Die Another Day

This game is a lovely metaphor for many things in life. In this game, you die every single day, and it's very inconvenient. You have to find ways of arranging your life around this fact. No one else really seems to notice, or if they do notice, it gets downplayed. Giving into it completely can ruin your income and friendships, but overdoing it can kill you faster or make you feel hopeless.

This metaphor seems a lot like the 'spoons' metaphor, where someone who has low energy (such as from chronic illness or depression) uses spoons to measure how many activities they can partake in during a day.

So you could see this game as being about chemotherapy, depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia, endometriosis, losing your faith, etc.

I played through to two bad endings first. I wondered if the game would show that there really is no good solution, or if it offered the hope of their being a solution of some kind. If you want to know which type of ending it has, I guess you'll have to play it.

I definitely think there's a lot of value in its overall messages. I have mild to moderate depression and am a single dad, so there are some things I struggled with for years that now I take shortcuts on, like using paper plates to cut down on dishes. Overall, I think this game will resonate with many people and I expect it to place highly in the Petite Mort competition.

(I also liked the self-referential part of the game about making a game. Is this the long version or the short version, or is it mostly ficitional and not self-referential at all?)

Die Another Day is a short resource management game made in Twine, where you play as a person who gruesomely dies at the end of every day, only to wake up the morning after as if (almost) nothing happened. And you can’t stop this groundhog-like cycle either - you will die no matter what - only exacerbate it. There are 3 endings, with different outlook on your future, dependent on your choices.

Aside from the obvious but effective metaphor for living with disability/illnesses, it makes an interesting point on the triviality of death. Forced to die again and again, each day, death just becomes an inconvenience: you don’t know when your body will stop working. What if you pass out in the middle of the street or in front of friends? What about the mess you need to clean the day after (bodily fluids/broken belongings)? What if you hurt yourself even more?

And so you must work around it - do you prioritise potential discomfort for an easier tomorrow? or convenience for (financial/social) struggles down the line? While you can prep some stuff, it’s not like you can really plan your day/life when you don’t know your state days/hours ahead - compromises can only take you so far. Your body essentially forces isolation from the world (how can you go out when your body might give out?) and yourself (can you spare the energy to do something for yourself?).

And so you die, every day.