It’s fair to say I’ve played a lot of games in my time on this earth and a lot of them have been indie games, especially over the past few years. I’ve played so many games, I sort of pride myself on being able to tell within a couple of minutes whether a game is good or awful.

Or at least I did until I played Dystopicon from Palitroque. I’ll admit I went into it blind. It was just another Steam code from a hopeful publisher, but my first few minutes were not great. Granted, I was trying to fit it in between a myriad of other stuff, but as the screen loaded and I was just in a room with a TV in front of me and not a world of instructions, I did think, “Can I be bothered with another indie devs’ art project?”

More fool me, although I certainly didn’t get there immediately. Glancing over the vague instruction screens and combining them with the fact I knew Dystopicon was some kind of future-Soviet Big Brother nightmare game, I started clicking, and it was far from love at first sight.

As blocky rats scurried across my floor, I had a passive thought to quit and go and play my current indie beau, Sandustry, a bit more, but I kept on. I’ll just give it another 10 minutes.

The premise is simple; the storyline is not. You are a citizen, and you have been housed in a scruffy flat and given a job, which is more fortunate than most. Your job is to watch state-provided TV, and the longer you watch, the more money you earn, which you can spend on essentials. Everything in the game costs cash; food is $2, a shower is five bucks. You are going to need to heat your place too, and that’s another two.

Along the bottom of the screen, you have several meters of your success. Besides your all-important Citizen rating, you have a series of health dials for things like Hunger, Comfort, Fun and actual health. If any of these drop to zero, you are finished. Done for. So the loop is you need to keep earning enough money to stock up on the essentials.

It sounds oh so easy doesn’t it? Read on.

To start with, the TV has three channels you can watch – Politics, Religion and Entertainment. Each pays for your time. Politics 10c per min, Religion 20C and Entertainment 50c. That seems like a pretty easy choice then – just stick on some Reality TV, some Eastern Bloc Love Island (‘From Russia with Love Island’ anyone?) and watch the cash roll in (time isn’t real either, so it’s effectively 10/20/50c per second).

The thing is, you get no actual benefit other than cash for the Entertainment channel, whereas watching state-run Politics will increase your Citizen standing. You can cheese this, but I am not going to give the game away because I think it’s a bug. All the while, as you watch, you are being watched. They know exactly what you are doing at all times. Until you learn to game the system a little, but more of that later.

Your initial minutes in Dystopicon will be a confused mess. Seemingly every few seconds you will be interrupted by various characters banging on your door with veiled threats, information or potential surreptitious opportunities. There’s also a fax machine thing under your TV constantly spitting out stuff you need to read. You need to eat, you need to shower, you need to tidy up. You need to watch the damn TV. Must watch the damn TV.

Certain activities can be performed while the programme remains on. Tidying up your leftovers after a meal for example doesn’t turn it off and you can keep earning, but taking a shower turns the set off. Don’t forget to instantly turn it back on again.

All activities take mere seconds, but things are thrown at you so thick and fast it can be awkward to keep up – and if you think that’s true at the start, wait until you get the code machine on later levels. Now there is something I hate.

As you progress from Second Class to Second Class Plus, on to First Class and beyond, your room will get upgraded. In reality, it doesn’t mean too much, but you will start getting new machines as you mooch through the game. Also, in reality, it just means you get more to do and less time to do it. The plate spinning of keeping all your stats in order becomes genuinely stressful.

None of these weird job simulator games are what you could ever describe as cozy. This one had me clicking every few seconds just to stay afloat and alive, and that’s before you start building in the weird story in the background.

If you think what I’ve told you so far is bizarre, it’s going to get worse. In each room, you will find a grill/air vent that you can crawl through. Doing so will set off an alarm, but eventually you will crawl through to a room where you can switch off the CCTV in your room so you can come and go as you please –  until they find out the CCTV is switched off. In these adjacent rooms, you will find some unsettling, disturbing and downright odd things. 

Disturbing.. and not just because of the human centipede

You are warned at the start that the game features euthanasia and suicide topics, and it’s not long before you find the chap in the next room swinging from a rope. All your neighbors though, appear to be crash test dummies, which takes the edge off it a little, but still. As somebody who has had friends take their own lives, I am not sure how comfortable I am with it appearing in my entertainment. 

As you continue to move through these rooms as the game progresses, the dummies will be more and more unnerving. There is a room where about 10 of them are in the centre forming a human centipede – Google it, actually, maybe not – what all of this means I don’t know yet, because I have not completed the game, and I feel as though I am some way off doing so. But yet I keep going back to it, which is very different from how I thought things were going to pan out.

Be warned, there is some mad old shit in here. I have not seen it all and I am not going to spoil any more of what I have seen.

So, should you play it?

The crux of any review is whether or not you should spend your money on the subject matter. If it is a laugh you are looking for, I can’t recommend Dystopicon, unless it’s a deeply dark sense of humor you possess. As a piece of art, without sounding overly wanky, the game is intriguing, captivating and enthralling but it’s not “fun”. It’s stressful, grim and hypnotically repetitive – does that sound like what you like? If so, then I couldn’t recommend it more.

The game genuinely surprised me because I wrote it off so quickly, but what is here is a clever and unique creation. 

At this point I don’t think I will ever play it again, but I can’t say for sure I won’t load it up again within the hour, when I feel ready for another dip. And I am not sure I have ever said that about a game before.

Dystopicon is genuinely a unique experience.

The post Dystopicon review: Big Brother, human centipedes and the TV you must never turn off appeared first on The Escapist.