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Review
Short and extremely strange surreal horror game, October 5, 2025I ignored this on first sight because I saw the cover art and thought it was a cozy slice-of-life game or something. Should've known better.
On playing, I watched with bleak fascination as the strange and unsettling situation the story depicts gets worse, and worse, and worse, until it all ends with a final choice that ramps the strangeness up and explains nothing. It's great because nothing is explained. A breakdown of human comprehension.
(Spoiler - click to show)I hypothesize that everything you see and do in this game, all the human details, are translations of something that cannot be understood. The main character is some kind of machine or alien lifeform (based on the image queue and sector restoration), and the depiction of the supposedly idyllic suburb on the supposedly idyllic planet Earth is the projection of a concept otherwise impossible to depict. Like Plato's cave, but what we see is only what humans can make of the alien universe outside the cave. Every detail is meant to be allegorical.
Throughout the story, we see the results of the main character's world, whatever it is, falling apart. The allegory breaks down with it, introducing anomalies like eggs that are images and dogs that are birds. The ultimate choice is whether the dysfunctional main character is willing to allow themself to be killed (accepting the birds) or whether they try to shed the dysfunctional layer and escape deeper, possibly entering another layer of false reality, or entering death all the same.
You could interpret the main character as an AI this way, but I think it may even be more interesting if you consider the story a translation of what completely mundane and non-sentient computational processes might go through in their "lives". Let's say a process in your computer hits a fatal error and has to be killed. What would it look like from the process's point of view? What would the human equivalent of this experience be?
Anyway, that's just a theory. (A game theory.) You could point to other things: Alzheimer's grinding away at memories of an idyllic suburban past, maybe? Or perhaps it's some kind of Matrix situation, with a very human protagonist trapped in a virtual reality world that falls apart as the Lotus-Eater Machine is damaged in some way. As a final note, the slow decay of the virtual reality-type setting really reminded me of howling dogs.
I went and read Axolotl in search of answers, but found nothing. I actually think this story was better, but Julio Cortázar didn't have the advantage of Videotome, so I'll cut him some slack.
This short game works extremely well with the constraints of its medium and the jam it was entered into. The Single Choice Jam requires there to be only one choice in the game, and it's a good choice. The Videotome engine allows for sound and art, and there's great use made of sound and art. The pixel aesthetic, associated as it is with retro nostalgia and lost childhood innocence, suits this story well.
