As someone who’s a big fan of Radiohead, this was quite a treat for me, since I love Kid A because it’s one of my favorite albums of all-time and from Radiohead. While for Amnesiac, it’s a great album, nothing else to say.

Well, where do we begin? There isn’t seem to be any gameplay as it’s much more of a walking simulator and you look at the visuals and listen to some great music. So, I’m going to the part of the music and visuals.

Well, the visuals and music are wonderful. Since to me, the visuals during the Kid A and Amnesiac era of Radiohead is fascinating, and make the comforted viewer uncomfortable, while making the disturbed viewer comfortable. The transition of that style from the blips to this “game” is pretty well-done. My favorite part of this “game” is the “Ascension” area, because it has the best song from Kid A (Motion Picture Soundtrack) and it had the visuals of the Kid A album art, which both fits well with each other. Another part is the “HTDC, Pyramid Song, You and Whose Army?” section where the visuals fascinated me and the music is the best songs from the respective albums they came from.

Do I recommend it though? Well, I would only recommend it to the hardcore Radiohead fans as they would appreciate it more than the people who play videogames.

Overall, a 8/10.

It starts out pretty cool, but immediately transitions to a hallway with a QR code that jumps you to the merch. I don't know if it's only me or is common, but that would have been less annoying if they had it open on the map on the companion website, and then just had the link for the merch. Overall it made the whole thing feel a little cheaper. That art isn't a foremost goal. Of course, we all have to make money, and unfortunately art comes from that pursuit as often or maybe more so than the pure drive to create and express. So I'll give a little benefit of the doubt. Though the frequently reoccurring minotaur character is present in Fall Guys and Fortnite, which... feels weird for an art forward walking sim. Like if "Edith Finch" was the next character in smash or something.

It taps into a lot of what I love about listening to Radiohead. The metatextual narratives throughout their work, similar aesthetics their music evokes paired with their album artwork and other media and so on. I do think that a lot of Radiohead feels a bit like... a solved ARG. Like something that once contained a lot of mystique, a broadened pastiche of the societal angst that's in their music with deeper mysteries hidden below. I feel like this should have been the perfect thing to reinvoke that feeling, minus the solved part. It unfortunately did not. It feels a bit "we live in a society", that sort of boring puddle-deep cynicism sometimes at this stage, especially with how narrowly focused on repeating elements this is. This sounds harsh, but I genuinely loved all of it. It's just when analyzing things within my mind would wander back to this.

I may have that expectation from the late 00's when I was getting into them and they did hold an ARG(if I recall) around in rainbows, and this was around the time they were making big moves to try and shake up the piracy-frightened music industry. I'm waxing a lot about the band, but if you're generally interested in art, art galleries, narrative-absent walking sims, definitely play it. It is worth the time even if not invested in the broader act of enjoying radiohead. There were some genuinely cool moments, and as I previously mentioned, the aesthetics are very pleasant in an unpleasant way.

Some folks have stated this is groundbreaking, or mind blowing. I would not agree with this necessarily. It's great, a standard I'd love to see in future projects going for a similar thing, but folks have been creating non-game walking sims for a while that offer just as much. It is nice to see a big name attached for future projects though. I'd love to see many other bands and simply art installations get translated into this sort of game format. Preferably with a VR mode, as that stuff works with the added layer of immersion that provides.

Some highlights: an amber pillar that plays the drum and bass segments of a song that when you step outside it, it plays the more ambient pieces.

A big TV cube that alters when you step on different spaces throughout the room

A backrooms liminal hallway

an endless spiral staircase a la guggenheim museum with sketchbook paintings

a morphing 2d/3D landscape.

demon dance circle

exploding album art

And some other great bits.