G

So I'm super into weird shit. Even really amateurish weird shit- Ratboy Genius is one of my favorite web series, which, if you're familiar with it, says a lot about what I will tolerate in terms of low quality. I genuinely enjoy listening to the Most Unwanted Song. I say all this to show my credentials as someone with a really high tolerance of- and interest in- what this game is trying to be. Also, its protagonist is an eel, which is one of the cutest and most delicious animals ever, so I was already more than ready to meet it halfway.

G is advertised as a surreal/art game, but it really doesn't stand up as either. This is a disappointment, because the splat on the gamepage sounds super interesting- a floody land? Mysterious and sudden disappearances? Unfortunate gifts? Heck yeah! Unfortunately, the game just doesn't have anything outstanding to it.

The art- simple, Gameboy-style, low-detail blocks- doesn't exactly make one excited to play. Its setting is incredibly dry and pedestrian for a game intended to be “surreal”- normal buildings, normal dirt, normal mines. No evidence of the regular floods, unless one counts the uninspiring lack of anything other than building, ground, and character sprites. There's a tedious amount of space, given that the gameplay involves so much walking (slithering) around. It feels empty- not in the lonely and desolate sense, but in the “art director couldn't be bothered to add any details” sense.

The art is also just not that good to look at. The grass is random pixels. The dirt is random pixels. The sea is random pixels where the tiling is still obvious. Everything is square. It's often hard to tell what land features are supposed to be, because the random pixels all blur together in a visual mush.

The character sprites are unclear- not an asset in a setting where things are intended to be strange. I assumed one sprite was supposed to be some kind of toilet before I learned it was intended to be a hand. Its portrait did not really contribute to the clarity; I learned this from its dialog.

Speaking of dialog...

The art issues wouldn't be much of a problem if the writing were great. OFF, for example, is pretty great despite some weak pixel art, partly because the writing is so brilliant. G is not brilliant. It relies entirely too much on telling, rather than showing; all the characters simply and straightforwardly inform you of one thing. Sometimes, it's a weak joke. Mostly, it's exposition:

I made a wish to have the hand of the G man. You can see how that worked for me.

I know a guy who worked himself to the point of death in that mine. He was as pale as a ghost by the time they found him. We all know who controls the mine; the G man. How is it fair that one person can decide who lives and who dies?

Deep underground in this very city is a rebel gang planning to push the G man out of office, but you didn't hear it from me, no sir.

This is all stuff that could be really interesting if the player could see it play out, rather than just being told what's going on.


This was a pretty good line, though. Got a laugh out of me.

The writing also gives no real indication of who the player character is or what he is supposed to be doing. I know from the menu that his name is Sir Eel, which is just offensive on multiple levels, but he has no apparent existence outside of being a sprite on the screen. Why am I helping this eel on his journey? Because he is the one that responds to my input, I guess. I'm not even sure what his journey is supposed to be, beyond wandering around several screens and interacting with characters who give no interesting responses. I pushed a guy, and brought a guy to help another guy, but I have no idea why, or what repercussions there might have been if I'd refused to do either. The game is an exercise in wandering, a walking simulator lacking the interesting scenery that is that genre's entire purpose.

Through the exposition given by several NPCs, I guess this was supposed to be some kind of religious commentary. (Here I must admit that I did not bother to complete the game; I couldn't bring myself to care enough to wander around and re-talk to every NPC until I stumbled on whatever I was supposed to do next, especially since it'd require continuing to hear that dreadful music.) What I saw from it was tepid, very much Babby's First Religious Criticism, with nothing to distinguish its subject matter from any of the flood of similar works before it. It brings no new views on the subject, no truths about the human condition, just a bunch of “these are things people have said about this,” presented in a format that's extremely unengaging.

I mentioned the music in passing. It is abysmal: a single, slow, tuneless track of random vibraphone tones, incessantly repeating. In a way, it's almost brilliant, in that its lack of any kind of direction, sense, or aesthetic value perfectly reflects the feeling of the game itself. The tedium of the notes- plonk...... plonk...... plonk...... plonk......- as I slooooowly slithered around an uninteresting island talking to uninteresting characters served to push me even further from any engagement with the game.

G fails on every front to be what it intends to. It has the beginnings of something that could be an interesting game, but suffers from a complete lack of development of these ideas.