I believe every game should be judged by what it tries to be. An Essay on Insipidity II is clearly not your average action-reward game. It is a story told in form of a game. I would not call it interactive fiction or a visual novel because there is really not much choice to be made or branching paths to be taken.

The justification for using the game format to tell a story is that the multimedia aspect of the game could somehow enrich the audience's involvement with the experience. So that's what I'd like to comment on when talking about this game: the story itself, and how much the gameplay aspects of it add to the experience.

STORY
Spoilers ahead.

An Essay on Insipidity II tells the story of Arkhip, a religious husband and father living in a time of harsh winter and famine. His only goal is to make sure his family has something to eat. He gathers whatever coin is still left and travels to nearest towns in hope he can buy, trade, or possibly hunt anything so he and his family will not starve to death in a near future.

Let's just say he was not successful in his mission, which is not surprising considering the title of the game is pretty much a spoiler. Neighbor villages don't have any food themselves, and they all end up being attacked by barbarians and burned down. In the end, everybody dies.

It's the story of a hopeful religious man in a bleak, hopeless world. Against all odds, all that drives him is his love for his family and his faith, both of which end up making no difference in the dark outcomes of his life.

Now, what’s the point of telling a story like this?

It is possible that the whole game is a commentary on something, but it was not clear to me.

It's also possible that the author just wanted to design an interactive media to convey the feelings of desperation, hope and frustration of the main character. That’s what art does: create a medium through which the audience can experience whatever the artist wants them to experience. If that's the case, let's take a look at how much the game design was effective.

GAME DESIGN

I understand the author focuses on his strength that is storytelling, so the other aspects of the game did not get too much attention. There are no battles or any kind of game elements, graphics are mostly RTP, menus and layouts are standard RPG Maker, and sounds were a mixture of RTP and some nicely picked ambience sound effects.

There were, however, some deliberate design choices that were meant to convey the feeling of being in the protagonist's shoes.

One of them, which cannot be left unmentioned, is the walking speed. On the first half of the game it is very slow; on the second half, even slower. I understand a slower walking speed may set the tone for a game like this, but it is always a risky choice. I also believe games that use a slow walking speed should always try to work with small maps, which was not the case. All maps were broad and somewhat empty, and navigating them in slow pace not only made the experience a bit annoying, but also discouraged any kind of exploration.

Another slow-down deliberate design that I did not like was adding text pauses after every comma and period. The pauses not only slowed down the game unnecessarily, but they didn't make sense in the flow of dialog. Lines like "Hello, sweetheart" came up a bit unnatural, and they were frequent.

The thing is, I understand the author was trying to make the player feel like the whole search was a big frustrating grinding adventure, and it was successful in that regard, although it could have been achieved just by the fact you walk a long adventure for nothing, without such design devices. I'm aware that I am suspicious to call out anyone for using deliberate frustrating gameplay devices, because I have done my share of it. The real problem is that frustration and grinding is only half of the protagonist's feelings that are supposed to be shared by the player. The other half is motivation.

The story of Arkhip is that of someone willing to undergo the harshest conditions and the toughest of luck because he cares about his family so much. In the game, the player will feel the frustration, but I don't think the game is effective in making the player care. I simply didn't really care about my family or saving them. I pushed to the end just because I wanted to experience the whole game and get it some feedback.

There are two ways you can get the player to actually care about the characters. One is by effective writing. Arkhip's wife and children are too generic in my opinion. The message they give you from the start is "we're nice fragile people that you're responsible for, and we'll die because of your failure because that's what the game title tells you in advance". They were annoying burdens.
The second way to get the player to care about characters is by mechanics. If you have both narrative AND gameplay stakes, you get the player actually involved. Any traditional mechanics should work, like awarding XP, getting power boosting items for battles, or just some kind of game score that indicates progress. Pretty much every game with a story combines narrative and gameplay stakes like that, and some do it in more intelligent ways. By forgoing all gameplay elements, you missed a great opportunity of making players actually care about what happens to Arkhip and his family. In the end, I didn’t feel like anything was really at stake.

So, while I think I understand what this game was meant to be, I don't see it as particularly successful. I believe I was supposed to share the protagonist's frustration seeing as all his efforts amount to nothing. I was frustrated, but more by game design problems than the story itself; the story failed to frustrate me because everything that happens was expected from the very first lines in the game.

CONCLUSION

My recommendation for next games would be exploring some gameplay elements that could get the player more involved with what's actually going on and motivated to see the game throughout. If you still want to stick with purely narrative games, just make sure the gameplay is a breeze and not an obstacle in the player's way.