NO THING

My first hour with NO THING felt like receiving a fax from a dimension that runs on cold wave music and bureaucratic dread. The concept is stripped to bone: you are an office clerk, you must deliver a message to the Queen of Ice, and the only inputs available to you are left and right. That is the whole game, and it is quietly merciless. Mechanically it sits closest to what people call a first-person constant runner. The path ahead auto-scrolls, you press left or right at corners, and if you miss your timing by even a fraction you fall off the edge and restart the level from zero. No checkpoints. No lives counter with a friendly reset. Just the corridor, the turn, and the drop. The speed creeps upward the further you push into each of the twelve levels, so what begins as a hypnotic stroll transforms into something closer to a reaction test with mounting dread. Players who remember the particular punishment loop of Super Hexagon will recognise the rhythm: memorise, mistime, restart, inch further, repeat. The level design is fixed rather than procedurally generated, which means the patterns are learnable, but the surreal visual layer actively works against that learning. And the visual layer is genuinely something. Looming faces, architectural fragments, and disembodied hands materialize in the foreground and background while you are trying to track the path. The palette shifts colour by level, monotone and severe, and the retro full-3D geometry has a strange quality reminiscent of early 90s dungeon crawlers rendered through a fever. A robotic voice issues abstract commands as you run. The story of the office clerk and the Queen of Ice is technically present in text at the bottom of the screen, but the game knows you will not read it at speed. That tension between narrative and action feels intentional rather than neglectful, a little parable about totalitarian obedience dressed up as a score-chaser. The original cold wave soundtrack shifts tone between levels, offering something between industrial, chiptune, and something genuinely uncategorisable. On repeat loops it can drift toward hypnotic numbness, which is either a problem or the whole point depending on your patience threshold. The honest caveats are short. The soundtrack loops are brief enough to notice after a few deaths on the same level, and players who want narrative payoff in the traditional sense will find the story too oblique to satisfy. The game is also very short in real-time if you happen to be skilled at this genre, clocking around four hours of average completion, though "average" here hides a lot of frustrating restarts for most people. What NO THING does not do is outstay itself. It arrives, it disorients you, it makes you earn every corner, and then it lets go. For a certain kind of player, specifically the kind who likes mood-forward arcade precision and does not need a reward beyond the act of getting through, this small strange thing from Evil Indie Games lands with more weight than its file size suggests. Put headphones on. The soundtrack earns it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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