goodbye.monster

When the world ended, life became an unpleasant costume. You have only ever wanted to gift it to something else, but it is not so easy now.

Instead you lie here, reduced to nothing.

I heard about this game because it was entered into the 2024 Independent Games Festival, and there were a few mentions of that on social media. It's a relatively short browser text adventure with excellent aesthetics and an intriguing setting. The beginning is a purposeful riff on A Dark Room, a short melancholic prologue, but it soon opens up in spectacular fashion. The rest is an exploration game that reminded me of Porpentine and other surreal IF I've played.

The music, sparse visuals and sleek CSS/JS create a fascinating UI. One log in the middle shows everything you've done, while objects to the side can be clicked on and interacted with. Connections, also hovering to the side, will take you to a new location when clicked. Everything is strategically placed to make it feel like you're truly walking around this decaying world while you scroll up and down.

The writing style has the same conservation of detail you find in games like their angelical understanding. Stark, minimalist sentences sketching out a surreal landscape, mentioning strange facts and never elaborating upon them. You get the sense of a far larger world beyond the game's confines, whose full history will never be explained.

Setting also gives me that Dark Souls/Porpentine feeling. It's a post-apocalyptic world defined by ruin: we've got a poison swamp and abandoned buildings and wind blowing through endless wastelands, outlined in neon pink and green against a dark background. The randomly-generated names for the protagonist and their monsters have Dark Souls boss vibes. Hallowed Exile, anyone? Weeping Knight? But what really makes the writing tick is a pervasive melancholy and isolation that comes across with each location, a longing for a world so long gone it's been forgotten in every way that matters. But it must have been better than this.

Individually, the sentences are just okay (there are a few comma splices). But combined with the music and gameplay, they shine.

There's also the monsters, part of the game's core conceit. They're represented as collections of squares that float around the screen, following you wherever you go. Clicking one opens an interface that lets you feed and further interact with it. I found myself not directly focused on them, more interested in exploring the setting, but I was attached to their little sound effects and the occasional notifications you get about them sleeping and releasing waste and so on. You can feed them, which is the primary purpose of the items you collect as you wander around. They are companions in the vast solitude of post-apocalyptic life. And they are supposed to, eventually, die.

I'd like to emphasize "supposed to". My main problem with this game is long before that happens, you run out of things to do. The description says "Travel with and care for small creatures, exploring an alienating, nostalgic world until the inevitable end of those creatures’ lives", and you do travel with and care for the creatures, but before any of them died I had already discovered everything there was to discover in the world. The process of discovery was great, and it's not a small game, so it took me about twenty minutes and maybe forty (?) locations to see everything. But nothing really changes in a location after you go there the first time.

Yeah, there's (Spoiler - click to show)a robed figure who can give you extra pets if you talk to them in the town and then swamp, but I could only find them once and never again. After that, it was just wandering around places I'd already been, looking for other new things and not finding them. Possibly I missed some important location or other, but I spent a while double-checking places I'd already been, and going through all the connections between places, so I don't think so.

I don't know how long creatures are supposed to live. Each of mine had a number slowly counting down from 100, which I assume is lifespan. Here's the thing: by the time I got bored and decided to end my game, the lowest lifespan counter I could see was still at, what, 70? The lifespan needs to be greatly reduced, or the number of things to do in the game greatly increased. Probably both. Alternatively, I would appreciate some kind of proper ending that could be discovered by exploring the game world and raising your monsters right, since I was looking for one but never found anything that felt satisfying. A part of me expected them to evolve based on how you feed them, but that never happens.

To the game's benefit, it does include one ending, which is how I terminated my playthrough. I wouldn't call it the satisfying ending I want, because (Spoiler - click to show)there is no resolution. Just ran out of things to do and decided to enter the wasteland and "forget myself", i.e. die, with my two creatures still around me. I could've beelined to that location and done that from the start, and it wouldn't have changed anything. It felt unsatisfactory to me. In some ways it's consistent with the themes of decay and a longing for something so far gone it can never be restored, but it didn't tie into anything I had done. And the prelude to that ending, wandering a world devoid of secrets because you've already discovered them all, wasn't fun and really took away from the joy of earlier gameplay. It doesn't help that some items in certain places respawn when I think they shouldn't, such as (Spoiler - click to show)the bones in the decaying hut. That feels like a genuine bug.

Despite the game's flaws, I'd still recommend it to people who like the aesthetics of Dark Souls and post-apocalyptic ruins. See the sights, you know?

One final note. The game has an account creation feature, and according to the itch.io page, apparently server-based multiplayer support. I didn't notice anything multiplayer when I was playing, but it's likely that nobody was playing at the same time as me, since this game is basically unknown. I don't know what effect multiple people playing at the same time would have, if any. It's possible that the server-based multiplayer support is just a way to easily save your progress. I made an account, but played through the game in one sitting so there was ultimately no need for it, and the ending I chose deleted my account anyway.

The itch.io page also says the game will get future updates, so maybe the game will be improved in the future. It'd be nice if we got more endings and more ways to interact with the monsters.

Quotes:

THE SHADOW UNDER THE LONG BRIDGE: A small cove rests in the shadow of the bridge. Discarded things gather here.

A weeping beast crouches on the edge of the rocks with what limbs he has to spare.

> CLOSE YOUR EYES

Faint chatter, steps, wheels. The bridge remembers those who came before. Their imprints echo quietly from above.

---

Wind unhindered by life.

It cuts your hands more kindly than any blade.

---

The little creature approaches the water’s edge. The tide ebbs and flows, the shallower parts of the ocean lack its signature opaque darkness. Instead filled with a quiet radiance.

> WALK INTO THE WATER

It’s cold. If you were an older thing it would hunger for you, but alas. You are not ready yet.