about a middle aged lumberjack daddy processing wood and other hard things. It’s about forestry, masculinity, and history, but on a surface level it’s a simple work simulator with a burly stripper and occasional twists.
The game, however, is about more than wood. And more than sex. As Yang elaborates on his blog, wood — how and where we cut it, then what we do with it — is something to which we ”apply a heavy varnish made of ideas and politics”. with timber not just a building material and source of fuel, but also a major player in the story of American settler colonialism, from George Washington’s cherry tree to Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin.
I need to reflect the ideological dimension of wood. So this is why I occasionally task the player with splitting something that isn’t just a log.
Sometimes it’s a sandwich or a pie, American food items that are frequently split and sectioned. Sometimes it’s an adorable puppy or an innocent deer, things that feel transgressive and funny to chop. Sometimes it’s an axe, chopping the means of chopping for a cute meta twist.
While chopping these objects in a forest is strange, I think it’s important that this selection of food, animals, and tools are all vaguely related to the American frontier theme and aren’t completely random. That’s what foreshadows the overtly political objects like a bald eagle.
But, yes, the game is also about a lumberjack and sex. If you want to try it out you can play Logjam here.
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