~Absence

This game is quite something, it's simple, it's short, but it's absolutely awesome, especially for people who like trippy, psychedelic adventure games. I assume some people, especially those who have a preference for things that make sense, are going to have a hard time getting into this game, but the lovers of the absurd will find it awesome.

Right from the start, the bizarre, nonsensical music and the monochrome surreal graphics set the weird mood of the game, as you set out to explore its small world without being completely sure what your objective is. Every single bit of "dialog" in the game is performed through emoticons and sound effects, without any text whatsoever, which makes the bizarre and mysterious feel present itself even in character interactions. Pressing X (cancel) will teleport the player to a "menu map", where you can save your game and view the items you have, which is also highly stylized and adds to the overall quirkiness of the atmosphere.

As you progress through the game, you collect items in some places, which allow you to open up new maps, trade with some NPCs, club the s**t out of some pesky obstacles and collect certain special tokens... I'm not going to spoil what the objective of the game is, nor how to get to it, but I can assure you that, the more you explore, the more the game becomes eerie and engaging. The ending was absolutely awesome, and it cracked me up quite a bit, don't miss it.

While I did like it a lot, the game is obviously not without its flaws, which I'll try to describe in some detail below.

One of the most glaring I found was that, in a certain map, there's a way to clip through a pyramid and walk outside the walkable parts of the map (picture attached). This is a bug that I particularly disliked, for it added some "negative possibility space", because at first I thought it was intentional, and I kept looking for something secret outside the boundaries... which obviously didn't happen.



Also, while I like this kind of key-and-keyhole gameplay where you have to find items, use said items in previously visited maps to open up new paths, and thus move forward, there were a few (very few, thankfully) things I had to do that felt entirely random, and impossible to predict that they're going to trigger the effects they do. For instance (and forgive me for the spoilers) there was a moment where I had to use a teapot to make an eye inside a heart teleport me to a map. This makes things confusing, because since it's impossible to predict, you'd have to end up trying out all sorts of absurd things in order to find the one that works.

One last complaint: since the graphics are obviously pretty simple and basic, sometimes it's hard to distinguish interactive objects from those that are mere decoration. It happened to me once, and it made me feel like an idiot.

Anyways, all in all, this game was still a pretty awesome experience. Yes, certain parts were pretty much guessing games, but the surreal atmosphere, the satisfaction of discovery (with the key-and-keyhole mechanics), and that freaking epic ending were more than enough to make this short, crazy, quirky game great.