Reviews by EJ

I don’t speak Catalan, but for a choice-based game I’m willing to stumble through most any Romance language with my knowledge of Spanish (and the hot minute I spent trying to learn Latin) and a dictionary. So take this review for whatever it’s worth; I can’t comment on the prose or anything like that.

Amb fang a les mans (“With mud on my hands”) is a short game about a man wallowing in misery in his apartment. He’s unemployed and possibly recently dumped (at least, that was how I took the ambiguous references to another man who used to live with him). Outside, everything is covered in mud. Actually, the mud is encroaching inside as well. The tools you have to get rid of it feel terribly inadequate. Reaching an ending requires you to try anyway, but none of the endings are good.

The two endings you get by staying in your apartment are pretty similar. The mud flows in; you try to do something about it; you fail and are consumed by the mud. Yeah, sometimes it’s like that. (The difference in these two endings is mostly in whether you manage to eroticize your own misery or not. I guess technically if you do, that’s the best ending available?)

The ending you get by going outside is a little different. The PC encounters a frenemy (who is maybe the ex?) who is coordinating an effort to remove mud from the streets. This person demands the PC join him even though the PC only has a plastic toy shovel, for the sake of the community. The PC feels like he can’t say no. (Spoiler - click to show)His efforts are fruitless and then the frenemy murders him with a shovel.

The game is up-front about the mud being essentially a metaphor for climate change and the spread of fascism and so on, and this being the case I had a sort of a philosophical disagreement with this story thread. (Spoiler - click to show)If you read it with this metaphor in mind, it amounts to “if you feel like you can’t do anything, it’s because you really can’t do anything, and people who are trying to build community and convince you that any little bit helps actually are awful and want you to die.” Fuck that! I’m out here with my stupid plastic shovel and I don’t know if it’s doing anything but I’ve gotta try, you know? But, you know, I do get that this is meant to capture a feeling rather than an objective reality. And it is pretty effective at that!

For anyone who may be intrigued by the game but put off by the warning for sexual content, I would like to note that you can avoid the sexual content if you don’t go in the bathroom or look at the computer. You can reach two of the three endings while avoiding those things.