A Game About takes you through someone’s daily routines and their attempts to break free of the hopelessness within them.
In A Game About, you’re left at a bus stop, given options on what to do with your day. Will you go to work? Watch TV all day? Check out a pet shelter? The options seem to be endless, but there is a bleakness to every call you make. You take in nothing but stress from TV. Going to the gym is painful. Everyone seems better than you when you take up jogging. And at the end of each activity, you find yourself right where you were the previous day: standing at the bus stop.
Before long, these excursions start to wear thin, and you find yourself unwell. Doing anything at this time seems to result in the same feelings. The same emptiness appears no matter what you decide in A Game About. It’s wearying and difficult, and all communicated with a quivering visual style that seems to imply a chaotic, discomforting nature in the character’s existence. It is difficult and taxing to exist in this place. But maybe there is something to be gained – a laugh or a small smile – in some of its hidden corners.
A Game About, with its stick man art style and its seemingly-unhappy tones, offers a glimmer of hope within the decisions you can make and the things you can do. Things are dark, but through the sheer willpower it takes to do anything, you are taking baby steps to a better place. It’s a short little game of finding the tiniest grain of hope in moving forward at all.
A Game About is available for free on Itch.io and Steam.
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