Errand Run

Despite its short play-time, Errand Run engages with a number of different themes, but there’s one I keep coming back to, possibly because it’s increasingly salient of late: how do you tolerate the intolerable? It’s no spoiler, I think, to reveal that what initially appears to be a simple trip to the grocery store with twenty bucks in your pocket is concealing something darker than just dealing with the impacts of inflation; the first passage glancingly averts to wrongness by mentioning in passing that all the shopping baskets are scattered around upside-down, but the second passage leaves subtlety behind:

"THEYRE JUST ONIONS FOR GODSSAKE but your mind is a bullet a knife slicing splitting s u n d e r i n g each precious layer ghostprickleof tears in your eyes"

(The last four words are blurred).

The text effects calm down after that, save for an ominous red-shift as you near the ending, but the intimations of exactly how much has gone wrong keep escalating; often you’ll see a potentially disturbing phrase that, when clicked, turns anodyne: “the fly died” becomes “the fly flew all the way back to home to make little fly babies,” for example (though depending on how you feel about flies, it occurs to me, maybe the latter is worse than the former). The gameplay loop remains consistent throughout, with each new aisle peeling back a layer of the protagonist’s denial, and providing more clues about the enormity of what’s happened – there aren’t any real choices to make, but fortunately, at ten minutes, this simple structure doesn’t wear out its welcome, and when the last band-aid is ripped off, what we’re presented with is memorable in its details, and appropriately grand guignol, even if it’s not especially novel (I seem to recall a Comp game from four or five years ago with a largely similar take on (Spoiler - click to show)the Rapture).

So Errand Run is an effective little horror story, sounding in delusion and religious mania and post-apocalyptic nihilism, but as I said up top, the reading I’m finding most resonant right now focuses on the protagonist’s actions as a form of coping. While there’s an implication that their perceptions may sometimes be confused by trauma, I think it’s more frequently the case that they’re trying to recontextualize and ignore the evidence of their senses, rather than suffering full-bore hallucination. That is, the protagonist knows that things have gone to hell, but just continues to engage in quotidian rituals like grocery-shopping to propitiate the devils of despair. At a time when the aspirations that gave our lives meaning seem increasingly questionable, and our own devils of despair seem not just real, but in charge of major government agencies (this store’s take on food safety has nothing on RFK Jr’s), Errand Run feels as much of a political story as a supernatural one. Just going through the motions can keep the hounds at bay, but for how long? We’re down to a rotting back of onions and two packs of cinnamon gum; eventually something will have to give.