For some reason during the early aughts, content strategists saw fit to fill every children's cable network website with free flash games. Whether it was genius synergistic marketing or web designers chasing a strange trend, every animated series seemed to have at least one.

The games ranged in quality. There was the excellent Capcom ripoff Teen Titans Battle Blitz and the minimalist adventure opus Operation T.R.I.C.K. Or T.R.E.A.T. (a strange collab between Codename: Kids Next Door and Unicef). There were also garbage games like Disney's Lilo and Stitch Sandwich Stacker which has a cult following I don't understand.

Olija feels like a good version of one of these games. It's a simple game that tells a simple story with simple gameplay. The difference is Olija has some artistic ambition. It's got the stunning art direction of a classic DOS game, using the ambiguity of the fat pixels to create mystery and tension in its world. Eventually, you learn to read these fat pixels like a second language, realizing what is a ledge and what is a trap.

However, just like the flash games it replicates, there is a hollowness to the experience. This hollowness seems intentional. Almost as if the devs wanted you to feel the haunting emptiness that came with an earlier generation of game design.

I was shocked to learn that the studio responsible for Olija, primarily does contract VR and AR design. For a studio so focused on using its talent to expand our reality, Olija seems focused on making ours smaller.