You hope, as you play, that there’s a common thread pulling this all together, but the scenes turn out to be skits without any narrative relevance, and that’s a shame. The story, which could be better described as ‘things that happen’, fails to coalesce into a larger story, plan or point. There are few landmarks and lots of repeated models, so you will get turned around by the sheer repetition of the environment. You can walk over things that look like obstacles, and you can be blocked by thin air. A map fails to show where you are, where blocked paths are, and doesn’t update as you complete objectives. It’s not always clear where you need to go, and often the answer is somewhere you’ve previously been with no logical reason for why. For all of the fantastically staged moments, A Day Without Me can have the hallmarks of a university game-jam project. The second, prevailing opinion was how clumsy and homebrewed A Day Without Me can feel. A Day Without Me is speckled with these heightened moments, and they may be worth the entry fee alone. It was made worse/better by dying multiple times, and knowing that I’d have to suffer it one more time. A sequence that references, of all things, Katamari Damacy, is utterly horrible. When the tone lurches into something like horror, A Day Without Me creates moments that will stay with you for a long while. The first, and most positive, is that when A Day Without Me gets it right – oh boy – it gets it right. Some minor-league puzzles offer obstruction, but they don’t take more than a few grey cells to overcome. The world distorts around you, weird glitches in the matrix threaten you, and – boom – you’re being chased and it’s time to run away. More often than not, you keep walking until something happens. It’s hard to describe what you actually do. You’re the only one, and things feel incredibly lonely. The title is something of a misnomer: if anything, this is a world without anyone else. You are wandering through a suburban (post-?)apocalypse, with garbage lorries and vans overturned and no-one to be seen. But it’s distorted through a Cronenbergian lens. It’s the quaint neighbourhood, the child hero, the control mapping and zoomed out perspective. There’s the faint outline of Costume Quest to A Day Without Me. Then a ritual circle appears on the floor, demons circle you, and things spiral downward from there. It turns out to be a laptop, cluttered with thousands of ‘deleted item’ notifications, as if someone was trying to erase data, fast. Once you’ve unlocked the doors, a bell rings through the house, so your next objective is to find its source. But things are a bit skew-whiff, as all your doors are locked and keys are tucked on the top of bookcases. You are an unnamed child, and your first job is to get downstairs. You start in your bedroom, in a suburban, white-picket-fence kind of neighbourhood.
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