Neon laced environments that ebb with shades of jubilant color. A labyrinthine purgatory that lives and breathes. A pervert gun that demands blood shed. An uncountable number of creatures to ambush and destroy.

In Middens the author has left a very personal stamp on the RPG, littering it with the detritus of his own obsessions and anxieties. As it happens Middens is also an extraordinary deviation of deep rooted genre norms that subverts and mocks many of the medium's favorite tropes.

Fond of connect the dot objectives in RPGs? Well...

Unlike other RPGs where heros are conventionally predisposed towards passively towing story plot points you call the shots here. Literally, as monsters will seldom attack you making you the arbiter of your own battles. You can engage them by opening fire upon their unsuspecting forms either instantaneously killing them in the act of your assault or being swept into a turn based duel. This mutation gives Middens almost the underlining air of an alien world Grand Theft Auto where absolute freedom reigns.

Enjoy stockpiling items? Well..

In Middens every item is a scarce resource. Often, you will overlook your inventory tentatively and consider carefully if you want to part with your beloved items. Celestial worms known as Vermis(that's latin for worm) feed on the rift and can be captured and deployed like one-time grenades or collected and savored like personal pets. These worms glow bright as uranium and every single one has a distinct personality and look outlined by the game's author.

Fond of level grinding?

Middens mocks you. Nearly every denizen of Middens is irreplaceable and doesn't return upon being defeated. Each monster encounter pits you against a character on the verge of extinction and your elimination of them assures the discontinuation of their kind. Even NPCs and vital save points can be targeted so if the player chooses they can genocide the world leaving themselves the only being left standing alive.

Complicating matters there is another, parallel interaction of creature fights---the game's antagonist grows stronger alongside you. Not only that, but for every creature you terminate the player is allotted the reward of one 'nothing' and these nothings will ominously pile into your inventory chipping away at the protagonist's own will to live. Like people who forsake the value of living creatures for money these nothings symbolically hint at the evil of greed and the costs of its appetites. One can accumulate all the 'nothing' in the world in Middens but in doing so they will concurrently remove what makes the game so beautiful---its many unique and startling alien residents.

Middens is certainly a triumph of the creative imagination, reordering both the RPG and satirizing the cynical nature of the material world into a disturbing wonderland, and like any great surrealist work, it conveys its themes with shocking sublimity. Like a side-show cabinet of curiosities Middens has much to look at but the pulp of its value is in no singular disconnected aspect but in its startling diversity of displays, potential meanings and eccentric creatures.

I allot Middens Four and a half Pervert Guns out of Five