"Art dies in the presence of thought... It lives in that virtual space described by Heisenberg’s uncertainty, in which the moment you name it … it’s gone." - toc fetch

Middens puts the player in a difficult position. Right from the get-go, it makes him promise to be a killer. It hands him a gun and tells him to point it at people, and suggests that when he has done this enough, he will be allowed to feel that he has won. Aside from being a possibly pitch-black take on the nature of grind in rpgs, this is nearly the entire plot of Middens. Roam the wastes, find unusual creatures, and shoot them.

Fortunately, any scarcity in writing is more than made up for by the lavishness of the art. The visual in Middens are a collision of styles, ranging from the subdued tones of a Hieronymus Bosch painting to the spastic technicolor hell of an atari game on a malfunctioning tv. An incredible amount of care and attention was paid to mapping this game, but even that pales before the grandeur of its battle portraits. Every single thing I fought in the trans-spatial rift that Middens seems to take place in, I would have been willing to put in a frame and keep in my house.

Gameplay in Middens, on the other hand, serves as a counter-point to art. Exploration is difficult--given the non-euclidian nature of the mapping in Middens--and a prodigious amount of it is needed before the player can move to the end-game. Combat, another necessity, is long and exhausting. The player summons abstract manifestations of different temperaments into play, and then everyone chips away at the lifebar of whatever fish-on-a-bicycle surreality the player decided to try and kill until it eventually collapses. Sometimes the enemies will try to bargain or plead (in their own half-lucid way,) which was a nice dash of flavor (with the fringe bonus of making the player uncomfortable,) but didn't save the combat from being fundamentally straight-forward and slow. Moreover, after-battle heals don't happen automatically, and are needed after every other confrontation, forcing players to backtrack heavily and rack up frequent-flier miles at save points.

The middle of Middens does drag, perhaps as a result of being so open-ended, and the player's inter-dimensional murder-spree--at first titillating and wrong--passes the point of banality. 30 Nothings is the arbitrary item count that gets you to the end-game sequence. I racked up that plus a few more besides, and my gun had the nerve to call me a pacifist. Fortunately, the ending sequence is much tighter than the rest of the story, and actually hints at character motivations in a meaningful way. It doesn't let too much slip, but for a brief moment it did allow me to connect with the characters, and I found myself wondering how much more of a punch the game would have packed if it had been doing that all along.

Overall, Middens has some flaws, but it's also daring, experimental, and gets you outside of your comfort zone. As one reviewer to another, I'd like to give some advice to anyone who wants to play this. Put aside your notepad. Suspend your critique. Wait until you get all the way through it before you analyze. That logical inner monologue will suck a lot of the fun out of this game. Treat it like you did when you first played Myst, and just explore. It may be that the message of Middens is about the banality of gaming, or that the way to win it is by not playing, but--as long as you are going to play it--there's some amazing artistry hiding beneath the rpg maker surface, waiting to revolutionize your world.