2 reviews liked by duckduckington


When I was a boy, my Dad use to take me to the ponds.
"Bobsicles" he'd say. "Isn't the world beautiful?"
I'd never reply, I never knew how to reply. The world's beauty was lost on me for all of my life. Well, it was.
Then, I played this game......and nothing changed.
Jumbo Josh has a nice ass, despite it all.

This game often gets decried as 'meaningless' due to its extremely complex and layered use of generated verb/noun text for a lot of the dialog, but this is probably the game closest to expressing the exact feeling I have when examining and re-examining surrealist and abstract paintings. The form itself is elusive because what is depicted does not and can not exist. That doesn't devoid pieces of meaning so much as it requires you to get over your initial assumptions a little bit and engage with them honestly.

Hylics is a goofy existential game where the very concept of death is meaningless, where the cycles of life and death are an aside for a Meaningful Quest that neither you nor Wayne and his companions fully understand. Basically, the game's clowning a little on 'traditional' RPGs by borrowing the same structure as them to show the inherent absurdity of it all. TVs give you telepathic powers. Toilets can have items. Go to the moon to fight a dude.