Given a chance at life, a choice must be made by a being whose tragic fate is to parasitically grow inside another.
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One of those unnerving three-minute "art games" that got passed around online in the late 2000s. Nothing groundbreaking but an interesting second wave of bite-sized indie design and dark subject matter.
This review contains spoilers
I didn't play many Flash games growing up, or perhaps I simply didn't play the same Flash games as other kids my age. I was kept on a pretty short leash when it came to the Internet back then—instead of Newgrounds, I was on Postopia, or Nickelodeon's and Cartoon Network's sites. At some point I discovered Miniclip, but didn't spend much time there, preferring console games instead. I'm not strongly nostalgic for very many Flash games, and few really stuck with me. But there's one Flash game in particular that burned itself into my brain: a little experience I somehow managed to find called Covetous. I recall it every once in a while, and the death of Flash had me thinking about it again recently.
Covetous is a game with simple graphics that only takes a few minutes to play, in which players control a small organism growing inside its "brother," a small child. The organism is implied to be a tissue mass or teratoma that has formed due to fetus in fetu. Bitter about its situation, it desperately wants to survive. Players guide it around its brother's body from place to place in search of bits and pieces to consume, which slowly kills the child from the inside. In the end, players face a dilemma—is it acceptable to end another's life so that yours may continue?
Though the game is fairly simple and doesn't bring particularly new philosophical conversations to the table, its presentation left a strong, permanent impression on me. The way the child's limbs jut sickly out from its body, the visual depiction of the mass forming inside them, the way consuming something leaves a sickly mark behind, the chiptune drone that could only be described as "wrong," and the blaring siren and flashing lights that sear the player's eyes and create a sense of immediacy when the final act arrives all contributed to something that really just stuck with me.
I can't be sure of how I would feel about Covetous if I played it for the first time just now. But playing it again does bring to mind memories of first stumbling upon it. It seems wrong to say it's "enjoyable," but "effective" might be more apt. It can be played via Flashpoint if you have the extreme content filter off, though you should skip this one if you're squeamish or sensitive to flashing lights.
Covetous is a game with simple graphics that only takes a few minutes to play, in which players control a small organism growing inside its "brother," a small child. The organism is implied to be a tissue mass or teratoma that has formed due to fetus in fetu. Bitter about its situation, it desperately wants to survive. Players guide it around its brother's body from place to place in search of bits and pieces to consume, which slowly kills the child from the inside. In the end, players face a dilemma—is it acceptable to end another's life so that yours may continue?
Though the game is fairly simple and doesn't bring particularly new philosophical conversations to the table, its presentation left a strong, permanent impression on me. The way the child's limbs jut sickly out from its body, the visual depiction of the mass forming inside them, the way consuming something leaves a sickly mark behind, the chiptune drone that could only be described as "wrong," and the blaring siren and flashing lights that sear the player's eyes and create a sense of immediacy when the final act arrives all contributed to something that really just stuck with me.
I can't be sure of how I would feel about Covetous if I played it for the first time just now. But playing it again does bring to mind memories of first stumbling upon it. It seems wrong to say it's "enjoyable," but "effective" might be more apt. It can be played via Flashpoint if you have the extreme content filter off, though you should skip this one if you're squeamish or sensitive to flashing lights.