WATT

The eponymous protagonist of WATT wakes up on an island, his memories somewhat fuzzy, and is told he has to collect six keys to get into a lighthouse to perform a task that will save everyone. This could be a setup for a classic puzzle game, but WATT is instead a slow, meditative, lightly interactive experience (I’m not sure there’s more than one meaningful choice) that muses on life, priorities, grief, and regret. Its dreamy vagueness was sometimes hard for me to connect with emotionally, but that could be my problem more than the game’s. It still had moments I found evocative and moments I found amusing. I especially liked the Chinese opera segment, which explores a man trying to find a balance between caring for his family and meeting societal expectations of masculinity in a way that’s metaphorical but also specific and unusual.

I did, however, find the work a little unwieldy to interact with. WATT tells you that to move forward, you should click on the colored text if there is any, and if there isn’t you should just click anywhere. This is fine; the problem is that sometimes it isn’t quite true. First, the game also makes heavy use of text styling, sometimes including color, for effect, which means sometimes it’s unclear which colored text is actually clickable and which isn’t. Second, sometimes the links did not seem to be colored—given that when they were visibly colored they were usually blue, it’s possible that the ones that seemed black were actually a very dark blue that my blue light filter was sucking the color out of, but they didn’t look different from the surrounding text to me. In addition, text effects (including colors) did sometimes get in the way of readability, and there was some timed text, particularly towards the end, that I found frustrating.

The visual design is otherwise very nice—including the use of text effects when they don't affect readability too badly—and the original artwork done for the game is excellent. I just wish I'd been able to spend more time thinking about what the game was trying to say and less time thinking about where I was supposed to click or trying to make out low-contrast text.