Welcome to the Universe by Colton Olds
Playtime: 33 minutes (23 minutes to first ending)
The one that’s: a whole-life simulator and a series of academic summaries intermixed
- the writing
The writing in the academic parts was pitch-perfect, really nailing a sort of dry, high-jargon voice.
I had a love / less-than-love relationship with writing in the life simulator parts. It had a very appealing energy which perked me right up. When it was working it was really working (I liked the opening screen and the goop joke particularly.)
But there was also a sense of manicness, or swinging really hard at every sentence.
behind the cut because I feel bad being so nitpicky
Is “panacea” the right word here? I read the sentence more to mean that the playground is a place where shower thoughts and pointless conversations flourish, not where they are cured.
I take it “catch ardency” is “catch fire” zhushed up. At sunset a palm tree might appear like it was on fire, but I take it we’re talking about the middle of the day. So I guess the palm tree is literally catching fire because it’s so hot! A palm tree literally on fire from the heat is a sort of striking, post-apocalyptic image that I would expect to be emphasized in a sentence, but the way this is phrased actually buries it.
In line with the manic feel, the life simulator loves to offer dichotomous choices, which the game follows up by intensely hyping up whichever option you chose. (You still get the same vignettes in the same order, either way. The contrast between what you get on option A and option B was sometimes pretty funny—on “I like good jokes” you get an entire screed railing against clowns; on “I like bad jokes” you get “Hahaha! Clowns!”)
Some of the description could also be more specific:
- overall
I think that we’re later told the academic-guy wrote the life-simulator, which I found very hard to believe (the voice the life simulator is written in is consistent, not like someone was writing it across their entire life. And I’m to believe someone with tenure wrote that survey?)
I think my biggest issue was a pervasive feeling of insincerity. At some level, the meta jokes and the “haha look at what we’re doing” is corrosive to the kind of true-ness that would make a “this game sums up a human life” ending land. (I mean, the first ending I got was literally a link to the tvtropes page “Joke Ending”.)
| Front matter | ||
|---|---|---|
| Could better set the table for the game | Successfully sets the table for the game | Successfully sets the table for the game PLUS |
The blurb conveyed very little to me, which was a missed opportunity for me to get in a receptive frame of mind.
Overall, invigorating writing and some interesting ideas, but too over-the-top and uneven to make an emotional connection with me
Gameplay tips / typos
- “Menthos” should be “Mentos”