Reviews from

in the past


This was kind of neat, albeit very bleak.

Certainly a “game” to make you feel something bizarre and not really entertain you. You are given a Game Boy to play and you'll read frequent letters sent to your cell and that's sort of it. Most of this game is just learning the world outside of your cell is apparently dying to some horrid virus, though you'll never catch a glimpse of it, your window is too high up to see out of.
I thought it was interesting how I hit a certain point where I was just apathetic about the outside world. Good or bad, it doesn't matter much to my prisoner, who at this point only really lives to hopefully escape (unlikely) or beat the absurdly difficult games on his Game Boy. I found Charlotte, a woman confessing her affection towards me through writings, to be quite sad as I thought that poor woman doesn't even know a single thing about me, including whether or not I'm even alive. Part of me liked getting her kind letters and another part of me was pissed when they'd slide under my door because now I gotta go read something instead of beating this Snake level. Ugh, Charlotte, how inconsiderate.

It's a sad project as its creator took his own life at a young age. Robert Brock makes you feel a lot with very little in Presentable Liberty and he clearly had visions he wanted to display. I wish things had been better for him.

I think Presentable Liberty is worth checking out. It's free and will only take about an hour of your time.

Presentable Liberty me rompio

La verdad es que para muchos esta calificacion es super exagerada pero esto me hizo llorar, me senti identificada, me senti completamente una prisionera de una celda que nunca fue una

una alegoria a la depresion que como alguien que lo experimento de primera mano es... simplemente desgarrador

Es una pena que a pesar de lo bien que logra representar la depresion no lograron salvar a su creador a tiempo... R.I.P Wertpol

i hate art. i hate art. i despise art. artists should be eliminated... grrrr... art... art.... artt

What you get out this game will be very different person to person, and I will warn that what you might get out of it might be entirely negative. The risk of works that are so personal and heavy is the tightrope of whatever it might handle making any personal, individualistic reactions varied.

I am not a depressive person, I have never had depression or anything of the sort, and I found myself feeling a oppressive sadness from this game. I can't Imagine what that might feel like for someone in a different position than me. I can't reccomend this game to anyone that isn't in a good enough position to handle it.

This is art made by somebody who needed to create something. Art shouldn't always be a source of comfort, art is a outlet by which we examine ourselves.

May Robert Brock rest in peace.

A lot weaker than I remember it being when I played it in my teenage years. I feel like the game's themes and atmosphere are pretty counter intuitive to the minigames Mr Smiley gives you. I should feel isolated, dreading the sound of the clock ticking, anxiously waiting for the next letter to deliver me more bad news. Instead I'm like "Shit, the snake hit the wall again. One more try and I'll read the letters."

In a way the pandemic years and the author's suicide might have made the game a lot more heavy and true to life than it planned to be on release, I'll leave that up to you if that makes the game age better or worse.
Also the cell door looks like amogus.


This game's ending is always heart breaking. There isn't much I can say about this game without spoiling the game. If you are interested in this I definitely recommend it. The whole feeling of isolation and the fact there were only 2 songs that played throughout the game were great. I just wished the game was longer and the pacing was a little better.

Eu queria muito poder ter salvado a vida do criador. Queria muito saber a que ponto essas ideias e projetos artísticos chegariam, pois são experiências totalmente diferente de tudo o que temos até hoje. Te faz pensar nas coisas que podem atormentar até mesmo pessoas talentosíssimas...

Absolute masterpiece, shame the dev killed himself in 2018

I would recommend this to anybody who wants to be depressed or wants worse depression.

Rest In Peace Wertpol / Robert Brock.

Throughout the course of this game, the player is stuck within a single room, locked out from the outside world. Their only method of contact is in the form of letters that they don’t have the ability to respond to. This game’s show dont tell policy really works to its benefit. You manage to get attached to characters you never meet, and get a feel for the ruined world that you’re not a part of and also never legitimately see. It builds up this sense of dread and nothingness that only gets worse as you continue waiting for the time to pass and for letters to slowly arrive. The allegory that it’s aiming for is achieved pretty well, to the point where a ton of players have allegedly had visceral depressive reactions to the whole experience.
It’s pretty short, and I’d recommend at least playing it once to have an understanding of what the developer may have been going through.
Though please do listen to the trigger warnings mentioned in some of the other reviews ‘cause good lord this game gets heavy. If you’re prone to being heavily affected by themes of depression and nonexistence then PLEASE sit this one out.

CW: Suicide, Pandemic, Helplessness, Poverty, Global Issues Getting Worse

On Spoilers: I'm not actually a fan of spoiler tagging the whole document, so I have tacked in a 'spoiler section' point warning within it, with a bold capital lettering along with an 'end of spoilers' section. So just read around those points if you're interested in playing the game yourself and just want to know what I think in advance.

Est Reading Time: 15 minutes without spoilers, 20 with them.
Policy

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Now this is a fascinating one. In this is an apocalypse horror game, the main mechanic is literally 'patience'. It's a sort of anti incremental game, you have no control over anything, all you can do is wait. You are placed in a very small dingy 5ftx5ft prison room with a clock ticking on the wall, a bed, and a thick iron safe door with a grate on the bottom which you can't escape from. Through the grate, letters come streaming in under your jail door from various characters who want to speak to you. The primary one being the antagonist named 'Mr. Money' who has imprisoned you with a specific purpose. You see, a majority of the population has been infected with a very deadly virus, and the only healthy people left are isolated in their jail cells. The problem here however is that a lot of those people are killing themselves, so as a result the game is about encouraging your character through this correspondence and various material gifts, like posters etc., in order to spirit you to keep on living. Since you have no control over escaping from your cell, you just have to be patient and wait for people's letters to read about what's happening in the outside world.

The use of a very limited and garrish grey dented room goes a long way in making your stay feel as uncomfortable as possible, with some incredibly strong sound design backing it. There's a constant wind and clattering noise that brings an eerie quality to it all. The visual design of the letters and posters you adorn over time, while somewhat amateur in quality, are still made with a fine aesthetic craft. One of my favorite bits about the game is how each of the characters who send letters have very distinct visual designs around them and font choices that make them come to life.

For the most part, this game has a 'pulpy' quality to its horror where its riding the line as a dark joke in the mania of its writing similar to something like Little Inferno or Five Nights at Freddy's, coy yet dreadful. It grins at you while telling you that the world is currently being organ harvested, like a darker invader Zim (which would be Johnny the Homicidal Maniac if you know what that is). The game also feels less like a 'horror' game even if you might get scared, and more a thriller where the thrill is despondent. Being trapped on a long family drive slightly carsick, or a feeling trapped on a bad slow Disneyland ride. Less psychological horror and more psychological humdrum. That churning of dread in itself is so rare, that it's worth the price of admission on that point alone.¹

Yet, the ticket on the ride comes with quite a few caveats actually. For one, people have reported being seriously shaken up by this game. For one, a website peer Luna, who I highly respect has this to say "I really say this with tearful sincerity that this work should be locked in dungeons behind dungeons so as not to see the light of day ever again."ᵃ Calling it a 'mind poison' and mentioning it made several of her friends contemplate if they should even continue living, as she passionately puts it "I myself went through one of the worst months of my life quickly following this work and I don’t feel like I earned anything from it.". This is a rather serious charge.

Following this incredibly dramatic and compelling rhetoric. There's also the spooky issues this game seemed to anticipate early about our real world condition. Issues of isolation, despondency, and viral pandemics, economic depressions, mass incarceration, and political desperation. Recently its adjacency to the COVID pandemic has garnered with it a great deal of follow-up traction. Which is unfortunate because it seems the author can't enjoy the profound discourse around this game, since there's one final nail in the coffin of its horrific settlement. A game which depicts a highly normalized world of suicidality, in which people risk their lives or kill themselves, has a dev who, 2 years after this games creation, was driven to suicide himself. That all being said I was not really unsettled or disturbed by it too deeply, as I tend to get a lot out of reflecting on the 'darker' parts of humanity. This is not meant to be an 'edgy' point but I love reading pessimistic works like No Longer Human or the philosophy of Cioran, and generally enjoy the genre of psychological horror writ large. So if you have anything close to my proclivities take that as the go ahead to try it for yourself ^-^

Regardless of the interesting relationships to the text mentioned above, I would argue the main trauma the work is trying to deal with, and why it seems so prophetic, is that it is very concerned with the economy. Throughout the game you are told about the shady dealing of 'Dr. Money' who has manufactured a viral plague and then sells people a shoddy antidote. He does it all, selling people's organs, threatening and blackmailing people, war profiteering etc. All for his own pockets. None of this is even a spoiler, this is actually set up in the standard yet gothic incremental game predecessor game Exoptable Money which sets the backdrop for the lore here. You don't have to play that game first but this one is actually meant to be a sequel with events here that were a 'wedged' side plot in that one. We get to read about the decaying of the world: gray, black, and red markets merge into one bloody torturous chimera. As the supposedly pure 'white market' withers away. It's a brutal apocalypse one that Peter Frase, describes in his work Four Futures, as exterminism. He argues there's a punnett square of possibilities that exist after capitalism as we know it, and the one with the most hierarchy and scarcity of resources, and by far the most devastating, is exterminism:

"In a world of hyperinequality and mass unemployment, you can try to buy off the masses for a while, and then you can try to repress them by force. But so long as immiserated hordes exist, there is the danger that one day it may become impossible to hold them at bay. When mass labor has been rendered superfluous, a final solution lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor." ²

More worryingly, one of the reasons why this game seems like it was able to 'tell the future' on COVID³ is clarified in a followup article he did on how the events of covid are a concerning predictor that currently in our real life we are on track for the 'exterminist' endgame hosted by the moment by the Party of Death

"For the Party of Death, the pandemic itself begins to appear economically useful, and the measures needed to combat it can come to be seen as worse than the disease — which, from the narrow perspective of capital accumulation, they may well be."⁴

He then goes on to highlight in that same article a warning, that you shouldn't just think the Party of Death as some indignant GOP candidates, the NY Times, Friedman, and honestly just basic cabal news is pushing for 'opening the economy back up'. I'm not the only one who lived through it either, people were constantly putting down and lifting restrictions every other week it seemed. The accumulation of scarce resources into the pockets of the rich, and clear structural 'violence' viciously merge into one monster, much like the ghastly cannibalistic world of Cruelty Squad. The only difference between that game and this one is you're kept at a birds eye view.

However here's the bit where I think the text is most brilliant, and also the one I find so fascinating. One of the main things that you get early on that you can use to stave off your dreary environment and bad situation, is video games. See, early on you're given a game device, and your hysterical 'buddy' sponsored by the institution to keep you happy, starts to buy you games. It's only after the second game he says he's too poor to get you any more games and profusely apologizes, and then his desire to keep you happy only gets worse from there as he disembowels himself to give you more incredibly basic and simple games.

This to me, is the brunt of the trauma that I felt was being communicated, almost as a sort of open form question 'is it even ok for game devs to expect money?'. Advertised both in this game and the original is a series of 3 failed kickstarter campaigns which, distressingly enough, is still up despite the original creator's death. On top of this, both of the current games he has up on Gamejolt are free, and the kickstarters are about making faithful 'remakes' of these for a pitifully small amount of money. This being a hyperlink in the game, and imbedded as a sort of quiet plea in the ending of both after everything I've described so far, it feels just to include it in a reading of the game's themes. If that's not enough to sway you, the reveal of the first game is using cat fur and human organs as money generators. It doesn't take a scholar to see how economies of suffering would make a game developer feel insecure about offering something or asking for money for their work.

A lot of games on websites like itchio will sell their games in bundles for dirt cheap, there's always sales. The only people daring to sell games at the 60 dollar mark anymore are studios selling AAA exclusives on the newest console. Not even highly polished AAA steam games can resist a steam sale markdown after a few months. So in theory, game devs should not feel worried about this and I'd be the first to reassure them they can price their game however they feel is right without much ethical issue.

But look, let's actually not discard it, lets dwell with this insecurity for a moment. From the inside, it's hard for a highly isolated yet passionate game dev not to see and putting game experiences behind a paywall as not being self cannibalizing the same working class it's supportive of. Even in the best case scenario it might risk doing this. And the various worse case scenarios intensify as our global crises do. Climate change is only getting worse and asking for 5 dollars for a game might have you in a neurotic state that people might starve or miss their electric bill because of trying to support you and your work. Might rack up debt interest just to try out your game. Might lose an arm working at Walmart or amazon just in order to buy your cute independent game everybody is talking about, or worse, nobody. So, if you beg them in the form of kickstarters, whereby you can also try to justify your game dev abilities as a core ability you have then you avoid it right? In a weird inverse way, street begging has more dignity than a paywall from this sort of worldview. All the more sad is that compared to a lot of kickstarters Wertpol was not asking for all that much "Alright, so the kickstarter is over, and failed again at 3188€/12000€."⁴ he closes with "So I guess, currently, it’s ‘on hold’, possibly cancelled, I don’t know. I really don’t feel like thinking about any of this much more.`` The disappointment here is palpable. This is all in spite of the fact it got it 5 minutes of youtube fame through popular lets players like Markiplier playing it. A depressing reality is that when it comes to indie games, most don't recoup the funds to continue developing games themselves.

What is the one counterargument that can be done? Well for the people already dead from these sorts of insecurities about world purpose and ability, there is none. No charitable set of words is going to make the dead change their mind about the value of their art. Or bring much healing to the affected families, who probably wouldn't appreciate having the suicide seen as non-rational, like 'its ok little Timmy was just wrong about how much he hated himself' doesn't ring well. So I must say as sympathetically as possible here, I deeply understand. I'm not out to overwrite the insecurity of one lost and young dev so much as trying to pave a path out for those currently suffering5. Honestly it's less a matter of being rational or not so much as being disconnected from kinships of care.

While not all suicidality relates itself so heavily to the feeling of the violence impacting others and themselves just by being alive, most at least tend out of self isolated loops of despair that are difficult to feel escape from. However if there is any way to quell these traumas for the living, one potentiality might be through gaming itself. In this setting, the entirely grim situation and circumstances can be almost entirely blocked out by minimalist gameboy games. Almost all are actually playable and Buddy mentions to you that the games have frustrated people with their difficulty. There are twenty levels for each and they all consist of dodging obstacles for a goal. They are all fun to play and they kept me occupied from the awful situation. I literally played the entire game hooked on these minigames, grinding through them for badges that would align my room, and stopping to read letters in between, because what else was I supposed to do? What was supposed to be unbearable became for me, actually meditative and fun, dampening the still upsetting tale within. For most of it I was in a better mood than I wasn't. A similar use of gaming inside the game, in order to stave off depression, shows up in 'No One Can Ever Know' and using it lowers your dysphoria from impacting you. It's just as effective in that text as well at 'dampening' the pain of being alive there as well. Computer games dampening the effects of trauma seem to have a legitimate is small amount of research supporting those claims⁵ ᵃⁿᵈ ⁶. So perhaps game devs can take solace in knowing that their games can actually heal a lot more than they think. Even if it's a dreary art game I think the same basic point holds true. And rather than throwing these games in a dungeon, basic optional⁷ yet easy to read in advance content warnings about whats inside of each would go a much longer way than just throwing every game we don't like into a fire. If I sound passionate on this its because these same echos against challenging art exist in the discourses around queer novels in high schools, which many districts including the one I live in in america is currently out to pull from shelves.

Nonetheless, it's this focus on economies as harm, is bound to take an incredible toll if somebody is already having self esteem issues. The constant use of suicide in the narrative feels more like bleak if somewhat humorous at points narrative device rather than something you're supposed to consider seriously as an individual. As a matter of fact your character doesn't actually have a option to kill themselves even with the only 'decision' in the game, you just bear witness to others that do. At the same time, the letters you get from the people who do are wistful 'you can go on where I failed'. I feel like this game is answering a dark echo about economies themselves, which is to say that we call when they aren't working as desired depressions and recessions, but don't actually treat them as such. Which for me at least is a daring form of storytelling.

STORY SPOILERS AHEAD

I think another point where this economic concern comes across is that your main character is constantly being sent letters of pure sincerity and gifts. Your well spoken woodworking friend Salvador will over the course of the story send you a table. Other people send posters as mentioned earlier, and one even a cake.

This speaks to another part of economic powerlessness that people don't really like to address, which is the power imbalance found in gift giving. I'm incredibly poor and for the most part of my life young as I am, many people around me were getting me gifts and nice things. Even in my current state now, close friends and family often send me money, clothes, etc. Some will send me steam games and it goes on like this. Yet I can almost never repay in kind, I just watch as people send me things and have life issues. Sometimes I do something particularly wrong by a friend, and stop being friends. Only to then be left by myself with the present remains. After a certain point in the game, not only do you feel overwhelmed by all of the gifts from the various benefactors, some who you care for more than others, but you can't do anything in return either. This is actually the most direct and specific the depressive function gets and even then its economic, you just literally can't because you're in jail in the confines of the game. More interesting than that, the ones that care the most are equally hurting themselves the most when trying to help. Whereas the evil Doctor Money is the only one who expects repayment for his 'gift' of a jail cell (your organs). Still, eventually there's a physical feeling to the gifts, they don't feel good, they feel like the only vestiges of memory of others as it attaches to the outside. The imbalance of the world of gifts and how it can reinforce a person's sense of looming inadequacy is told brilliantly by your player character having no voice at all.

Finally I think it's worth mentioning where the game falls short. There are 3 characters aside from Dr. Money, who all try to be your friend. One is Salvador, your old friend who ventures across to a different land, who has known you for a long time. Yet, it's not ever explained how he knows to send letters to you since the course of your understanding of the confines of the jail cell exists purely for you, and how they don't get screened out entirely means his feuding for your attention exists only for thinly held narrative reasons. He also electrocutes himself to death via the generator. Then you have of course your buddy who is mostly well written but, his hysterical laughing over text uses a throttling of capitalization and lowercase which combined with a creepy poster makes him feel like way too gimmicky, although breaking character by pleading with you quietly to be happy is neat, they didn't need to write him so psychotically. The worst of them all however, is how they treat Charlotte. Charlotte is the lonely baker girl who lives near the prison and sells cakes. She's sweet and plays you music at one point. The problem however is that she commits suicide and tells you right after you escape 'sorry I couldnt be more patient but anyway'. The other issue here is that she is only bonded to your silent protagonist out of a random knowledge she has that you and her are both the only people not hit by the virus in town. For her to be this lonely yearning flowery girl who commits suicide just before you can get to her, even though she knows you're in there is very twee and offensively exploitative of women for a cheap narrative trick. Which sucks because the rest of the game runs completely fine on suicide. It's not the most offensive thing in the world or anything but it's far from narratively ideal.

Even then, there's other smaller issues too. For example, the Triangle game which meant as a geometry dash clone takes input of several jumps when you press the button, allowing you to fly and even go outside the screen, there's no way to play it without this flying glitch happening since a press takes several jump inputs at once. Another is how Salvador, who does not know the confines of your room is able to build you a table that is perfectly aligned in the room, in fact I think it being too big or small would have encouraged the points being made more.

END OF SPOILERS

The final thing I will say is I don't think it's reasonable to discard difficult art about despair as inherently harmful. This is an instinct I completely get since I found the depiction of despair and futility in Omori and Danganronpa so upsetting I could not actually finish the games. I get the desire to either condemn these titles or at least make them inferior. But self deprecation, despair, depression, etc. are all deep emotions in our real life, and to repress our relationship to their depictions in art is to fall into the same maniacal trap of forced hostage happiness that this game criticizes. The more we repress ourselves from the misanthropic parts of life, the harder it becomes to accept things like Global Warming, Genocides, War, Depression, etc as the violent realities they are. That all being said I will again reassert that this game is not far the faint of heart, its an abrasive experience of powerlessness that counters the typical designs of why people want to play videogames.

That all being said, I know that even after writing all of this I still haven't gotten rid of my own feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. The game didn't give me them, just clarified them in nice ways. I feel kind of bad that as minimalist and simple as this, I couldn't accurately address the various other more nuanced depressions and discomforts in the game. Then there's the dearth in being able to make this a compelling piece to read, it's rather dour and unexciting. Honestly, this is likely because I'm still quite new to writing on games but I also try to put a lot of myself and knowledge into my writing as well. At the end of the day, maybe the fact that I abstracted depression to larger socio political issues means that I'm a bit of a death whisperer. For me, struggling with those feelings are just another part of the disappointments and degradations of life and to that effect perhaps that's also why I find a serious appreciation for art like this as well.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

a. From Luna's insight on the game link. I do end up somewhat critical of this text in this piece, but I only do so out of respect to the original writer as a peer I hold great respect for on the website. Not to mention she was who originally spurned me to give this one a try in the 1st place.

1. Although besides my cautiously positive praise on this game, there's a few other games on similar notes I think are worth prioritizing first, Little Inferno, Static End, and Trash the Planet, along with Exoptable Money itself. You could consider this game a much rougher hard mode to the themes and focuses of these games. Consider those other games just general recommendations in any other case.

2.Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase, sorry no page number on this one its an EPUB

3. I mean "Seems" here quite strictly. I don't believe in Predictive Programming and even if you did, a primary plot point in the story that is revealed is that Dr. Money manufactured the virus into existence, which makes him more similar to Bob Paige from Deus Ex than real life COVID. The pandemic connections are well meaning but not bringing up these facts can accidentally play into the hands of ludicrous conspiracies like that COVID-19 was lab grown. Which leads to other conspiracies like that the elite can just manufacture a deadly virus and various other bioweapons, a sorry conspiracy theory that even my highly liberal facebook dad seems to believe in. There's definitely some responsibility to be had to not just reference where games anticipate the future but also where they don't and probably don't even try to.

4.The Rise In the Party of Death link. For what it's worth, the leftism is not a politics I'm trying to push on you in this reading so much as a general understanding that the world we live in is slipping quickly towards apocalypse.

5. "We found that intervening with either Tetris or Word games four days after the trauma film was effective: participants in both Tetris and Word games conditions had relatively fewer intrusions after the intervention than participants without a task. The evidence for this finding was strong. " Tetris and Word games lead to fewer intrusive memories when applied several days after analogue trauma link

6. "But Colder Carras emphasizes that the genre or specific game isn’t what necessarily helped with recovery. The benefits, she says, stemmed more from the connections the Veterans made with other video game players; the distractions they created for themselves by playing the games and removing their focus, for example, from alcohol or drugs; and the meaning they derived from the games." Study: Video games can help Veterans recover from mental health challenges link

7. My thoughts on Content Warning or the uncharitably termed 'Trigger Warnings' is complicated, because they can be spoilers in themselves in the sense they tip off what a piece of art is about. For some, knowing the exact confines of them all may be unwanted and take away from the 'surprise' of the experience even if having 1 or 2 mental blocks around certain content would make you want to air on the side of caution in all cases anyway. Personally, I'm rather indifferent to spoilers but it's something I think about a lot. I hope one day backloggd allows you to spoiler tag specific sections of text because I definitely would like to make it opt in :/

sadness is closer than it appears

my friend made me play this back in the day and got super fucking bewildered because all i did was play on the gameboy and not look at a cockroach or whatever the whole time

genuinely wish i remembered this game other than the title but i thought it was cool

eu vejo esse jogo de uma forma mais otimista do que a maioria das reviews que eu vi aqui

é claro, é muito triste oque tenha acontecido com o criador dele, que descanse em paz, mas eu gosto como no final do jogo uma pequena esperança é deixada, até pra um jogo que só tem desgraça, fala mt pra mim sobre esperança

Who is delivering these letters? How are you still getting letters when everyone is dead? Where do you go to the bathroom? Other than nitpicks like this the game was definitely an experience and a vibe. Being cooped up in a prison with nothing to do but play unfair gameboy games really made time feel longer than it actually was and the twist was kind of interesting if not a bit forced. RIP Mr. Smiley. Also RIP to the Dev. This really shows how much potential they (and by extension all of us) have.

CW: Suicide/Depression




"I hope you keep going anyway. Always keep going. Don't give up like me. You never know how much more time you have."

What you get out of this game is very dependent on you as a person. For some, it is misery, for others, it could be a sign to never lose hope and keep going.
I personally got the later. Even if, it was a depressing ending, with a sad way for everything to end, in the end of the day, it's a cautionary tale. It's a direct letter from the dev of this game, begging us not to go down the same path he did, even if he didn't realize it at the time. While life is sad and depressing, and there are many moments for us to be miserable about, there will always be people we care about, and music to leave us happy in the fleeting moments, and despite everything, we need to remain hopeful
Of course, this isn't to invalidate the negative experience someone may have with this game, cause I understand, it's a horribly depressing experience. However, this is what I personally got out of it, but on the same time, I perfectly understand why you wouldn't want to touch it as a piece of work.
I just hope you all stay safe, and stay in touch with your loved ones

This game is both bleak and hopeful in many different ways.
But knowing what happened to the creator this game feels like it takes on a new meaning, especially with the Buddy and the baker.
I can't rate it because it just feels so personal, especially now

Um ótimo jogo narrativo para sua época, lhe apresenta os personagens muito bem mesmo sendo por cartas, tem diversas criticas sociais ao decorre do jogo, capitalismo, consumo, distrações, depressão etc etc
no fim foi uma ótima experiência para sua época

why this looks like him?
why i see him?
why i still see him?
what is wrong with me?

(PC - Free)
9\10

rest in peace Wertpol..

What i liked :
(there will be spoilers)
- somehow i feel this game is more important than i give it credit forits one of the many games from my edgy phase that made me appreciate those small weird experiences, started with me being a snotty child watching markiplier.

- OH GOD EVERYONE IS DEAD.

-there are only 2 feelings with this game, panic and anxiety.

- characters, literally 4 characters, and they are all memorable, this game is short, give it a try, you can finish it within 30 minutes

this is one hell of a rabbit hole to delve into, for starters, unfortunally the creator of this game has commited suicide, man, what a shock it was when i learned about it, i have no idea what he had been through, and honestly i am scared of delving into this rabbit hole, but one thing i can say for certain, he expressed himself, went foward and created something that will be eternal, he left his legacy here with us, and for that i am eternally grateful, so many potential artists and great minds die before having the courage to charge forth with their ideas.
if you are one of those bealtiful creative minds that feel trapped, worried about ratings, opinions, please don't be, show the world your ideas, leave your legacy, leave something here so we may know you existed.

Please.

I was both pretty bored and interested while playing this.
Waiting around for things to happen, playing some mini-games to pass the time until you get your next letter to progress the story.
You don't really know what's going on and the way the game is structured, you might either get so bored you drop it, or wanna see it through since it's not a long game anyway.
I did the latter and I'm not exactly sure how to exactly feel about the game or the message it tried to convey.

ENG: Good. This is much better than Exoptable Money. We're in a prison and, surprise surprise, there's nothing to do. Except for a handheld console with fun mini-games to pass the time. While we're distracted, we'll get letters from various people: a doting grandmother who runs a bakery, an adventurous friend, an overly nice "friend", and capitalism itself.

Unlike the previous game, which was in 2D, here we move to 3D. Of course, there is not much to do due to the intrinsic nature of a prison, but it is interesting to see how this space is transformed by the objects that are given to us.

Finally, as is evident, the whole game is an allegory of freedom. Our adventurous friend, so opposed to us, dies. Grandma dies, tired of waiting for us. The extravagant friend throws in the towel and shoots himself. But capitalism lives on.

ESP: Bueno. Esto está mucho mejor que Exoptable Money. Estamos en una cárcel y, sorpresa, no hay nada para hacer. A excepción de una consola portátil con divertidos minijuegos para pasar el rato. Mientras nos distraigamos, nos llegarán cartas de diversas personas: una cariñosa abuela que lleva una pastelería, un amigo aventurero, un "amigo" demasiado agradable, y el capitalismo en persona.

A diferencia del anterior juego, que era en en 2D, acá se pasa al 3D. Claro que no hay mucho que hacer por la naturaleza intrínseca de una cárcel, pero es interesante ver como se va transformando ese espacio por los objetos que nos regalan.

En fin, como es evidente, todo el juego es una alegoría la libertad. Nuestro amigo aventurero, tan contrapuesto a nosotros, fallece. La abuelita se muere, cansada de esperarnos. El amigo extravagante tira la toalla y se pega un tiro. Pero el capitalismo sigue vivo.

Such a bizarre and interesting experience, only about an hour long so can't talk a lot about it but it's worth checking out, it's atmosphere is really creepy and you are very desolate as messages to you start normal but get weirder and weirder. Don't know what to make of it tbh. Also heard the creator passed away after suicide, so rest in peace :/ I can only imagine what thoughts were going through his head while making this. Worth checking out since it's only about an hour long, very strange experience indeed.


I hope the creator rests in peace. Others may think this is nothing more than a game that encapsulates his depression but I think that's fine. It's a testament to his skill. He was able to convey so much with so little. It may not be the most groundbreaking nowadays, but he knew what to expand upon and what not to. I think he had potential, and I'll keep presentable liberty in my memory. I hope others do too.

This review contains spoilers

a lot of people seem to have strong feelings about this game. it might just be that i don't get it, it might just be that I've thought far too much about my own depression for this to say anything new, but... to me this simply seems like a not very good game. it's an expression of the developer's own depression, but it doesn't have any strong, coherent message beyond that. it does a few clever things to mess with the player and a whole lot of cheap, not at all clever things. it's simply not a game worth playing.

Calling a piece of art dangerous is generally a difficult tightrope. Sometimes doing so usually invites people’s curiosity and ends up giving the thing more exposure than you intend. But I really say this with tearful sincerity that this work should be locked in dungeons behind dungeons so as not to see the light of day ever again.

The game is effectively mind poison, it’s a stark depressing work expertly crafted but desperately crying for help as it brings you down the same depressive spiral the creator went through. It does not pull punches and there is no hope. The author themselves committed suicide and I know friends who were poisoned by this work and thought of doing the same. I’m sure there’s people who can look past this, be unaffected even, and call it amazing for the slice of emotion it is. That it’s one of the most poignant works that encapsulates depression so well. But it is for that reason that it should never be played. I myself went through one of the worst months of my life quickly following this work and I don’t feel like I earned anything from it. I wouldn’t wish this game on my worst enemy, because I cannot think of something worse that convinces people to abandon everything they care about.