Say No! More (2021)

Say NO! More est un ovni un peu indéfinissable. Ce n'est pas un walking simulator puisque vous ne contrôlez pas le déplacement de votre personnage, pas vraiment un QTE puisque vous ne pouvez pas mourir et que au final la touche sur laquelle vous voulez appuyer n'a que peu d'importance.

En fait on est presque plus proche de la cinématique interactive que du jeu. Mais c'est bien. C'est très bien.

Le titre assume totalement sa nature de défouloir anticapitaliste. Tu es un.e jeune adulte qui en as marre du monde du travail ou règne la fausse bienveillance de façade ? Marre de pas trouver de job épanouissant et d'enchainer les stages non-rémunérés ? Marre du cynisme de tes managers toxiques ?

APPRENDS A DIRE NON !

En spammant le bouton non, regarde la pyramide hiérarchique s'effondrer et prend le pouvoir.

Il n'y a pas grand chose d'autres à dire sur le jeu. La direction artistique n'est pas très jolie (ya un petit coté Roblox) mais elle assume totalement son nawak avec des personnages aux expressions renvoyant au prime des rage comics, des effets de montage kitsch sur fond de nuit étoilée et des dialogues extrêmement drôles. On notera qu'il y a un éditeur de personnage surprenament complet pour ce type de jeu.

J'ai été très sensible sur le message, très bienveillant et premier degré de la fin du jeu.

Since I am new to gaming I haven’t experienced a lot of the games that others have. Due to this I have friends who would always recommend things for me to play and I would ultimately say sure, I’ll add it to the list. Until my list eventually began to become rather overwhelming. By overwhelming I mean I currently have over 100 games that are either in my steam library or have been recommended by others. When I started streaming a friend of mine brought up Say No! More to me as a joke. He said that I should learn to Say No! More and eventually redeemed it as a channel point reward on my stream. Overall I was looking forward to the playthrough though, even if the title was lesser known with under 1k reviews on steam and it being rather out there in terms of content. The reviews still average out as Very Positive plus I was looking forward to a short playthrough of something rather comical.

Would I recommend this game to people though?

Well, to be honest, with Say No! More it really depends. This game was purely for jokes and the humor, graphics, and style of the game are all rather niche. While I enjoyed the playthrough on stream, a personal friend of mine picked it up soon after and didn’t enjoy the game at all. The game may not be as entertaining to some and personally I’d never play alone. Meaning I’d recommend this for someone to play through with their friends or on stream with others if they don’t mind the dumb humor. The game overall has a very silly story with not much in terms of control or gameplay, it's simply something that you go through for the laughs and probably won’t play through again.

Overall, I wouldn’t pick it up for its normal price of 15$ USD on steam. Picking the game up on sale and spending a few hours enjoying it with friends is worth a shot though. You may enjoy it for the 2-3 hours you play it, or you may dislike it and return it pretty quickly.

Video of this Review:

This is definitely more of an interactive story. It's very cozy in that sense and requires minimal skill or effort. The fun comes from taking the time to customize reactions, which in the end only matter as much as you feel it does. You can run through the entire game in a couple of hours.

The story, voice acting, character designs, graphics, and world-building, it's all ridiculous and super charming. I enjoyed every second of it.

As is pretty apparent by the title, the humour and gameplay are used to construct a fun metaphor for setting boundaries. As a people-pleaser working on 'saying no more', I really appreciated this game, and I think anyone in a similar mindset will as well.

If you see this on sale for super cheap and enjoy smaller experiences like this, I recommend picking it up!

It'd be easy to criticize Say No! More as a rails shooter: There's very little challenge, it's extremely repetitive, and it leaves a lot of mechanical opportunities on the table. But as interactive satire, I found Say No! More charming, funny, incisive, beautifully presented and unquestionably unique. I really enjoyed it!

Say No! More runs with its self-declared unnuanced, one-note premise into the realm of absurdity and stays there - all whilst qualifying its premise in its own title. There's nothing quite like it and it's glorious. Satirical perfection even.

So, you said yes to a capitalist.

Buying and playing anti-capitalist games under late-stage capitalism is my protest of choice, so I was immediately drawn to Say No! More's demo last year. Even as a single chapter slice it managed to work standalone and neatly take the premise to a satisfying conclusion. How exactly it could be expanded on without too much fluff was the question...

And, in all veracity, it didn't convince me early on. Like most self-contained, satisfying morsels that get expanded on, it just felt like more for more's sake and a dilution of everything the demo had. A too much-sel.

It turns it around. One, it gets fun with it. Discovering the word 'no' to fight workplace injustice is treated like an actual superpower with all the audio-visual anime flourishes to boot. Two, the plot is punctuated with lows and highs and twists and turns which help transport the concept to an an emotionally resonant and real-life applicable place. Three, I was playing it wrong.

Every worker gets their own personal trainer under a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Say No! More is essentially an on-rails, power fantasy reaction game. Your only means of control are four reactions to unsettle your opponent and four different rapid-fire or boosted 'nos!' Naturally, I assumed the game was mechanically building up to requiring that different opponents are unsettled/defeated by different reactions or nos - surprisingly not! I can only assume this was a very intentional choice to avoid making a puzzle game or hold up the pace. It works.

What this essentially means is that your contribution to the action is reduced to one of comedic timing. Say No! More hits best when the pace is kept up. My mistake that dampened my fun with the game in those first few chapters is that I was fully exploring every last morsel of dialogue - systematically letting the timer run to its end, and running through all the reactions before unleashing a charged no. Do explore all the dialogue, but approaching things like I did by slowly going through the motions is a sure-fire way of killing all the game's fun.

There are handful of exceptions wherein it's best not to say 'no' that break up the game nicely and help keep your itchy trigger finger holstered. A few achievement-popping examples and a repeat example that brilliantly builds-up to the closest thing the game has to a side quest, but I could have done with a few more. This would have boosted the game's replayability. Still, my early concern that every level would just be peppered with being asked inane variations of 'get some ink for the printer' was crushed.

Where trees and worker democracy grow.

You can call it one-joke, but the advantage of that approach is the flexibility with which the story can be read. For those of you who don't just fancy a kinder capitalist workplace and rally against things like coercive wage slavery, hierarchy, commodification, and all the rest of it, Say No! More doesn't rule it out. Saying 'no' is very much a metaphor for dissent more generally. The real undercurrent events of the story are much more about worker mobilisation and building solidarity. Working conditions and toxicity, unions, overtime, propaganda, a four day working week, etc, all get their mention. The office even looks like a worker cooperative by the end. These explorations more than justify Say No! More's as a full product beyond its demo.

It may not look like much, but its colour-popping, low-poly stylings perfectly match its feel good wholesomeness. The dynamic physics of the environment are also actually rather impressive. Every blast of 'no!' sends people, furniture, and office supplies flying in unscripted ways. Even in cutscenes, the unpredictable reactivity of the environment is played off for laughs as characters freely walk into and knock over items. It's all great fun.

And did I mention the game is funny? Hit and miss? A little. I think the game works better as a blast of wholesome than a bottomless barrel of laughs. Whilst the game is more than one joke, its main source of humour is undoubtedly beating a dead horse until you finally laugh. Even if you don't laugh, characters prove unendingly entertaining.

I don't want to harp on value for money, since I think the game is worth the price of admission. Whilst the price on Steam did make me initially pause, the iOS version is a very easy sell indeed. Parity here would have been great, but I can understand it might not have been possible.

No - pun intended.

Playing like an anti-late capitalism, anime, motivational video straight from your personal trainer, Say No! More is a wholesomeness and hilarity overdose. Say No! More, but just say yes! now.