Did anyone else play the anticlimactic, anxiety-mixed-with-boredom-inducing 2014 roguelike puzzle game Road Not Taken (by the devs of Realm of the Mad God)? I think about that game a lot.
I won’t say it’s underrated because it’s not, but it delivers an experience no other game does and it at least deserves more analysis and criticism than it got. It’s deliberately structured as a metaphor for life, and it is one but not the one they thought they were making.
It’s never a good game, nor is it ever bad to the point of active agony. It’s that the same time as doing a lot of intriguing unexpected things, it slowly flattens your mood. The aspects of the game design that are deliberately player-hostile do land (while being humorless and undramatic, totally unlike Souls’s sadistic comedies) and the parts that are supposed to counterbalance this by feeling rewarding or relatable fizzle completely. You try to see the bright side and the complexities of the game and how it’s challenging you, but however you turn it in your mind the bad side always seems to outweigh the good, and still you question if you are just missing the right way to appreciate it.
It’s like life as it feels in days of dimly-anxious languishing. And it’s all quite bland and unimpressive, it even lacks the satisfaction of fully immersing yourself into the depths of emotional darkness or of life’s lack of meaning. It remains at the trite surface of those dark feelings – which for me in unhappy times in my life, is often where I found myself spending most of my time, sometimes feeling frustrated that I couldn’t even muster actual sadness or grim thoughts that were even interesting or relatable.