16 | THE GARBAGE OF THE FUTURE
16 | THE GARBAGE OF THE FUTURE
by: AM Ruf
Progress:
- I made several attempts to play this game, reaching a few different “bad” endings. Since there wasn’t an attached walkthrough and I wasn’t able to find any reviews for tips to help me, I timed out at the 2-hour mark and had to stop. I was not able to reach what I presume is the “good” (but may not actually be, for thematic reasons relevant to the game) ending where you dump all 100% of the sludge and can leave without becoming a mutant.
Things I Appreciated:
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This game is incredibly disconcerting, disorienting, and nightmarish in its presentation that builds over the course of the game. I felt on edge throughout my first playthrough especially. The seemingly semi-random movements of the hostile bird and sludge-zombie-previous-coworker and constant reminders of where they were, along with the constant flickering/failure of the flashlight created a palpable sense that this environment actively despises you for what you are trying to do. Moreover, the writing regarding the sludge/fumes is especially tactile—it felt truly inescapable, soaking into the ground, the air, your skin, your lungs, leaking from the hose and pouring into the lake. That sensory detail lingers vividly.
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I thought the perspective shift when you become Mutant Jake was interesting. Despite becoming the thing you’ve been trying to escape, and losing some faculties, the world becomes noticeably more inviting. The description for the forest changes, and there’s even beauty to be had in the lake.
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I found the UI to be hostile, in an interesting way. Clicking through the links became this kind of serpentine process, stacking concepts on top of each other only to be unwound again. Though I eventually became more fluent in figuring out where to click to get to key items I was interacting with more efficiently, I never could truly create a durable mental map of the area I was in, it felt like a non-euclidean nightmare dimension.
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The game is thematically very rich. Since I don’t know whether or not the “escape” ending is actually achievable, having not solved it, I would like to speculate on how interesting it would be if it was not actually achievable (that essentially, the game had a fake achievement for this ending to troll you). It would seem appropriate to me because as I played this game, I recognized a familiar pressure: if I only manage myself better, dart in to click the pump switch often enough but still avoid too much prolonged exposure to the sludge—if I always keep track of that and the bird and the mutant and the flashlight just right, I could do this. The manual tells you that you should use protective equipment that isn’t there. It tells you that damaged equipment should be replaced, yet you have the shittiest leaky hose, finnicky flashlight, and temperamental pump that collude to ruin your dream of doing what? Finishing the night’s shift so you can just die tomorrow? Or the night after that? Bill’s previous partner mutated or died. You will mutate or die. Bill will mutate or die. The boundary between flesh and sludge will dissolve; your skin is the leaky hose, inescapably permeable. You might wash your hands again and again, but you cannot wash your hands of this. With that in mind, returning to the original point I speculated on: even if that achievement is real, which it probably is, I don’t know that achieving it would be anything more than a pyrrhic victory, for the reasons just elaborated. But I won’t know for sure until someone else solves the game and discusses it where I can see it.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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I think since I didn’t properly finish the game (as far as I can tell), I think perhaps the most useful thing I could do here, rather than offering recommendations, is just to elaborate on my gameplay approach and describe how the game taught me to play it.
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On my first playthrough, I was completely disoriented because I had no concept that the different areas (e.g., field, hill, shore, path) are around the same truck. Previous games have primed to think of locations being more distinct from each other, so I confused myself into thinking there were at least 3 different trucks because of the different locations that a truck appears at (i.e., there’s the truck that’s at a hill, a truck that’s at the shore, a truck that’s at a field). I think not helping me here was my mental image of “truck” defaults to a pickup truck, as opposed to a giant tanker truck. I definitely could’ve read the context better to avoid these misconceptions. In this playthrough, I read the manual but never found the hose, so I just opened the valve and let the sludge spill everywhere and became a mutant pretty fast.
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In the second playthrough, I was like, ok, there’s got to be a hose. And there was. So I “properly” set up the hose to drain the sludge into the lake. I spent my time at the shore babysitting the pump, but eventually I had the same issue where I mutated before completing the task.
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I tried another approach where I would wander around the scenes to avoid spending too much time at once at the shore where the pollution is the worst, but this would inevitably result in getting killed by the mutant after it grew tired of my attempts to ward it off.
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I realized that the mutant never entered the truck, and the truck interior was also safe from the fumes, so my next attempt was to set up the hose, open the valve, and then sit in the truck for the entire duration of the draining process. I think once the pump switches off, it drains at 1% per turn, so I cycled through clicking Jake → Wait → Jake → Wait → Jake → Flashlight → Hit → Jake → Wait etc. This results in the player experiencing the most mind-numbing radio and conversation with bill. But, it is completely safe from the contamination and mutant, so I sat through it. I think at least 40-50 minutes of my 2 hours were probably just runs where I attempted to do this. I probably shouldn’t have played so conservatively, but I was convinced that any amount of contamination exposure was so risky that I could not justify a reason other than out of boredom to risk leaving the truck after the draining process started.
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The second time I enabled save/loading so I could test what happens once you actually drain it completely. My run appeared to be drawing dead at that point though; after sitting for 100 turns in the truck, the mutant was hyper aggressive and would kill me almost instantly, or I would get contaminated trying to retrieve the equipment. There must be some kind of in-game timer to punish the camping strategy that I tried to use.
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On a late run, I received a hint from Bill that there could be a way for the pump switch to be pressed down permanently. In one of my mutant runs I had gnawed on the switch resulting in a click, so I speculated that it might be possible for the player to induce the mutant to gnaw on the pump switch for you while you’re still human. Perhaps the bird is involved, I never could figure out what to do with the bird at all beyond just scaring it off.
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I timed out at that point, but were I to continue playing, I would have tried to see if I could get good RNG for the mutant to gnaw on the switch for me, if that’s possible.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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One element of the game that stood out to me was just how brutally tedious it was to use my camping strategy of clicking Jake → Wait → Jake → Wait over and over again in the truck. It got me thinking about how, maybe as a game designer, you could discourage a self-destructive playstyle by making it mechanically tedious to perform. I get the sense that the game was probably cuing me not to spend 100 turns in the truck to wait out the timer, and I was being unnecessarily stubborn by resisting the pressure to take any exposure risk. As a game design lesson, it makes me think one could weaponize the situational clunkiness of a UI to help guide the player away from unproductive approaches to the puzzle.
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This game is a good case study in NPC behavior for an IF game. I haven’t seen too much of this yet, but it seems like the mutant and bird move to different locations based on a logic that the player has to decode, with some agency to influence it (by scaring them off, for instance). The player is given information about what these NPCs are doing, with the level of detail dependent on proximity. For the horror atmosphere as well, the constant reminders of what the mutant is doing makes its presence feel appropriately oppressive.
Quote:
- “All around, beautiful and unnameable things slid through the water, casting deformed shadows and reflecting incandescent colors.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- The intense dread after you’re told you’ve crossed the mutation event horizon, but before the transformation has taken place, not knowing how long you have left or what that process will be like.