This review contains spoilers
The computer contains magic. It contains, in fact, more magic when it is late at night and nobody but it's user is around. There is so much strangeness out there, and though most content is funneled now into certain platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok, there retains a mystique about the uglier and messier internet. 2:22am, itself a bizarre internet artifact, comes from a time when this partition of the internet was as complete as it is today, and channels an earlier force of strangeness: public access TV. Its twenty minutes are fairly compelling, and some of its scenes nail the vibe it's going for, but its Unity-blocked scenes' artificiality often detract from the mystery.
What 2:22am does well is being itself. The introduction gives the player the controls, WASD, mouse look, and click, and one piece of advice: to play alone, and to play late at night. The game's moments can be pretty disorienting, so the controls being given early and never changing is appreciated. After that, however, it is just channel surfing through the lonely robot zone. There is a dark, featureless city, a cooking show hosted by disembodied hands, a lonely kitchen, and found footage reels. It has an otherworldly mood at times, like it was uploaded to itch.io from another galaxy.
Where 2:22am falters is when its stitches start to show. With the knowledge of how Unity's default map looks and how blocks look on top of it, it's easy to feel that the game is nothing special. However, this veers into the "I could've made this!" debate, of which I am firmly in the camp of "Well you could've made it, but you didn't..." To avoid that kind of non-criticism, my argument is that when seeking to portray such an odd, alien feeling, one shouldn't use such familiar building blocks. Wandering through untextured blocks doesn't feel like public access TV, it feels like playing Roblox in 2008. Perhaps this sort of Unity game was not quite ubiquitous in 2014, and therefore felt more unique back then, but I don't know.
All in all, I like a game that is unafraid to be itself, full of strange images, and uncaring about any traditional game ideas. Go smoke some weed and put on 2:22am next time you're alone on a Saturday night. Maybe you'll wake up and forget it even happened, only to recall it weeks later, cutting a radish, looking at the moon, or opening the refrigerator.
What 2:22am does well is being itself. The introduction gives the player the controls, WASD, mouse look, and click, and one piece of advice: to play alone, and to play late at night. The game's moments can be pretty disorienting, so the controls being given early and never changing is appreciated. After that, however, it is just channel surfing through the lonely robot zone. There is a dark, featureless city, a cooking show hosted by disembodied hands, a lonely kitchen, and found footage reels. It has an otherworldly mood at times, like it was uploaded to itch.io from another galaxy.
Where 2:22am falters is when its stitches start to show. With the knowledge of how Unity's default map looks and how blocks look on top of it, it's easy to feel that the game is nothing special. However, this veers into the "I could've made this!" debate, of which I am firmly in the camp of "Well you could've made it, but you didn't..." To avoid that kind of non-criticism, my argument is that when seeking to portray such an odd, alien feeling, one shouldn't use such familiar building blocks. Wandering through untextured blocks doesn't feel like public access TV, it feels like playing Roblox in 2008. Perhaps this sort of Unity game was not quite ubiquitous in 2014, and therefore felt more unique back then, but I don't know.
All in all, I like a game that is unafraid to be itself, full of strange images, and uncaring about any traditional game ideas. Go smoke some weed and put on 2:22am next time you're alone on a Saturday night. Maybe you'll wake up and forget it even happened, only to recall it weeks later, cutting a radish, looking at the moon, or opening the refrigerator.