The Preposterous Awesomeness of Everything

My first instinct when I loaded this up was to check whether anyone else had ever heard of it. Joe Richardson's debut commercial release sits in that particular corner of Steam where the thumbnail looks hand-collaged out of craft paper and fever dreams, and that instinct is exactly right. The game drops you, naked and bewildered, onto a beach populated by a primitive society that somehow already has rocket parts lying around in a clearing. Your job, nudged along by a friend named Drake, is to rally the community, campaign for Project Manager status, and get that gloriously impractical spacecraft into orbit. The verb interface leans into classic adventure game logic but adds custom actions like "Befuddle," "Disrespect," and "Pray For," which tells you immediately what kind of register you're in. The art is the first thing anyone will notice, and it deserves its moment. Richardson built his world out of a distinctive collage style, somewhere between a ransom note and a particularly unhinged illustrated pamphlet. Characters are assembled from cut-out body parts and exaggerated mouths, and the effect is appropriately grotesque for a satire about civilisation's failures. It does not look like any other point-and-click on the market. That originality counts for something real, and it pulls the game out of several moments where the writing would otherwise leave you cold. Where the game wobbles is in the confidence of its satirical voice. The premise, a primitive society unknowingly re-enacting every bad institutional habit of modern civilization, lands cleanly. The faux-democracy section, where you campaign for Project Manager against a cast of absurd rivals, is the mechanical and tonal high point: it captures exactly how democratic processes become farcical without making you feel lectured at. But the game has a recurring habit of underlining its own jokes. There is a meta moment where your character literally creates a satirical video game to explain the game's themes to the other islanders, and critics at the time called it out for exactly what it is: a work that occasionally stops trusting the player to read it. That self-explanatory impulse blunts the sharper edges. Multiple endings are present and worth experimenting with via the checkpoint system, though none of them land with the gut-punch the setup almost earns. Runtime sits around two hours, give or take, and roughly fifteen thousand words of text accompany you through that stretch. For narrative adventure fans who measure value by density of ideas per hour rather than hours per dollar, that calculus works out. For anyone expecting puzzles with real bite, the inventory interactions are more decorative than demanding. This is also Richardson's first commercial release before his more refined later work like Four Last Things, so the seams show: no voice acting, no controller support, English only, and a checkpoint system that replaces a proper save. None of that is disqualifying. It is worth knowing going in. I have a soft spot for small, strange games that are clearly one person's earnest attempt to say something and get it wrong in interesting ways. This qualifies. The collage art alone would justify a curious afternoon, and the Project Manager campaign sequence made me laugh out loud in a way most bigger games don't bother attempting. Approach it as a mood piece with comedic ambitions that slightly outreach its satirical discipline, and you'll find something genuinely worth your two hours.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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