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Not Sure What I Just Played, February 17, 2014The thing about games (stories? Hypertext fiction? Poetry?) like this is that whenever I reach what seems to be a wall, I'm never sure if I've experienced the full game, if the author is trying to convey some message about frustration or death or something else profound, or if I'm just dumb and not finding the next thing to click on.
This game epitomizes that feeling. After clicking on everything I can and reading the resulting slightly-to-fairly gross, bizarre (but presumably with some much deeper meaning I'm not catching) snippets of text, I'm locked in a loop that doesn't seem to have an exit, with a score of 800,000 and with no apparent way to continue. (Spoiler - click to show)And the only way to progress through the loop -- just so I can respawn at the beginning of the loop again -- requires several actions and then sitting through a poem, which appears line by line, with a brief but excruciating timed delay between each line.
At this point, I have very little interest in continuing; I feel vaguely sorry for the amorphous protagonist, but (slight) (Spoiler - click to show)I'm pretty sure nothing I help him do in the game is going to improve his life outside it, and he's so passive it'd be hard to imagine him improving it for himself. And the dreary, unrelentingly unkind atmosphere suggests this is the kind of game where "winning" will be Pyrrhic, if not worse than losing.
As a game, I found the biggest flaw to be how difficult it was to know what to do when (or even if there was a "right" or "best" or even "productive" thing to do). As a story, I found it surprisingly compelling, in the same way that a kid feels about poking a dead thing with a stick. But the appeal wears off pretty quickly.