hoo ya i like this one for sure mm hmmm

the balance of whimsy and horror just struck the right cord for me, i thought from screenshots i'd have a... distaste for the character art style with the big ol heads and flimsy lil limbs, but it felt right for the game

definitely way less horror and way more dark humor than expected, and that's fine by me! a+

Fellas, don't you hate it when you are playing a dark, introspective pixel-art horror indie game, trying to immerse in this world and setting, and then out of nowhere a fuckING GIANT ZOMBIE MURDEROUS ELEPHANT BURST IN?...Yeah same, it’s such an inconvenience…

Non-funny introductory jokes aside, I don’t actually know how to really start talking about Distraint; I could make jokes all day about how it’s the scariest game ever since it takes place in the most terrifying setting of all … the housing industry, but at a certain point I’d have to eventually say something of value, and that’s where the conundrum I’m facing as I write this comes. I don’t really know how to approach Distraint, a game that aims to be so profoundly satirical and critical while striving to hit a particular note of the horror genre, and yet, seems so… confused, confused at itself, and doesn’t always manage to find the right words to tell its story. Maybe, and funnily enough, the reason I myself I’m having problems analyzing it, it’s because the game also doesn’t quite know how to approach itself.

And it’s strange, ‘cause at its most superficial level and in some particular key moments, Distraint displays a level of genius and gut some games wished they had, it’s a very personal story, far more direct and human than something like Inmost or Lost in Vivo, just to name other two horror games I’ve beaten this year; this isn’t the first experience to explore the horrors of the machinery that moves the entire housing system and the companies that mold it, but it’s one that wants to both to do a profound critic of how it works and the people behind it, and how its effects can affect the most vulnerable of us. Doing this when the protagonist itself, Price, is a creditor/collector seems like something that would come out of a really tricky dare, but for everything I’m about to say about Distraint, I really want to stress how much it succeeds in actually presenting this ordeal. Three last jobs, and that’s it, Price just have to do three last jobs, to notify to three different how their house will be taken from them all for unjust and stupid reasons, and after that he will have the position of his dreams… but at what price? The game starts with the response of that answer, Price knows very well that this is utterly horrible, it makes him sick to his stomach, but like a gear in a bigger invisible machine he just keeps on going, and the game acknowledged that the turmoil that he endures for the rest of the game is the fault of those who are higher than him as it is, in a way, his. For the first couple of minutes, in the moments Distraint tries to be its more human and personal, it’s the moment it really hits, and it becomes almost as horrifying as a big scary moment could be; in a way, you are the monster, Price is the monster, and the entire two hour experience is him trying to hold to some kind of forgiveness, to try and face the turmoil to its face, to go and throw it all out because that’s the best thing to do… only to fail, to just keep being that gear, and to never find peace for a deed that haunts you.

It's through that lenses, a very pessimistic yet more real and close ones, that Distraint becomes an indescribable experience… but the problem is, that is not all of Distraint. It is the core ideas and values the game wants to explore, and there are some really special moments in which the game truly shines, but at the same time, accepting only the positives would be ignoring the… well, the rest of the game. Do you know the phrase ‘’I know writers that use subtext, and they are all cowards’’? You probably do, it has earned an almost memetic status, and while now it isn’t the time to get behind the context and person behind it, it’s a really funny statement that, in some sense, I weirdly partially agree with it. Subtext is EVERYTHING, but it is sometimes good to be explicit, there’s stuff in stories that is very important to get immediately across, maybe because of a sense of urgency within the themes of the work of any given reason. I say this because yes, Distraint IS explicit, but that’s not the problem with it, rather, the problem lies within both repetition and its difficulty to manage tonal whiplash. The throws away the ‘’show don’t tell’’ rule out of the fucking window, with only ONE (1) moment in the entire game where I felt that it actually didn’t beat me over the head with either something overly explicit or that it didn’t tell me before. I got the same feeling you would get when reading an essay of an student that has to get to a certain number of words, and it gets so bad to the point you get contradictions like, even after Price himself telling how doing these acts makes him feel sick and even his conciseness tells him that, half-way through the game a character tells him what he himself basically thought several times and says ‘’Ah, I think I get it…’’… WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU GET IT?! PRICE YOU MUPPET YOU LITERALLY THOUGHT ABOUT THIS 12 TIMES ALREADY! The game is also hyperly focused with the first tenant you evict, and while it makes total sense and I do like the relationship between the characters, it makes it so the other two and barely anything more than a passing memory, specially the third one; you don’t really feel like you get to interact with them in any meaningful way, and the dialogue with them can feel weird and empty, and not in a intended way. Also, there are some comedic or less intense moments I find out of pocket, there are some that I do like, like every time you get to meet your bosses which is so charismatically bizarre I adore it, and an interaction with an elderly woman which it is both funny as it is kind of sad, but aside of those instances, everything else feel… off, and sometimes the dialogue can even diminish the theme of the entire game; at one point the aforementioned first evicted tenant says something along the lines of ‘’Oh don’t worry dear, you don’t have to blame yourself, besides, I’m pretty old so I’m gonna die anyway!’’ which… I know it wasn’t the intention at all, but it sounds so wrong…

Hell, I would even argue the horror games feel out of place!.. Oh god I’m sounding like a madman aren’t I… Look, Distraint’s ambience and visual style is really, really good, the Deluxe edition has made a couple of changes that make the game look fantastic, a simplistic visual style that manages to feel detailed and convey the feeling of rot and decay so well… but that’s where it kinda ends. The visuals are nice yeah, but the sound design is really weird at times, there’s an over abundance of stingers and really loud noises while others seem to be completely missing, and it’s doubly jarring when certain moments DO have cool sound design. And I couldn’t wish enough that the game just tried to go for more quite moments horrors, because it is in that machiavellian horror that that game hits the hardest, and when I just see blood, bodies and FUCKING ELEPHANT ZOMBIES... I feel empty, sure I might jump a bit, but after that, that horror really doesn’t add much to the puzzles or the story itself.

I feel as if the reason I’m being so negative it’s because Distraint simply falls flat in these elements for me, and if it succeeded, I would be praising it far more than I would otherwise, but as it stands, I just wished it was more focused, even more personal and satirical, and experimented with that side of horror it can do really well.

I don’t know if I even really managed to say something after all of this, or if I just spat out nonsense… maybe a bit of both.