Metallic Red

Being alone or in a small group in space is a classic story setup. Even before space people did it with ships, like Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson. Movies like The Martian or Gravity, podcasts like Vast Horizon or Wolf 359 or Girl in Space, and IF games like Protocol or Seedship all deal with isolation in space.

To me, that says that there's something about the experience that satisfies some primal human urge for self-evaluation and discovery, like a spiritual quest to understand yourself. In this game, **Metallic Red**, you float through space, tend a garden, communicate on the internet, order packages, and get into Tarot; a very 2020 kind of life.

The gameplay is split into days, with a typically day consisting of browsing the web, checking your plants, and sleeping with strange dreams. It changes quite a bit by the end of the game.

The tone of the game is melancholic and isolated, with themes of change, loss, and growth. It is well-put together; the only thing that looked like a bug was a possibly repeated conversation.

I'm not sure whether the game was structured around a certain set of themes or if it was built around this character and just imagining what life would be like for a person. I wonder if it's the latter because (Spoiler - click to show)someone being raised religiously then becoming depressed as an adult, leaving the religion, and getting into gardening and tarot is such a universal experience that I know 2 or 3 people personally who have done it and dozens more online. So this could just be a way to take a universal experience and put it into space.

In any case, I liked this story. State isn't really tracked; you can use a chapter select to hop from part to part. I forgot one of the instructions during a cooking segment and couldn't figure out how to get out of it for a while, but I found that part satisfying.