No Players Online Classic (2019)

This is a really, really neat concept. It's got an appealing aesthetic to me, I'm a sucker for chunky Quake graphics, and horror set in a dead multiplayer game? Sign me up!

I don't think this game lives up to its premise, let alone its promise. Its framing device is incredibly muddled - you find a 'dusty VHS tape' that's dated 1986 and contains, apparently, direct-feed footage of MS-DOS, which has a server list advertising free skins, which feels odd for a game made in 1986 or 1997, but then the game itself is a Quake pastiche and you're just playing it like normal - and the moral dilemma it introduces feels both at odds with the premise established two minutes prior as well as just plain undercooked.

Speaking of runtime, this game is about ten minutes long and still manages to recycle scares. It manages to make those ten minutes feel padded, too, because it does that intolerable thing I keep seeing on itch.io games where it's madness-inducingly slow unless your finger is glued to shift, at which point it becomes merely glacially slow.

I don't get why a game that's stated to be unfinished and eleven years in development also apparently had a thriving multiplayer scene in this basic and amateurish map with a half-dozen sixteen-player servers. I don't get a lot of the logic about tying your dead wife's revival to an FPS map and I think it's a really clunky thing to make literally tied instead of, like, him trying to bury himself in his work after her death and you need to shut the servers down because this just isn't working out, man but I can accept a bit of wonky logic in these regards if the story and themes actually told are interesting.

Which this game isn't.