A speedrun through dinner lands in ACMI's Wobbly showcase

In Family Reunion you are a very bored child at a long family dinner, and your one goal is to make the evening end faster. Imagination, conversation and exploration are the resources you spend against boredom; the table, the plates and the relatives are all drawn by hand, wobbling the way a drawing does when nobody has cleaned it up. Leandro Waibe, the Buenos Aires illustrator behind it, calls it an incremental dinner table simulator, and a free demo called The Appetizer is on Steam and itch.io.

On Oct. 11 the game lands in Wobbly, a one-day program inside ACMI's free Games Week Showcase on the closing day of Melbourne International Games Week. Curated by Claire Osborn-Li, the lineup gathers games that, in the words of Waibe's announcement, embrace the misshapen marks of the hand of the maker.

Last month we wrote about Leonardo Devito's painting of the player at the desk, and the through-line runs back to The Collage Atlas, the pen-drawn world we covered in 2016. A game that looks handmade keeps the maker in the room with you, which is exactly what a bored child at a dinner table is praying for: evidence that another person is present.