Many, many blue moons ago, I want down the rabbit hole of getting free games on Steam. What the process of getting these games involved was typically going through giveaways that would force you to subscribe to YouTubers, join Steam groups, and the like. And the end result is that you almost always got bottom-of-the-barrel shovelware. Very rarely, you'd get a gem like Distraint, but nine-point-five times out of ten, you'd get something like The Slaughtering Grounds, Galactic Hitman, or The God's Chain. If James Stephanie Sterling covered it in their series of videos about crappy Steam releases or Steam Greenlight games, you name it, there's a solid chance I paid nothing to own it.

Why So Evil isn't exactly remarkable in these regards, insomuch as it's so transparent in its lacking quality that no one in good faith could hope to have fun with it after thirty seconds of playtime. There's no menu to speak of, the game just kind of starts. All of the UI is done in the horrendous stock-Bubble type that every low-effort, half-assed Unity project made between the years 2011-2018 used to death, so even if you refuse to play the thing, you know. All of this being charitable, however; the screenshots alone were enough to warn off potential buyers, they did not try to hide this at all. Essentially, this wouldn't have been out of place on the CD my brother's friend gave him full of games they'd made when we were kids. Except this had a pricetag on it. I pity anybody who bit that bullet long before Steam refunds became a thing.

The funniest thing about this is that, for a game that touts bullshit difficulty, it becomes almost laughably easy on a controller. When it's not easy, it's just not that fun, and a big part of that is that there's no real meat on its bones. This is, for all extents and purposes, a tutorial project that someone expanded on but refused to build off of.

The only noteworthy thing about this game in 2024 is that you can't buy it anymore. No, not because they tried to sue Steam users, that was someone else. Because they released almost two hundred games on Steam over the course of less than two years and under different pseudonyms. Whoops!

Let me tell you about a fly I once nicknamed Buzz. Two flies, as a matter of fact, because I couldn't tell them apart. Here I am, lying down on the couch of a moving RV. The thing's definitely a bit of an old spirit: the seatbelts tucked beneath, which I've chosen to neglect, are what you find on school buses across America. Old-fashioned, down to the way the logo on the buckle has been scratched off and spat on time over time. Now, if you lie down above the drivers, you get a glimpse of the world as it passes you by: gravestones in the middle of who knows, rocky nowheres, and once the West Coast has flown past you, great American dustbowls punctuated only by the wind passing through the small screen in front of you and the car radio down below. But, of course, you don't get that on the couch. For the price of comfort, I would argue, you get the ceiling. Only if you lean forward in a way you're really not supposed to does the world reveal itself in broader strokes. The problem with the ceiling is that it can't compete with your phone, and the problem with your phone is that there's only a finite amount of social media you can scroll through and music you can listen to before all of your senses go numb. In come two flies, almost innocuous in their immediate presence, willed into existence somewhere in a parking lot we stopped at, never at ease with themselves. I struggle to come up with ways you could keep a house fly as a pet since it'd always find holes in the cage you put it in. But more damning than that, you can't have more than one of them. You can have two black cats but never two flies. At which point does the second fly steal the name of the first? At any point in time you decide to notice them.

I left that trip short of the two flies I had acquainted myself with while staring at the ceiling. Not pets, not nuisances, just things that were there and made me feel... I don't know, relieved?

I don't see how the average experience of going to feed the ducks in your local park is all too different. There are more of them, they're larger, much slower, and less malicious in intent. But the reality is that you always leave the park having acknowledged the adorable creatures beneath you as little more than a temporary relief from day-to-day ennui and stress.

Plastic ducks don't fare the same way. They're a good middleground between flies and ducks: they're small and, in many cases, indistinct enough for you to impose your imagination on something that is decidedly real, and yet they float. They're slow and graceful, and best of all, they stick around. Down to the aggressively yellow color they sport, there's an undeniably charming sense of artifice to them that, expressions be damned, brings a smile to my face.

Placid Plastic Duck Simulator sits at ease in that artificial middleground as a piece of digital artwork, calm with the fact that you cannot feed its ducks more than your own politics and personality if you so choose. What going digital with this experience means is that the well-worn rules of what is both natural and artificial are discarded entirely. Through the use of save games, your ducks are as they were, rather than a natural byproduct of the environment they're in. No longer do two or three Buzzs' pass you by in the span of an afternoon.

But then, what do you achieve when you can no longer let go? What is the value of holding dearly onto something so obviously impersonal? What do you gain from it?

Quack.