Killing Time At Lightspeed: Enhanced Edition
released on Jul 05, 2016
Browse social media at the speed of light. Watch your friends grow old in the blink of an eye. Realise there's nothing you can do about it. Tell your friends you love them one last time.
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Enhanced Edition
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A 20 minute game about browsing the internet while moving at lightspeed. In a single half hour, years have passed for your friends.
More than anything, its a game about a Feeling. Almost instantly after you've left the planet, technology starts advancing at a rapid pace. Implants, synthetic rights, police crackdowns, all these factors become everyday issues for your online friends. As they get into their facebook arguments and debates, it immediately creates that sensation of feeling lost. You can try to keep in contact as best you can, but the only prompts you can send to people just expose your ignorance about the world. It can be frustrating to have such limited responses, but it conveys just how lost you are as your friends drift on through life.
Its not a particularly elaborate game and its not trying to be. There seems to be some minor changes to posts depending on your actions, but its hard to pinpoint the exact cause. That ambiguity helps the game's thesis. What impact are you leaving on these people's lives? Over a decade has passed and you've only posted a few comments. Do they even remember you?
On your final page refresh, no one's on the website anymore. The company providing your flight didn't add any other website options, so you're stuck looking at bots while all your friends have moved on. Its the culmination of that feeling of quiet isolation. Even when you get off your flight, what's waiting for you? Lightyears away from friends, rebuilding your life, trying to reconnect long-distance with people who have barely heard from you in the decades. Its messy. Its complicated. Its an uncomfortable feeling to sit in but its the reality of things. Now you have to live with it.
More than anything, its a game about a Feeling. Almost instantly after you've left the planet, technology starts advancing at a rapid pace. Implants, synthetic rights, police crackdowns, all these factors become everyday issues for your online friends. As they get into their facebook arguments and debates, it immediately creates that sensation of feeling lost. You can try to keep in contact as best you can, but the only prompts you can send to people just expose your ignorance about the world. It can be frustrating to have such limited responses, but it conveys just how lost you are as your friends drift on through life.
Its not a particularly elaborate game and its not trying to be. There seems to be some minor changes to posts depending on your actions, but its hard to pinpoint the exact cause. That ambiguity helps the game's thesis. What impact are you leaving on these people's lives? Over a decade has passed and you've only posted a few comments. Do they even remember you?
On your final page refresh, no one's on the website anymore. The company providing your flight didn't add any other website options, so you're stuck looking at bots while all your friends have moved on. Its the culmination of that feeling of quiet isolation. Even when you get off your flight, what's waiting for you? Lightyears away from friends, rebuilding your life, trying to reconnect long-distance with people who have barely heard from you in the decades. Its messy. Its complicated. Its an uncomfortable feeling to sit in but its the reality of things. Now you have to live with it.
This review contains spoilers
The lack of save system and somewhat abrupt ending dampen the experience somewhat but the premise is so strong and intriguing that the flaws are worth looking past
An enjoyable little experience
An enjoyable little experience
This review contains spoilers
After thinking for a while, I've come to realize that I don't really like this game. The questions it poses and the world it presents are interesting enough, yes, but at the same time there were multiple points in which I didn't find it very believable. I also didn't care much for its characters, which were mostly fine but not that compelling, and its ending, which was just brutally abrupt and unsatisfying.
Perhaps I'm just not its target audience, as I loathe browsing Facebook and Twitter. Watching a group chat on Whatsapp or Discord probably would've made a bigger impact on me. Ah, oh well.
Perhaps I'm just not its target audience, as I loathe browsing Facebook and Twitter. Watching a group chat on Whatsapp or Discord probably would've made a bigger impact on me. Ah, oh well.
A visual novel style game where you are taking a roughly 20 year trip to a space colony that only seems like a 30 minute trip for you. While you are traveling you keep up with news and old friends by checking on and replying to messages and posts on the current popular social media site, every time you refresh the main page over a year of time for everyone else has gone by. A good short game showing brief snippets of the lives of a small group of people as they deal with a frequently shifting tech and political climate.
Haunting. What have we lost by placing friendship behind glass? Life told in status updates and forgotten birthdays. Slowly even the act of forgetting disappears.