Psychopomp is meaningless meaningfulness.
Almost nothing about the game is trustworthy. You inhabit the perspective of our main character, an unreliable narrator who believes the world has been lying to them, creating a device to perceive this world for what it really is. The problem is, this turns out to work, at least, from their perspective.
The game frames it's dialogue through our main character, with thought bubbles of her speaking to the player about gameplay tips and "tips" about the real world. Both of these tips are full of false information with the occasional true tip about the game. What's real here and what's not is hard to decipher, and that's exactly the point.
The gameplay is also designed from her perspective, the UI itself being the mechanical workings of the strange device she's devised. There's literal gears pulling up to showcase her inventory, colored tubes punctuating out of the mechanical brace of the helmet demonstrating her stamina, there's a monitor haphazardly placed to the side of her vision with an image of herself in order examine her vitals. Every part of the game is fed through her perspective.
The game harkens back to dungeon crawler mechanics, but with your primary actions being more within the realm of a point and click adventure game. You look at the horrid tentacle demons with anime masks hiding their true fleshy faces, you speak to large humonoid rat creatures with boobs the size of my head, you touch the warm felt of a metal processing worker's apron who's working under a giant creature's baby-like head who desires you to kill him. You attack in this game with your trusty hammer, which comes down with a satisfying animation and crushes everything into a fine meat paste.
You start off in each area you visit in relatively normal settings, only to descend down an elevator towards this new reality. In one, you're in a hospital wing with Alexander The Great, Cleopatra and Plato propped up by fat fleshy bodies, being kept alive with their sickly ideals until you cut their life support off. The giant creature child who only wants to die is being overworked and exploited by those around him, kids laughing can be heard inside burning furnaces, workers are ambivalent everything besides their work. The world is being exposed for it's true nature in it's most metaphorical sense.
Yet there's also hintings of something greater. There's implications on one sign that speaks of human beings like the writer isn't one of them, there's an entire epilogue sequence where we discover a note that showcases a galactic event occurring that has an entire portion of space blacked out entirely. There's a sign that reads interpretations of what stars mean, only for someone to write over it saying "there are no stars". We take perspective of someone waking up from a motel and speaking to someone on dealing with a future plan that will be unfolding, a new UI and everything to match with our maybe current reality. Maybe it's aliens, maybe it's Gods come to Earth in the form of aliens, maybe it's something else entirely.
Psychopomp feels like a stepping stone into a much larger project. Within the 90 minutes I've put into the game, it's managed to hook me in with it's visuals, dialogue, and gameplay, creating a dream-like nightmare that comes and goes in the blink of an eye. It's a fascinating title that I desperately want more of.
Almost nothing about the game is trustworthy. You inhabit the perspective of our main character, an unreliable narrator who believes the world has been lying to them, creating a device to perceive this world for what it really is. The problem is, this turns out to work, at least, from their perspective.
The game frames it's dialogue through our main character, with thought bubbles of her speaking to the player about gameplay tips and "tips" about the real world. Both of these tips are full of false information with the occasional true tip about the game. What's real here and what's not is hard to decipher, and that's exactly the point.
The gameplay is also designed from her perspective, the UI itself being the mechanical workings of the strange device she's devised. There's literal gears pulling up to showcase her inventory, colored tubes punctuating out of the mechanical brace of the helmet demonstrating her stamina, there's a monitor haphazardly placed to the side of her vision with an image of herself in order examine her vitals. Every part of the game is fed through her perspective.
The game harkens back to dungeon crawler mechanics, but with your primary actions being more within the realm of a point and click adventure game. You look at the horrid tentacle demons with anime masks hiding their true fleshy faces, you speak to large humonoid rat creatures with boobs the size of my head, you touch the warm felt of a metal processing worker's apron who's working under a giant creature's baby-like head who desires you to kill him. You attack in this game with your trusty hammer, which comes down with a satisfying animation and crushes everything into a fine meat paste.
You start off in each area you visit in relatively normal settings, only to descend down an elevator towards this new reality. In one, you're in a hospital wing with Alexander The Great, Cleopatra and Plato propped up by fat fleshy bodies, being kept alive with their sickly ideals until you cut their life support off. The giant creature child who only wants to die is being overworked and exploited by those around him, kids laughing can be heard inside burning furnaces, workers are ambivalent everything besides their work. The world is being exposed for it's true nature in it's most metaphorical sense.
Yet there's also hintings of something greater. There's implications on one sign that speaks of human beings like the writer isn't one of them, there's an entire epilogue sequence where we discover a note that showcases a galactic event occurring that has an entire portion of space blacked out entirely. There's a sign that reads interpretations of what stars mean, only for someone to write over it saying "there are no stars". We take perspective of someone waking up from a motel and speaking to someone on dealing with a future plan that will be unfolding, a new UI and everything to match with our maybe current reality. Maybe it's aliens, maybe it's Gods come to Earth in the form of aliens, maybe it's something else entirely.
Psychopomp feels like a stepping stone into a much larger project. Within the 90 minutes I've put into the game, it's managed to hook me in with it's visuals, dialogue, and gameplay, creating a dream-like nightmare that comes and goes in the blink of an eye. It's a fascinating title that I desperately want more of.