The Stack

Spoilers follow the break.

Almost a “my apartment” game, this game tries to create interest by having things go arbitrarily wrong in various ways, starting with a papercut and ending with the destruction of your house. Well, okay: that makes it sound like it has an escalating dramatic arc. It doesn’t really feel that way. It feels kind of insubstantial. With the exception of the destruction of your mailbox, which necessitates a trip to the bank where a robbery occurs, the problems don’t feed into one another; they’re just obstacles to overcome, one after the next. That bank robbery doesn’t even really affect the player character at all; it just kind of unfolds and gets resolved in the background while you repeatedly type “z”. Although there could be more to that than I saw: I finished with only 14 points out of 20, and wasn’t inspired to go hunting for the remaining 6.

The prose is functional but kind of charmless, except at a few offhand mentions of the player character’s lost past — a wife who isn’t with him any more, plans for children that never came. Those moments, in Hemingway fashion, suggested to me that that the more dispassionate descriptions around them might mask a deeper sorrow. This sort of quiet moodiness is severely at odds with the more insurance-commercial-like tone of the calamities that follow, but it strikes me as a technique worth exploring elsewhere.