It should be stated that Interaction Isn’t Explicit isn’t a video game first and foremost, but rather an attempt at being an interactive educational art piece about game design.

It is very impressive visually, but since almost everything is in black and white it can difficult to understand what you’re even looking at sometimes. The sound design is great, and is accompanied by a beautiful synthwave style soundtrack.

The game goes into detail about various game design mechanics and philosophies, even citing games that supposedly do these the best. But at the same time it usually fails to uphold these same philosophies, having clunky controls, messy combat and often confusing level design.

The developer’s biases towards which games are ‘good’ and which are ‘bad’ become more pronounced as you progress. In a project like this, having such obvious biases are unnecessary and does more harm than if you were to take a neutral stance.

The developer claims that Shadow of the Colossus is the greatest game ever made that nothing released since even compares to it. That is not true at all and is merely a subjective opinion.

If you are interested in learning about basic game design philosophies being applied in a more practical (yet clunky and somewhat pretentious) context rather than reading about it in a book, definitely consider playing this.