Point Borealis

Point Borealis (aka Supersensory Investigation) is a homebrew demo by Macau Exports released on 29 July 2023. It’s a sort of music video with an ambiguous plot.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password supersensory, or from its Pouet page.

About Point Borealis

It’s hard to describe this demo without just watching it for yourself. It contains four different scenes that switch between each other forming a somewhat non-linear story.

The main scene is a video playback of black-and-white footage of a forest and lake. It feels very Blair-witch-esque. It has some digital interference so it looks like the footage has been corrupted, but there is a creepy figure towards the end.

Next is a set of three hexagonal bipyramids (yes I had to look that up) that float, rotate and eventually land on a flat surface.

Third is what appears to be a scene of a sky with a full cover of grey clouds moving along. There are some symbols that appear (circle, wave, star, inverted cross, square), but I have no idea what they are supposed to represent.

The last part is the text that appears.

Supersensory Investigation “Point Borealis”

Codes by cce AKA Tykkiman, Audio by Miika

Experiment: Extra Scholastic Perception

Belief transmission with no subjective Faith

our longing is our pledge and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.

Trial outcome: One soul recovered

It’s all very ambiguous, all I can tell is that the penultimate line there is a quote from Anecdotes of Destiny by Karen Blixen.

Credits

The demo was made by Tykkiman of Macau Exports with music by Miika.

Review and conclusion

Point Borealis is quite remeniscent of demos made back in the original scene days that show off several effects, in particular it reminds me of Money Creates Taste because of its greyscale palette and artsy theme.

The message behind it is really open to interpretation so it can mean anything or nothing depending on your point of view.

I do like how the demo showcases all kinds of Libdragon techniques like 2d renders, 3D effects and video playback. The audio does seem to be a plain WAV file and alongside the video, this does make it one of the bigger ROM files out there, clocking in at a cheeky 25.9MB.

At the end of the day, the strength of Point Borealis as a demo is in its style. It might not be clear enough to pinpoint, but that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

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