The Sun Will Blind My Eyes

This game captures a moment with careful attention to detail. It's not a situation I've ever been in - the morning after a one-night stand with your coworker - but through the game we can peek into it and into the characters' lives, getting a sense of who they are. It's a very casual moment - no tension, no high stakes, just two people the day after a fling. The dynamics between them are somewhere between awkward and intimate. They know each other almost, but not quite. They're not entirely sure where their relationship stands now, and they're navigating new waters.

Appreciated the attention to detail in the woman's room, with the goth decor and her middle-school love of emo music. Or the randomly selected emo band you can talk about. Similar attention is paid to the protagonist - they're clearly a defined character, not just a blank slate. I like that they have a prosthetic leg and former ambitions of being an artist, which you can discuss briefly.

My criticism, I guess, is that the description says "try to convince [your abrasive coworker] to stay in bed just a little longer", which made me think there'd be more conflict in the game. I was expecting more pushiness from the protagonist, maybe some commentary on social pressures surrounding relationships, but there was a surprising lack of that. Seeing more points of tension with the relationship - how long have they known each other, do the other coworkers know, does the boss know, what do they really think about each other? - might make the story more interesting. You can pick various terms for the woman, from "lover" to "colleague" to "rival", but they don't seem to affect the narrative that I could tell? A touch of conflict could make the game more engaging. As studies in mood and character go, though, this is nice.

Playtime: < 15 minutes

This game felt like a snapshot into a life, with hints and fragments into the previous night as well as further back into the past. I liked how you could piece out a (incomplete) whole with the little bits of information parsed through your “exploration” of the room. There are some suggestive elements in some passages (which are quite endearing),

While you can try to get your partner to come back to bed, there are three endings to this game, with varying levels of success to that task (if that is what you ended up wanting to do). Some will feel closer to the song the game is based on, but all are pretty satisfying.