Eight Last Signs in the Desert

You're in the Platonic realm of ideas or something, which has been utterly wrecked due to the desert of the real or something, and consumerist mass media means the symbol is now entirely distinct from what it's supposed to represent, so meaning is dead. Or am I completely off? It wasn't easy to tell what was happening.

Gameplay consists of pairing up remnants of past symbols (e.g. traffic cone, woven basket). Each pair you assemble gives you a prose poem. It's nicely written, with great music and art, but also extremely abstract.

The creators list Jorges Luis Borges (magical realist author) and André Breton (co-founder of surrealism) as inspirations. I'm not opposed to surreal games, but this one was too abstract for me. I liked Lucid, another surreal IFComp game that some people thought went overboard, but for whatever reason this game didn't click. Maybe because as abstract as Lucid was, it was still grounded in reality, with various symbols alluding to the protagonist's human life and their past. This game felt distant and impersonal in comparison, and it was difficult to find anything not trapped in layers of imagery. It's a matter of taste, though.

I initially tried playing this on the phone, which was a bad idea because it uses some very nice hand-drawn art that relies on a widescreen UI and didn't show up well on my phone's small screen width. Playing on a PC worked better.

In lieu of further analysis which would probably miss the mark anyway, here are some excerpts:

Ideas try to form all around you, in the desert. Sand rattles and writhes, grain climbing atop grain, but even when you kneel and try to help them by raising them by the fistful, they are tired, spent, and fall back through your fingers into a shapeless expanse. Leave this residue.

One day, a long time ago, you came to this place and now an animal cannot be distinguished from a fire or a stone. Elsewhere, posters, milk carton ads and skyscraper-tall holograms alike are all engulfed in sand. The news report an epidemic of dreams of dry drowning.

You stand in the desert like a monument to yourself, a tension, a spark, a ribbon on fire or perchance a rubber band, promises fulfilled?, indistinct realities, a desert (recursively), the language of objects, curtains, the object of language, the sputtering of a flame.

You visit some locations, spin some text options to your preferred option, then "seal" your choices to commit to them. I think the order of locations and the spin text has effect on the poetry.

Everything was so surreal and metaphorical that I don't think I really got a message from this game. But the language was lovely enough that I could enjoy the feeling of the poetry washing over me, uncomprehended.

This is a surreal game set in the desert where you examine eight different objects and make various choices concerning them, which are then sealed in. At times the game mentions connections between two items; for me they were the last two I had chosen each time, but I don't know if that changes on different playthroughs.

It has lovely looking sand art that looked really hard to make but visually appealing.

When I say surreal I mean very surreal, like between The Wasteland and Finnegan's Wake surreal. Here's an excerpt:

What horizons can we reach with twining? The process is strict but has an end. She comes up with a new weave for her tale. It goes like this: sand. The weaving proceeds from absence to absence. This happens every Thursday. A kiosk is so very far from her. Oh, didn’t you know, she says? It is a strange affair.

It's writing that willfully impedes understanding for effect, with just enough connections between sentences to trick your brain into thinking it knows what's going on but an overall effect of something unfamiliar. It's like the text equivalent of a Dali painting.

This beautiful and hard-wrought story that defies categories and quantification is, unfortunately, entered in to the 'categorization and hard quantification of games by group vote' competition, and so is subjected to numerical evaluation. But I think that the ranking of this particular game won't really matter; what matters more imo is what people feel or experience while playing it.