The Commute

This is clearly a programming exercise and is barely playable. It's ultra-short, and the challenge is figuring out the actions necessary for completion. There's little in the way of feedback for any actions that don't lead to progress, and just a few sparse locations, one of which has 90% of what you need to win. I suspect the code behind this is quite simple. The goal is just to go through your morning routine and drive to work. You eat, drink, kiss your family goodbye, and drive away. The drive is very eventful, if you don't grab everything you need, but other than that there's little excitement.

I knew all this going in, having read the hilarious reviews on the game's page. But I wanted to see it for myself, to poke at the game see if it did anything interesting. Sadly, it really is that sparse and empty. I did enjoy reading the small amount of heightened prose. The tone is so strange.

If there ever were to exist a Stepford Husband, it would be this protagonist. He talks about his life with a happiness that feels artificial, spouting platitudes like a pull-string doll, meekly satisfied with everything. He describes his wife, his motorcycle, his toast, and his patio with an equal level of moderate enthusiasm, but never with any specificity. His wife and daughter aren't even named, and can barely be interacted with. Work, the one thing he does complain about, doesn't seem like it actually upsets him. He still sounds like an automaton, denouncing his also unspecified work but still concluding that oh well, it must be done. Throughout the entire game, he keeps saying he does this exact routine, each and every morning. It's definitely not intentional, but the effect is creepy. The brevity and lack of response to anything but the required actions makes it feel like you’re stepping into the mind of a talking display in a museum or a theme park ride, one given consciousness, doomed to live out an eternal groundhog's day without ever being aware that they are doing so.

I read a short horror story like this, where a simple room-cleaning AI for a rich kid thought that all of its actions were autonomous, the product of independent choice, not knowing that its routine lifecycle was one that it couldn't violate if it had been allowed to try. It's a disturbing look at the concept of predestination. What if our actions are all decided in advance, and we're playing out those actions, the phonograph needle of time riding the groove of our life, operating under a mere illusion of choice until the day our song ends?

This game is awful, but in a way that's both very funny and also a little unsettling. I'm grateful for these oddball homebrew games that cropped up over the course of the competition. They served as a great reminder of just how good the tools for making adventure games were, and they remain fascinating curiosities to look back on today.