Slated For Demolition

There are, of course, a lot of surreal and highly metaphorical games about trauma, and there are probably many reasons for that, but one of those, I think, is that the subject matter really lends itself to that approach. Trauma loves symbolism. Trauma revels in taking an ordinary everyday object and turning it into an emblem for the worst thing that’s ever happened to you. And because it’s an ordinary everyday object, it can lurk around every corner waiting to ambush you in the middle of a perfectly good day and remind you that you’re still not over that thing.

Slated for Demolition represents this experience by having its protagonist, as the blurb says, “haunted by a relentless marinara pasta demon”. (It feels slightly inappropriate in this context to say that that turn of phrase delights me, but it does.) There’s something bathetic in this, to be sure, but again, that seems fitting in a way. It’s not really funny to be having a panic attack because you saw a regular everyday object, or something that isn’t even that object but kind of looks like the object, but on some level you grimly recognize the absurdity of it. In practice, I didn’t find the silliness of the concept too distracting; the game mines the pasta imagery for some surprisingly effective horror scenes, and a sequence in a grocery store where the words of the description start to be replaced by types of pasta is legitimately disorienting. Given that most objects in the game have some kind of emotional significance tied to a key memory, I was a little bit surprised that this ended up not being true of the pasta, but at the same time the pasta is positioned within the text as something destructive of meaning—not insignificant, but sort of anti-significant—so perhaps that's appropriate as well.

The game has a world model of sorts, and a list of objects to collect, and at least one actual puzzle; all of this works well enough, but it’s mainly in service of getting fragments of text that you can piece together into something resembling a picture of the PC’s past and present (albeit not a complete one, and deliberately so). In addition, although I’m one of those people who’s always complaining about timed text, I thought it was well-used here—it’s not the default or used very frequently, so when on occasion a phrase appears word by word for emphasis, it has the intended impact.

I was quite absorbed in the specific, sharply drawn if disjointed details of this one person’s life, so it really threw me to reach the ending and (Spoiler - click to show)suddenly be asked to insert myself into the game instead. That’s not a thing I generally find rewarding in games and I especially did not like it as a swerve from inhabiting the consciousness of a very specific person who was not me (and occasionally also a very specific marinara pasta demon). But there’s precedent in this kind of game for reaching out to the audience this way and making them think about their own lives, and it’s hard for me to tell if it’s not well executed here or if it’s simply not to my tastes.