Nilsenberg
BACKER
2016
One of the most unexpectedly frightening games I’ve ever played, plunging the player into a computational, sisyphean nightmare, a totalitarian paradise where you’re unwittingly assimilated into a protocol of laser-honed destruction. You virtually become a software-based Terminator, at the expense of your free-will and corporeal selfhood. It’s as ingeniously designed as a Mario game, yet it instills paranoia and fear instead of joy. What easily could have been a featureless facade of a concept is given artistic sentience as a work of ominous late-capitalistic portent. A direct oxymoron of fun, creative gameplay and narrative nihilism.
2021
Eleven-year old me had this insistent urge to slaughter wild animals in video game form for some reason. Looking back at this, through merely the prism of memory, admittedly, I don’t even feel that “young and dumb” is an adequate explanation as to why I kept playing this monstrosity. Luckily, for my own sanity, it was just a phase.