Not a review. I just feel obligated to add to the meagre content warning for this shit because the Developer seemingly did not want to directly tell the people who might download this that there will be pop-up images of GORE that flash across the screen.
I mean legit live leak/rotten.com stuff.
My guess is that the Dev did not want to "reveal their cards" by giving a heads up for this,
like they didn't want to soften the impact of god-dam UNCENSORED IMAGES OF CORPSES by warning that they will randomly appear.

If you don't want any spoilers, give Decimate Drive ten minutes of your time and then come back.
It is well worth it if you are poor and seek an asynchronous micro- thrill and joy which is best experienced blind.

The slow set-up also proved utterly genius in such a short game, to let that single trick it pulls on the player carry more weight, while setting the intended mood for that otherwise admittedly goofy Idea.
I witnessed a constant emotinal flux inside of me, rushing from short burst of terror to dopamine high giggling, all predicated on the tension of a restless motor engine wanting to hurt me.
While I was running for my Player Character's life I felt some genuine frights, not horror mind you, rather a contemporary but primal fear to not get crushed by tonnes of fast-moving steel.
This was only made possible by its short length, the almost innate uncertainty we have all experienced while trying to cross a street and can't make out if a car, heading directly at one will hit the breaks in time and the game's promise to twist this uncertainty into vehicular manslaughter.
I believe if it was any longer with more scenarios then the routinised gaminess revealing itself would turn that fear of getting bulldozered by a faceless machine too much into a fear of not touching a hitbox, which sets you back to the start of the level.

That game you play with the cars you flee from is just an asymmetrical live or death version of "catch".
It could be boiled down to a couple things.
First of, just listening for the automobile or a driving bassline shouting from its stereo.
Breaking the open parallel from the player to it with a street pole to stop that vehicle aiming straight at you dead in its tracks.
At least for as long as the A.I. takes to reverse back out of it again.
Or a Corrida de Toros like dance in which the player utilises timed strafing, sudden directional changes and maybe even outplays the car by looking directly at it, while calculating its trajectory or they deliberatly bait it into a corner to win more time.

Moving around the Player Character will run, or rather jog, automatically.
One silly jank I found as I was playing is that the walk/run toggle button won't function a second time after you switched to walking.
The very indie game dev solution for this problem was to hit the jump button.
There was no other real use for the existence of this jump button, so after finding this kinda funny bug I choose to deduct that the dev only left the jump button in this game, aside from that little extra feel of "better movement options", or immersion or some shit, to reset the Player Character to their default running speed.
Why there was even the option to walk could be questioned, but I would claim it also aids the deception the game pulls on the player with its slow and deliberate, atmospheric start.
I also liked that the first few minutes subconsciously train the player to understand that their only goal is the red glowing door,
like if that wasn't obvious to them already, but still there is zero tutorialisation, only mood setting and tension building and I enjoyed that holistic approach.

Yea, this little itch project was pretty fascinating, if I hadn't played Homebody a couple days ago and would still care to think about that kind of stuff I might've called this my favourite horror game of the year.
(This might just be a sly attempt to shout-out Homebody lol, a game, horror and puzzle fans should def check out, although I probably wont write about it, cause @BeauTartep already did the definitive dissertation, but spoiler warning)
I mean, I have been writing this now for longer than it took me to play the game. That is the equivalent of an automatic recommendation in my book.

One minor nitpick I have is that I think the death screen and sounds leading into it could have hit harder, in a literal sense.
Shit could have been an ounce more visceral.

Itch.io Horror games are weird and I am kind of obssesed with them lately. There is so much good stuff to find behind all the jank and between the overstaturation of backroom games. lol
What I learned from this game is that it can be possible to find thrills and tension inside a concept that might just seem completly silly on paper, at least if you pace it with intention and restraint and know how to set the proper atmosphere for it.
And that vehicular manslaughter is kinda not based. Miss me w that shit pls.

Currently going through this list by @Erato_Heti because I am interested in what the users on this website have created and to find motivation for my own efforts while also getting my little itch game fix.

Turns out the first game I chose to play was made by @gomit and a couple other folks who all went together to my old school in the Video Game design class. Earth is the size of a wallnut it seems.

"A favor" is a narrative-driven horror walking sim that is worth checking out for its well executed tension, atmosphere and good pacing helped by its short playtime.
I liked "A favor" but I think there are two troubles one could experience, the obvious student project aura and the obvious narrative.
I personally couldn't care less about the former, like when there exists some jank here and there, a bit of a lack in a unique visual identity, but it should be adressed, because it could bog down the experience for some. The trajectory not matching up with the crosshair, some not so hidden short cuts in presentation or even the fucking bin only catching the trash when you aim slighty above it, are all endearing to me and part of the honesty in workmanship why I keep coming back to free itch games instead of cleaning out my huge backlog of games I've paid for or the ones I started with subscriptions services.

As for the story and primarily the Twist. The "He actually was that Tyler Durden dude the whole time!!"-moment.
The chef's kiss student project Gütesiegel, which reminded me of my own old classmate's approach towards the idea of interesting narrative writing. That conclusion should already be obvious to the player on the first or second in-game day.
In my own experience with the (what feels like it got used here) borderline misguided storytelling technique,
which feels like coming up with a mindfuck-ending first and then a tasteful enough framework around it, this actually got me kinda impressed with its strength in narrative-flow and the suspense build-up through its horror elements. (I am not posturing that you can't come up with an ending first. I merely wanna point out that the intention for a plot-twist often seems to be the focal one in these kinds of stories)

I fully want to echo that other review on here and say that despite having a predictable plot built on a honestly trite narrative trope, it still kinda pulls it off anyway. Kinda.

Kinda, cause fucke me, mental illness as a narrative device seems like a thing we should have left behind last decade.
Not only for it's reduction of real, difficult issues into a contextual reasoning for scary and weird shit happening in a story, but maybe just because it is too expected.
Just let that sink in for a moment, mental illness and the discussion of and around it got used so many times as merely a mechanical crutch for lazy writing that I can feel confident in accusing its focal use in a story as such of being trite, of being tropey.
This apathetic perspective towards its thematisation is a direct result of the regular misuse of such a delicate topic.
Of its almost expected reduction into just a plot-twist device with maybe some obligatory hints towards a real message or statement on it.
I am not even aiming my criticism directly at "a favour", but at the broader ways of implementation in which mental illness gets handled in Pop-culture.
Hell, even my use of the word "implementation" for such a difficult topic feels apathetic, but that seems to be a more fitting description for the approach mainstream art festered around it.
Mental illness just isn't the thing most of these stories actually want to discuss, it's just the reveal of it's existence in them that wants to make you say "Damn" right as the credits start rolling.
It's like a slightly less trite, slightly more delicate and often actually well intended, version of the other student project classic, the theme of recreational drugs. I am more than guilty of exploiting that one as just a weird-shit-happening or plot-twist mechanic in my own student projects.
I can recall a teacher calling us students out on it's collective overuse, which is probably more difficult to do with a theme that has more weight and often actual sincerity to it.

"A favor" pulls it off in my opinion. Not the adequate discussion owed to this topic mind you, but the use of it as a plot-twist device. Simply the road towards that conclusion makes the fithteen minutes worthwhile, at least if you are able to shut off that ranting voice that made me type out that last paragraph in its timeframe.
Also, that the reveal got communicated through a simple, understandable phone unlock via face recognition was kinda neat.

The set-up already let my M. Night senses tingle, only communicating with the friend via the phone, finding pills and especially the Video Game book you can find on the first day accompanied by the inner monologue "I own the same book" on the player's screen was all I needed to know where this was going.


A interesting thing "a Favor" managed to achieve was to skirt around a niche indie genre I like to call "Wage Slave Horror", while also executing that style better than the ones I've played. Recently I made this list after binge playing a lot of itch games and recognising a fascinating pattern. Admittedly "a favor" only evades my very specific parameters because, even ignoring the twist for a sec, it's a favor the player does, not a real job.
But that said, having played a decent number of these, the design in this one around the medial tasks was excellent.
The position of the telephone in the corner with the player's back towards two hallways made me anxious each time I needed to answer the call machine, but was unable to check my backside.
Same with the position of the plants. The player can't keep an eye on the entrance to the room while watering them, they have to look towards the neighbouring building which also made me feel tense that something is gonna happen over there any moment or in my blind spots.
Same with the paper bin, the kitchen, the safe and the bathroom mirror.
There is always the possibility that something could creep up behind you without any notice.
Of courses after one playthrough this tension is gone, which now that I think about it seems maybe to be too contradictory towards the use of a re-contextualising ending.
"Fight club is better on the second viewing" because you can now see all the careful foreshadowing and attention to detail.
You watch a different film, or rather watch it differently.
Knowing the beats of a horror game and especially that loss of uncertainty towards it's potential but non-existent scares works directly against this built-in replay value.

I would love to see another project by this team if they choose to keep working together. They showed their potential here and they got all the game design basics more than down especially for the subtle emotional strain needed in a good horror game.
Damn. This write up got way longer than I intended it to be. I hope my criticism was constructive, even that rant I couldn't hold back on. I think when something gets someone to write that much it speaks for the amount of thoughts that art made one engage in, which to me is at least the biggest compliment.

How do you folks keep your creative drive up?
Everytime I create something I half ass it, because I tell myself I can't disappoint myself if I didn't actually try.
It doesn't even work and I still end up disappointed with myself.
I never really like the outcome that much, at least not enough find the drive to finish it, at most I'll post unfinished stuff somewhere in the attempt find motivation and then I don't create art inside that medium for another six months. The result of that lack of commitment or honing my craft to get better at it will come back to haunt me when I pick it up again just to half ass it again and demotivate myself again, because my efforts and results didn't make any progress since last time.
I got like two half finished game projects, a bunch of unfinished demo songs, two short film scripts and a portfolio full of drawings of which the quality has barely progressed since I was sixteen, not to mention all the half finished reviews with attempts at poetics in my notes app.
I am revealing this because folks knowing about it might make that unfinished art closer to getting finished.. might make the finished project more real. idk might make it more than just a thing in my room I can ignore the state of, because I am the only one who knows about it.
But rn I can just can never find the motivation to finish any of that stuff.
I'll rather start another thing just to drop it again it seems.
There is never a creative drive to fully commit.
I'll half ass it, cause its easier that way.
I can't find my mojo anymore.

Even this vent is half assed ngl.

Shit, I can can't even finish playing longer Games recently.

This game is the vent channel now btw.

Link to the game: Dr.Langeskov..

Through it's own limited and single goal of merely existing amusingly aware of itself as a game, the crowscrowscrows formula of the meta-fictional "Stanley-like" walking sim, gets made and breaks by the quality and quantity of jokes the devs hide inside them - by the strength and length of the back and fourth, by just how many different narrator reactions can be triggered by the player's actions or non-actions and by how funny all of those are to the player.

If I wait long enough will something else happen?

No, this is a free game.
And that last line sounded pretty concluding, at least in it's verbiage even if the vocal delivery made it seem like he wasn't quite done talking.

What if I press this thing, or this thing, will each of those inputs by me contain a new line of dialogue by the narrator as a response?

No, most of them will not.
Writing good branching jokes can be hard and hiring Voice actors can be expensive.

Unfolding in the backstage hallways of a fictional heist game of which the player gets tasked to orchestrate the functions for the current "real player" and Dr. Langeskov structuring the gags around this, what turned for me out to be a sadly pretty one-note effort at a meta-narrative, appeard to be the only script he holds for the player.

In my first few minutes of play, the setup still seemed novel enough to lend itself for some creativity. Novel considering at the least when this got released, but like with a bad South Park episode the same joke over and over can get pretty boring if the execution lacks and the joke wasn't even that funny in the first place, turning your twenty minutes with it into an eye rolling exercise.

The most intense the voice actor gets in response to your action also doesn't stem from what you choose to do or didn't do. The game just won't even let you execute a specific interaction the narrator asks from the player. You can't pick up the ringing dial-phones placed in some areas, when you try to your player character lifts it up a bit just to hangs up.
Is this funny? That is completly subjective like all humour and all things probably.
But is it disappointing that the most passionate the game raises its voice at the player happens to be the result of it's own unaddressed limitations? I would argue so. If the game addressed this dissonance beforehand it might have worked better for me, but the narrator acts like I should be able to answer those calls, which in all honesty made me in that moment feel like I should be able to and just pressed the wrong inputs or something, and the "lmao you can't even do that" punchline fell kinda flat as a result.
Idk I think the game could've thematizised that lack of interplay, that Illusion of choice, but it rather wanted to make a gag without adressing any of it, which felt dull.

The first few minutes and rooms turned out to be the highlight, obviously because the joke just started, but also because the narrators need to rush the player combined with the environmental story telling he wants you to skip made the games world appear bigger than it actually is and confident in itself.
Once the Novelty wore completly off I just tried stuff to see if I got a reaction, but getting predominantly disappointed was mine.

I really enjoyed that you never see the "real game" and that all the tasks you take part in to make the other person's experience possible existed also to paint some interesting pictures in my head, but before I could properly draw them out the narrators voice always interrupted my thoughts with the same gag or some new medial task.

It should be obvious from the start that there won't be a heist for you to experience, but even if I saw the ending coming from a mile away I still enjoyed it's execution, at least enough to make the credits hit somewhat.

I am gonna stop doing this product review thing in which I try to boil a game down to the target audience it might appeal to, because it is antithetical to most of the things I usualy wanna achieve while writing and seems reductive. I'll have to learn how write a proper conclusion or some shit idk.

A proper conclusion

How many empty shells of level stone melded with cast iron slabs were left somewhere, unused and completely purposeless, purposely ignored and forgotten.
Concrete giants who fell to their weak knees, whose chests caved in, while gasping in the dusty air for too long after decades of screaming the soul out of their body to no-one but the echo.
Whose shadows cast for none except on our undeserved, vehement insistence of something we dare to call human compassion.
The years of effort wasted, wastful destruction of nature for wasteful construction and unused potential housing, just to at best languish as an investment for some, only in stats and numbers thinking, asshole. Whose figure in the puddle next to the structures reflects back just as obsidian as the water it is made of, if you could even still call it that.

Idk, the story is pretty vauge and open to interpretation and that is how my Marxist ass chooses to interpretate its themes.
If I am trying to reduce the experience I would call 0_abyssalSomewhere an opressively ambient, fromsoft inspired, experimental art game.
Your minimal, mechanical toolkit consists of a single slash attack that will find it's use and the player some interaction inside the atmospheric third person walks, all topped off by intriguing visual experimentation and occasional inner monologue via text on the screen.
A few times the camera will switch to a fixed perspective, which I thought was neat. I genuinely loved my under an hour short time of staring into this abyss.

Play this game if you like the sinister vibes in fromsoft games without the punishing trademark soulslike experience, experimental art or just to broaden your horizon and join the waiting seats for the sequel.

"I had a dream I was under the ground
My friends and family were buried all around
A worm took a bite of me
And then he washed it down with a bite of you, a bite of you
The same worms that eat me will someday eat you too"

Juurruu is a short grid-based puzzler about sprouting roots from ancient fauna, with 24 caves to dig through.
Three chapters, each with a twist on the same radicle, but Juurruu just knows at what length to tie them up, before they get strained.

Sound design polish like Frédéric Chopin. (Sorry, I can never stop myself)
The 1-Bit creature merrily waddles to the chiptune when you guide them through the door you just opened for it.

I got this recommend by @Erato_Heti a month ago, because Rain World is my favourite game of all time and I can kinda see the reason why, not just for the fact that you play a little white rodant who crawls through boxy shapes, but also for it's desire to go at least a bit deeper. Because after reaching it's depth mechanically, kind of confusingly somewhere in the middle of the game, Juurru almost ditches that effort in favour of a more story-approached conclusion, which I honestly appreciate much more than if it squeezed any small drop left out of it self.

It has it's ups and downs after that inside the levels, but for it's short playtime it is definitely more than worth checking out being a completely free experience.

Hold down the W-key with the entire, clenched fist.
Ram some Nails directly into the brain-juice leaking ear canal, after the Post-Void headache's single repeating riff shredded the scalp off the temporal skull. Maybe just nail the W including Keyboard to wooden desk board that gets scratched around on, to save time and that brittle table.
Not blinking till the eyes bleed out of the nessecity. To catch the first glance of the gun slinging amalgamation and the eyes their ichorous break in a blood bath.
Hydrate with gore. It's some little shit's stipulation inside this Post-Void.

Smoke unfiltered pervitin with the aim-trainer gods, as the carpet flooring starts pounding waves around us.
The chamber transmogrifies with each new hit to the face.
The Reload-Key gets spammed only to reload the run, never the gun. No need for that kind of tactic in the compulsion feeding demand by the Head-explode-simulator. Though, occasionally the pinky might spread it's leg to shift shape and gear.

Yea. This game is pretty good. I kinda suck at it lol. Only rushed past stage five once in my four-five hours of play, but I'll keep trying. Reaffirming my complete switch from controller to KBM with this game feels like an insanly chop headed idea, but also like an acceleration of that process. The first few runs I thought this game was impossible, but after staring directly into the LCD sun long enough, I realised that piece of shit plastic controller cursed me with blindness and now I finally see the light.
Still hurts to look at for too long tho.
I think I legit never had this much fun in a game with an average of fourty-five second long runs. (I really suck)
It's also absurdly simple in it's mechanical components, there is a slight risk of it getting stale for some, but for a quick half-hour+ of play it is highly nutritious in value.
The player can only carry one gun, can slide to go faster / dodge a bit and can choose an additional effect after each completed stage, but the game violently just screams "Aim for the head you fuck and never stop running for your life" at me and all I can do is blush and keep fingering my Reload-Key.

Play Post Void if you like breakneck shooters,
need a rougelite clicking-on-heads laboratory
or want to be visually overwhelmed in the best way possible a non-epileptic, Videogame enjoyer can get for only a couple bucks.

Perfect Vermin is only like three cigarettes long and I puffed two of them just to spite the no-smoking sign at the start of each office.
When the ending and that last line hit,
I was like:
"Damn."
coughes up burning hot tar

I am filth.
Perfect Vermin was cleansing.
I wished smoking, whichever brand is the cheapest currently, wasn't sometimes as fun as smashing up a printer with a sledge hammer tho.
Okay, it isn't nearly as fun as that, I kinda hate doing it actually.
There is a normalised routine in my addiction (and in my country, we had the most % of smokers in our population worldwide for quite a while) which sometimes let's me forget how fucking damaging and stupid it actually is.

I think I just need to stop wanting to destroy myself fr fr
If not for me, than at least for the people around me who I love and involuntarily inhale these clouds of cancerous shit.

Fuck.

What is a healthy addiction to have?
I need a substitution.

The first ever shot I took in my first ever game of any Counter Strike, which I fired completely haphazardly out of my hip, turned out to be a piercing double kill with a single AWP sniper bullet to end the round as the second to last guy standing.
One eastern-European sounding guy in the voice chat went nuts and the next round the entire squad followed me.
I should have just quit playing right then and there, while I was still riding that high, because they soon realised what a fucking noob I actually am and I remembered why I normaly, preemptively choose to mute my squad-fill in most online games I suck at.

Also, as an Austrian guy who loves to paint, I hate that there is an instantly recognisable, shitheaded implication in the gamer tag "Austrian Painter" which was next to the muscle flexing profil picture of a sly nazi, at least -sympathizer, idiot, who hard-carried me the entire next game.
Or maybe he meant Schiele or Kokoschka we'll never know. He might enjoy going to the museum after working out or headshotting some shitters like me.
Nah, we all know who he meant.
I just hate that we all know who he meant.

"Aren't children's Toys kinda scary?"
"I mean, yea, they can be."
"How about we add some flashing red lights or just present it visually with a limited color palette of black, white and brownish reds, kinda like dried blood, aren't they even more scary now?"
"Well, a bit too.. stale, don't you think? But if the artstyle is intriguing enough it could be something.. at least."
"Isn't the nativity of a little kid not seeing how scary this is, EVEN MORE SCARY?"
"Eeehm, kind of, but isn't this in the same ball park of overplayed clichés as all the other idea's we had until now?"
"How about clicking on things? Isn't clicking on things and not knowing how to click or interact with them fucking terrifying?? Like a fear of the unknown!"
"No, not in the slightest. I don't think you even know what fear of the unknown means. That also seems like it would break the flow or immersion of whatever we are even trying to do."
"If we play a disturbing, scripted event after you click the intended and only possible way, I bet you will shit your pants though!!"
"Could we rethink thi.."

CHAPTER ONE DONE

"How about we make the second chapter a bit more interesting?"
"Okay, let's give it a kind of teletubies, happy tree friends vibe. I also think smiley balls are scary have I ever told you that?"
"Whatever"
"Also there will be a fail state"

CHAPTER TWO DONE

"The last chapter will be really disturbing though."
"How so?"
"Dead dog. But it is more implied than actually shown"
"Damn"
"And the chapter is gonna be abstract and creative in ways you wish the rest of the game was.
Except for one kind of annoying physics puzzle you'll waste too much time on"
"Why not ma.."
"Btw the we will call it Happy game. Get it?
Get it? Get it? Get it?"

Roll the credits.

The soul living in this house, formed through the memories we gave it. Stormproof mementoes in it's decade old interior, attached with only the strength of our attachments.
Haunted by no one, only by a feeling, by inevitable change, you can only see clearly once it's to late. Things will transform or disappear, while you aren't looking at them and as you turn back you can only make out their silhouette in the distant fog.
Not the ghosts of past lives, the ghosts of our passing lives. We allow them to wipe the memories of their faces, of who you once were, of who I once was, of all the other's and of the people we wanted to be.
Creaking floor boards sound in your voice as I try to move on.
The Heavy rain keeping me trapped inside whispers our favourite song.
The hum of the waterboiler, cascading through pipework tuned the cadence.
I haven't just missed you, I have also missed seeing you become the person you are now.
Cardboard boxes full of my old stuff in the closet of the still warm guest room, closed shut because they barely reveal anything about anyone anymore.
A single essay you wrote in elementary tells me more about you then all childhood toys combined.
The flickering bulb in the kitchen still burning through it's life even though mom always told you to not leave on all the lights. Developed and unselected photographs left hanging on the line in your dark room, because the memory on them still shines bright enough to feel no need to take them along or maybe the best of them are somewhere else with you now. Maybe you never took them down for me, so can have an Image of your truest self, you want me to know is happy.

As a hopeless romantic, melanchoholic and gamer who doesn't believe the medium needs "real mechanics" to reap it's full potential of interactive story telling, the simple conveyance of that feeling, after living your own life for the first time and a soon, bitter-sweet realisation will hit that everyone else's has also moved on, isn't just more than most games are able to make me feel, it slit my heart into two pieces.
The feeling of sand slipping through the throat of my hourglass, makes swallowing hard like crying.
Or all the other themes cementing this and spaming my cry button.
First love. A deadline on it. Fighting against life's intention to send you down different, distant directions. The undeserved struggles of queerness. Sisterhood. Siblinghood. A family slowly drifting apart, willingly and unwillingly. Being replaced in your job or threatened to be if you don't try to fit in more.
All tied together so effortlessly in this house.

And as a forum-smart Punk, I adored the mixtape of references used to paint angsty teenage rebellion.
All the little nods to female punk bands, Riot Grrrl music and zines, Bratmobile and Heavens to Betsy on the cassettes or Portland local Deep cuts I would have never known, like The Youngins. Buttons with Band names like my beloved The Slits X-Ray Spex, Patti Smith. Nineties Nostalgia I would find while rummaging through my uncles old stuff to steal and repurpose it. Groove Magazin, Fucking magic eye pictures, even written out combos or cheat codes for Videogames, niche board games nobody ever knew how to play, that one very specific "I want to believe" poster with a green-lit UFO on it.
Or the image of the embarrassing, weirdo dad it paints.
Dedecating his life to JFK conspiracies, writing a trilogy of fan-fiction about it, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet and downing Whiskey, all while the attempt at getting into James Joyce collects dust in the cellar. I could go on for hours with these reference-listing reductive redundancies, but I'll just stop myself, the game deserves better than just rattling off all the cool Pop-Culture stuff, which I think are cool. Maybe I should've just left that out completely tbh, but I want some of you to check out these cool female/female-lead Punk bands at least.

I'll just end this write up with this quote, lifted from the Game and shortened a bit.
"The readers want to hear about the quality and value of the hardware, not ruminations.."
Piss off if you unironicly want to read reviews like that. Let that do IGN, A.I. or whatever.
Form your own opinions about the quality and value of the art you engage with and let the art form you.

Just play Gone Home.

Dithering monochrome, shifting baren museum halls viewed through quadratic window panes.
Framed laments hung up inside reject contextualisation and reduction via description, they only embrace the visitor's brief moments of Ascension to the other side of the frame.
An Exhibition too abract to make out, too esoteric to grasp, too short to stay in forever, but worth getting lost in and thankful that you came by.
The passages throughout it's labyrinth speak in feelings I know all too well.

The melancholic dialogue writing definitely hit the right spots for me, some of it reminded me of my own anti-capitalistic ass or even wordplaying compulsions.
In rare instances it fell on it's nose, but those few flew by fast and never halted the pace.
I was gonna spoil one legit bar here, but ///CODA is too short to leak any of it's text or contents any further than reviewing it does.
It's a surrealist, first-person exploration game, so probably the type of game meant to be experienced blind and it costs only like 4 bucks on steam.

The game has this simplistic bleakness in it's critic of profit motivated thinking, being fucking sad with the role you are meant to act in and just capitalistic hierarchies in general.

There is some brutalist minimalism, liminal space wankery in ///CODA, but even with all the worn out associations built-up inside the low-budget structures of indie horror it actually strengthens the narrative's fundament, serves its purpose to underlines a mood and exceeds the decorative gimmick, at least most of the time.
A liminal space is often defined as a transition period, going from one place to another and feeling lost or uneasy inside of that empty uncertainty.
Getting suddenly fired without a backup plan, waiting to finally work as someone who doesn't make you depressed, like walking in a gallery from one abstract, black and white piece to the next with too much naked wall in between.

One thing I have only referenced is how unique the UI and general presentation is. Honestly, I already used the words I wanted to describe it with in my pretentious intro soup. (I think writing the start or a part of my of reviews more like Song lyrics or whatever is gonna be my move now)

Just check out the steam page if you are up for something like this

There was one chapter, which to be frank, I sadly didn't care for at all. I am just gonna say it had some first-person platforming, a fetch-quest and my least favourite writing of the game. Other than that, some invisible walls, which always irk me and the fact that liminal spaces in general just feel a tad too uninspired even with a purpose in the majority of it's use, I'll have to knock the score down a bit. Maybe after a revisit, I'll bump it.

If you like weird, minimalic places with an unnerving atmosphere to wander around in, some sincere writing from which at least some lines will stick in your head, or just games with a museum as the hub then give this solo dev effort by Fin Deevy a try.

There lives an inherent, inescapable, existential nightmare inside an endless-runner, a disarming feeling, only heightened when it additionally masks itself as a rhythm-game. Violent hits of industrial noise bang on my ear drums in unpredictable time signatures, till I am overwhelmed by a metallic taste in my mouth, then they tag-team up with skyscraping, iridescent exoskeletons to lift the ground from below and crush me with it.

When I was still letting top-shelf Zaza disrupt my circadian rhythm to an ungodly amount, a friend of mine would always want to play Thumper whenever he came over and toked Viennese Woppy Goldberg Furrbuger Deluxe Skunk Baba Kush with me. Back then, I caught myself having to find an excuse to play another game instead of outright telling him that I silently hid my panic attacks the last few times we smoked and played this.
Thumper can be a hell lot of fun. Weed can also be a hell lot of fun, your head just needs to be in the right place and Thumper always seemed to push my head, who wasn't in the right place to begin with, through the gates and away from "fun" part of that saying.
This thing achieved its mission to be the the first ever Rhythm-Violence-Game. It made me feel like I was dying when I stared down its barrel and saw a cloud of smoke in front of it.

I am teaching that friend the guitar and had to explain his ass, I don't know how many times, that there are four beats in a mesure (in most of western hemisphere music at least). It is really hard for him to follow the pattern my bass and a drum sample split time into. (His atmospheric playing is dope tho)
Despite, maybe even because all of that he rips my ass at this game, as the rhythm's primary conduct appears visually. He is just better at that and more comfortable with getting lost in the underworld orchestrating it.
I just couldn't. I couldn't let myself surrender to the flow of play with this Video Game. I was kind of afraid of it for some reason. Afraid of letting myself go. Afraid to offer myself into grip of its claws.

Even after stopping with the Scooby-doo dick, Thumper is still hitting some parts of abstract primal fear inside of my brain. Just like Yume Nikki it reminds me of Nightmares I had as a kid and it might sound kinda fucked up, but now I can actually appreciate it for this.

One thing responsible for the auditory dissonance in Thumpers harmonies is the simple fact that the levels came before the instrumentation. The game is a seven+ year collaborative effort from a small indie team, a "Drool" dripping from the corner of Brian Gibson's and Marc Flury's mouths. Gibson also pours one half of it's sweat and blood into a tsunami of noise struck by a "Lightning Bolt". My love for this two-piece band and his unconventional Bass playing in it were the main reason Thumper peaked my interest. The dude plays with a fucking cello tuning, two low bass strings and guitar or banjo strings for the highs, to really stab through the wall of sound, drummed up by the powerhouse Brian Chippendale. Before that he worked for Guitar Hero's and Rockband's "Harmonix" as the lead artist for over a decade. That man is probably in the Top 3 of the coolest MFer's in the entire industry. Although I can't think of anyone sharing that podium tbh, but I wanna leave space due to my Ignorance.

I don't know if my needlessly word playing style of writing way too long sentences, frontacted by trauma dumps pretenting to actually be about Video Games appeals to anyone other than my need to call my therapist again. I kinda like to vent in flowery ways to random gamers I will never actually know, while maybe trying to reach a single person who might relate to any of it or some shit.

Don't smoke as an ecape from your problems, especially not the ones inside. And fucking share with someone when you experience panic attacks, or just when you feel like fucking shit. Even more so when there is a friend right in front of you.(by now I tell that friend all that shit and listen to his)
Hit me up if you ever feel like you need one.
And if you are a stoner who thought about quitting, this Mark Fisher K-Punk Blog Post helped me to genuinely want to change myself.

Anyhow, here is a certified hood-classic Lightning Bolt live performance that encapsulates my panic attacks and eventuall panic-attack-surfing while playing this game.
When I first played Thumper my brain was the security guards, now it's Chippendale.
And neither would have been possible without Gibson.
I hate that I love you so much, it is bad for me.

Thumper is a decent nightmare to haunt your dreams with. If you are up for that or just a kinda half-baked, audio-visually abstract 'rhythm-game' give it a go. But don't touch it if you are already on a tipping point while also dangerously high.