This review contains spoilers
As we do the menial tasks that make up our lives, the ones full of monotony and repetition, there's sort of a trance-like state that we end up entering. We get more space to think about our circumstances. The low hum of the computers in an office room accompanies our every idea, a comfort instead of an annoyance. It's normalcy. It's safety.
Whenever I think about this idea, of getting in my head as a product of monotony, I inevitably end up thinking about Pathologic. In that game, you spend most of your time walking from place to place at a snail's pace, making very little progress in keeping those you're supposed to protect - including yourself - alive. It's a brazen, bold way of designing a game, to be intentionally "boring" in this way. Yume Nikki has some similar blood, but I think that its visuals are much more fantastic and full of intrigue, there's always something to catch your eye on your long walks through the dreams of Madotsuki.
Despite this, Pathologic is still full of weird characters and writing choices that end up keeping the player engaged in that time in-between walks. Its world is fairly fantastical in its portrayal. Bizarre creatures roam the small town on the steppe that are simply treated as normal, and one character has a doppelganger of herself that is never properly explained. But the game Commonplace is a game only made up of these moments of nothingness for quite a long time - and captures them much more eloquently.
An interesting choice made throughout the beginning of Commonplace is that all forms of conflict are avoided as soon as they may become an issue. An ethernet cable gets fried? It's never brought up again. A man is having problems with his marriage? While it informs his character, it's never something taken as needing to be solved. Commonplace depicts the complacent, a status quo that not only is unchallenged, but is beloved. Our main character adores it, and the only people with strong feelings about it wish to regress it backward, like the main character's boss who constantly talks about the "good ol' days". Our main character themself, Sam, is particularly in love with things staying the same as they are - which is why things changing so quickly is so distressing.
When we're presented with the same tasks over and over every day, with structures that ask nothing of us but to conform to their rigidity, any small change becomes immediately apparent to us. The game does such a good job engraving this rigid ritual into you for that first hour or so that, at first, you start to think that maybe you were the one who was wrong and the hallway didn't get longer at all. Maybe your coworkers weren't acting strange that day and it was just a bad day for you.
Maybe the entirety of the office building didn't shift entirely.
Who's to say?
The tedium of office work, day in and day out, will inevitably lead to a mind forever daydreaming. Sam may be happy with their life, but the human mind desires more - and so, it created more for them. An infinite, impossible office building, phenomenologically designed for them to be able to travel through with items placed in all the right places for them to be able to advance further and further into its labyrinthine chambers.
The low hum of the computers disappears, and though Sam's thoughts are no longer orderly, they're more interesting and freeing than ever before. A disconnected, impossible mind palace of their own invention after years of rigidity.
And yet in spite of this freedom, they still find peace in complacency by a lakeside, with one of their coworkers, resting under a full moon. Despite everything, Sam still settled.
Maybe this time they'll truly stay.
Whenever I think about this idea, of getting in my head as a product of monotony, I inevitably end up thinking about Pathologic. In that game, you spend most of your time walking from place to place at a snail's pace, making very little progress in keeping those you're supposed to protect - including yourself - alive. It's a brazen, bold way of designing a game, to be intentionally "boring" in this way. Yume Nikki has some similar blood, but I think that its visuals are much more fantastic and full of intrigue, there's always something to catch your eye on your long walks through the dreams of Madotsuki.
Despite this, Pathologic is still full of weird characters and writing choices that end up keeping the player engaged in that time in-between walks. Its world is fairly fantastical in its portrayal. Bizarre creatures roam the small town on the steppe that are simply treated as normal, and one character has a doppelganger of herself that is never properly explained. But the game Commonplace is a game only made up of these moments of nothingness for quite a long time - and captures them much more eloquently.
An interesting choice made throughout the beginning of Commonplace is that all forms of conflict are avoided as soon as they may become an issue. An ethernet cable gets fried? It's never brought up again. A man is having problems with his marriage? While it informs his character, it's never something taken as needing to be solved. Commonplace depicts the complacent, a status quo that not only is unchallenged, but is beloved. Our main character adores it, and the only people with strong feelings about it wish to regress it backward, like the main character's boss who constantly talks about the "good ol' days". Our main character themself, Sam, is particularly in love with things staying the same as they are - which is why things changing so quickly is so distressing.
When we're presented with the same tasks over and over every day, with structures that ask nothing of us but to conform to their rigidity, any small change becomes immediately apparent to us. The game does such a good job engraving this rigid ritual into you for that first hour or so that, at first, you start to think that maybe you were the one who was wrong and the hallway didn't get longer at all. Maybe your coworkers weren't acting strange that day and it was just a bad day for you.
Maybe the entirety of the office building didn't shift entirely.
Who's to say?
The tedium of office work, day in and day out, will inevitably lead to a mind forever daydreaming. Sam may be happy with their life, but the human mind desires more - and so, it created more for them. An infinite, impossible office building, phenomenologically designed for them to be able to travel through with items placed in all the right places for them to be able to advance further and further into its labyrinthine chambers.
The low hum of the computers disappears, and though Sam's thoughts are no longer orderly, they're more interesting and freeing than ever before. A disconnected, impossible mind palace of their own invention after years of rigidity.
And yet in spite of this freedom, they still find peace in complacency by a lakeside, with one of their coworkers, resting under a full moon. Despite everything, Sam still settled.
Maybe this time they'll truly stay.