And Roger (2025)

Sweet, mechanically inventive and thematically apt. Quite a bold opening, I thought I was in for something much edgier; a clever wrongfoot.

Some inventive interaction and the hostility in the interface is engaging; narrative-focused experiences can sometimes feel frictionless and one's interactions redundant, but not here.

To the Moon and Florence comparisons are well made. I probably prefer it to both.

I didn’t really get the overall impact out of this short interactive story that a lot of people are getting, even if I can see why it worked for them.

At first I really disliked how the game is played, particularly with a controller which doesn’t really fit the game’s pointer-based design. Moving that cursor around, you figure out the right way to interact with various abstract buttons, knobs, and sliders as part of little minigames associated with each scene. It can often be quite awkward, but this is is occasionally a positive as it allows some scenes to get across an extra level of tension, frustration, and uncertainty that is core to its protagonist’s perspective. A couple moments also use a simple shared motion to connect two ideas in a way similar to a match cut in film, others intentionally use their UI design to have you do stuff the wrong way and then adjust in a way that makes narrative sense, things like that which work reasonably well.

There’s a sort of conflict where on the one hand the intentional clunkiness immerses you in the character’s experience, but also often kept me at a distance, and the narrative’s overall shape made it hard to appreciate what it was trying to do and land on the side of immersion until pretty late in this already-short experience. Brevity does also feel like part of the problem for me in emotional impact as there is just not much time with these characters, and because of that and the gameplay risks it takes and whatever else about the story and art style and so on that doesn’t connect for me, it remained more an interesting concept to me than something I was very into.

It would be missing the point to call this not fun or not entertaining or whatever, but despite the things I can understand and appreciate about it, it just didn’t quite hit.