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Review
Grocery shopping. Again.
You play as an unnamed protagonist who begrudgingly hauls herself into the local supermarket to complete the weekly errand of buying groceries. You only have $20 in your pocket, so budget wisely.
Gameplay involves going through the store and deciding which groceries to buy. It soon becomes clear that (Spoiler - click to show)buying groceries isn't important. Turns out this mundane errand is the protagonist's desperate grasp for any normalcy because, well... it's the apocalypse.
The strength of Errand Run is how the protagonist knows more about her situation than we do, leaving us in the dark until the end where it pulls a delightful bait-and-switch.
Now, we do know that something's going on. The lights are off, the AC doesn't work, and the store is understocked. But you can be fooled into thinking that the world is simply going through a rough patch. Local food shortages, overdemand of the power grid, etc.
With a sigh, you step through the automatic doors of the local supermarket. No blast of cool air whisks over to greet you; the AC's been acting up for months now.
Oh, no, no, no.
(Spoiler - click to show)She's not there to buy groceries.
She’s pretending to.
The world has been ransacked by a force of evil, only referred to as “waves of rapture,” that kills people before hauling them away. She saw it take her family members and acquaintances. It’s possible that she’s the only person left.
As if this isn't the 18th time you've deliberated over that bag of rotten onions.
This. Line. Right. Here.
I did not see this coming. The whole time, she's been playing pretend! I seriously thought we were there to purchase groceries with our measly $20.
It’s her way of clinging to sanity, the closest she can get to the life she had before everything fell apart. Ironic since grocery shopping is something she hated.
The reveal adds replay value because it puts the gameplay into context. When it says, "your mom definitely taught you better than to waste money on sugar and fried shit, but IT'S NOT LIKE SHE'S HERE NOW," you assume the protagonist means that her mom is elsewhere.
Nope. She's not here because she died a violent death. Welp.
The game’s writing is frosting on the cake. Its cynical humor provides commentary about the task at hand without being too dire. The author builds on this visually through text effects and colours that convey (Spoiler - click to show)the protagonist’s wobbly mental state.
To conclude, Errand Run is a brief horror game about (Spoiler - click to show)crawling back to the familiar because the entire world has gone to pieces. It doesn’t go deep with its story, but it doesn't need to.
Where it doesn’t have depth, it sure has attitude.
