Felix' Ramblings Felix' RamblingsQuick warnings/notes upfront:
I don't know where to start. Since playing the game, I have a bunch of thoughts loosely flying around in my head. I'm sitting in my room, at the beginning of a small vacation from work, trying to process this game I finished a a few days ago. Let me start with some harmless stuff.
The game has been on my list of games to play for over 5 years. The only reason why I didn't play it earlier was because I had troubles getting the game to run on linux. I was browsing my Steam library, saw the game, looked up if anyone got it to working since then, and yeah - nowadays the game runs okay-ish on linux out-of-box, and with some tweaks, it supposedly "fully works"; or rather it doesn't run any worse than on windows.
I don't even remember where I initially heard of game at this point. I only vaguely recall reading some high praise for this niche game. The steam page doesn't exactly scream "high quality":
The description "I'm sorry for making this" as well as the combination of "deals with topics such as suicide, self-harm and mental illness" with "It's about myself mostly" did peak my interest though. And given that it's free, I added it to my account.
In hindsight after finishing the game, I feel kind of lucky that I only played it now, and not 5 years ago. I'm sure the game would have hit differently, but life changed a lot since then, and right now, this seems like quite the fitting point in my life (although I'm wondering how I would have reacted to the game back then).
It's not really a "game" in the traditional sense / this game falls into the category of
"walking simulators".
The game is a 2D game where you (mostly) control the character "Jon".
The developer's description of the game is quite fitting:
You get a lot of text. You can easily spend 3-5 hours on your playthrough. As such (and probably even more so than elsewhere), from a game mechanics point of view, this game is not very interesting, or even "good" for that matter. Some sections feel way too long, stretched out, a chore to complete.
Let me show you some parts of the beginning of the game. You wake up, and you can scroll through two small screens of Jon's apartment. The "dialogue" at this point consists of Jon's thoughts. You leave your apartment, take the bus to the university, sit down for the lecture without being able to interact with anyone. Then you take another bus home. And the cycle repeats the next day. So far, it's very easy to believe that this is Jon's life, and by extension, the life of the developer.
This is a very gentle introduction, and it quickly transitions to becoming abstract for the entirety of the game. As the cycle continues, the few environments of Jon's life merge together, with your only choice being to navigate a weird, broken, combined space of various things. After Jon refusing to leave the apartment, we get the title card "Life Tastes Like Cardboard".
We enter room containing a cardboard cutout. We get to revisit this room a lot of times throughout the game: We can find (entirely optional) objects, which remind Jon of some random memory. In that room after finding such an object, you can sit down and "talk" to the cardboard cutout (or rather: Jon will sit down and talk to himself about his memory regarding the object you found). The cardboard cutout only ever says "Hello, my name is Rem. I am very good at listening.".
Shortly after, Jon gets to know the only other re-occuring character in the game: Ollie. From there on out, we will walk through various abstract places, occasionally meeting up with Ollie and talking about random things.
I'm not a good game reviewer. I cannot do this game justice by just listing the various scenarios which occur throughout the game. However, I do want to show you a random selection of environments in the game. It really feels like a rollercoaster: Some feel cheap and broken. Some feel broken on purpose. Some look really good.
Same goes for the game contents. To list a few:
I'm not a very artsy guy. I cannot articulate well why I like certain things. I avoid most music with lyrics in them, and for most songs I cannot even tell you what people are singing about, even if I like the track. I don't really care about poems, and I'm not the guy to deeply analyze media (even when forced to, I always struggled in school in that regard).
For games, I usually exclusively enjoy game mechanics.
This game feels different. It's not some story written to "hook you", to make you ponder life - or at least, it doesn't feel like that. This doesn't feel like an art-project to me either. It's not some abstract space designed to the player. And most importantly, to me, this doesn't feel like a story about Jon.
This feels like the story of the developer. "It's about myself mostly" and "I'm sorry for making this" doesn't feel like some marketing bullshit. The game, including the art and including the music, was made by one person. The entirety of the game feels very personal. You get to see Jon being vulnerable. Showing emotions, his dark points in life, him just generally feeling miserable.
I cannot describe this in another way; the game just hits differently. There were sections of the game were I thought the gameplay was bad. There are bugs, and I didn't bother exploring everything either. But I felt intrigued to listen to their story, and even if I know that plenty of people have put their heart/soul into projects of theirs, this game felt personal like none other. Like there is a layer between most projects/games and their makers, which is absent here.
Despite what I wrote above, the game does, in a classic fashion, "ramp up" over time, even if the ramp looks more like a rollercoaster.
You have the "close to reality" start of the game, including a breakdown causing Jon to stay at home. You get a text-adventure-ish part of the game, where you are essentially locked up in your home, unable to do anything, stuck with the same set of menu options until you finally get the option to "curl up on the floor".
You explore a world with some hazy like figures, until you reach a point where your (2D-)perspective is flipped, and you get to see the world from the previously unseen side: The hazy figures show their ugly faces. Comfortable places become haunting and alienating.
Whenever you are with Ollie, the game seems peaceful, or the horrors seem managable. Everytime you leave Ollie, it feels like the Jon is spiraling down, hard.
I'm having a hard time putting my feelings in regards to the end of the game into words. I kind of just end up describing what happens in the game, which is not the point I'm trying to make. When I first finished the game, I interpreted the end as the protagonist killing themselves. In fact, after I finished the game, I looked up the developer for signs of life because I felt like I just played through a suicide note [0].
The day after, I looked up some reviews / video essays on the game. For example, I enjoyed this video essay. They interpreted the ending in an entirely different way (which I don't dislike!). But this also caused me to realize that, when playing the game, I saw the world through my own lense (if that makes sense). Let me elaborate:
When I played through the game, I didn't realize how much of a help Ollie is to Jon. Of course I was aware of the shared moments, of the times where Jon shows his vulnerable side. But I just didn't realize that it was Ollie who helped Jon climb out of the hole each time. Or to formulate it differently: If Ollie didn't turn up, how would Jon's story look like? My gut tells me that it wouldn't be too different, but I know that this is wrong. I am confronted by the fact that I'm fucking projecting myself onto this game.
This lines up nicely with a struggle I have had for the last couple of years: I tried finding some (digital) community in which I feel comfortable, where I want to socialize with others, etc. Gotta say, so far, this has not worked out at all. I don't like the common social media platforms (facebook, instagram, ...). Reddit is fine for browsing stuff, but I have no desire to participate. I tried looking at some Discord-servers, but I haven't found any which I deemed interesting enough to stay in. I gave imageboards a shot, but they even the more obscure ones are often incredibly toxic (or not that interesting). I joined a few Discord-servers of twitch streams I lurked in, and again, the discussions were just totally not aligned with my interests (at least for the servers which had a bunch of active members in them). Seems like "communities" really just aren't a thing for me and I'm working better with just small groups of people. (Although befriending new people has been pretty hit or miss so far).
Compared to Jon, I'm glad that I am (at most) alone, but don't feel lonely. I didn't really had that sense of "loss" when friendships ended or drifted apart, when I decided to leave communities or isolate myself further from other people. Probably helps a lot that my hermit life stems from a feeling alienation / desinterest on my end, instead of rejections coming from others.
Even after all of the rambling above, I'm still having troubles putting my thoughts and feelings into words. After work, after other programming projects other video games, my mind keeps wandering back to the game (and especially the music). Even though I interpret the game as a pretty brutal experience of depression and self-destructive thoughts / actions, I don't get in a bad mood when thinking about that game. I think it's just making me appreciate all the various aspects of my life which I take for granted. I wonder, if I were Jon at the start of the game, how would the game play out?
This might also be the first time where I'm truly appreciating an artistic work of personal self-expression, without the arstist being some close friend of mine. And I can't even say why: I don't know why. I don't know what makes this game feel so special to me. As I said in the beginning, I'm fully aware that other people have poured their hearts and souls into projects of theirs, but I cannot think of other projects of any kind which have had this impact on me.
Maybe at the age of 25, I finally learned to have some empathy with people I don't know? I keep digging through my brain, asking myself questions whether there is some unique aspect which I super relate to but am to embarrassed to admit. I just don't know.
With the exception of The Witness, I can't recall another game where I thought about it afterwards for a longer period, even if I would say that I enjoyed the actual gameplay of it far more. I only played this game for 3-4 hours, that's not even that long.
I feel like I should explore experiences like this more (for myself). No idea how I can do that, but I feel like I'm missing out if I don't.
[0]: The developer is still alive and well; they are posting on Twitter/X on a somewhat regular basis. (I have never been this happy to see furry art, lmao). As of writing, the developer claims to be 30 years old. So given that the game came out 6 years ago, this makes them roughly my age when they released the game, and I don't know how to feel about that.
Felix' Ramblings