Defective Holiday seeks meaning from the isolated moments of its mundanity. The ideal traveler believes either witnessing or imagining extraordinary phenomenon can produce identical reverberations in their mind. This drifting opacity goes against the traditional idea of a relaxing getaway, but emerges as a scattershot method to capture surreal spaces between ordinary places. True to its name, Defective Holiday is a capricious but endearing vacation.
Everywhere feels special when you’re on vacation. A change in scenery and a break from normalcy can render even the most prosaic location memorable and conspicuous. It could be something as simple as a different variety of trees next to a highway or as stunning as a nice beach at sunset. When an environment is framed as on vacation, anywhere you go carries the potential to be celebrated and remembered.
This is a path toward understand what, exactly, Defective Holiday hopes to accomplish. It begins with the player receiving some kind of broken orb-like device. You’re being told, presumably by whoever sells or rents this device, that this one is defective. It is implied it will adversely compromise the experience it is supposed to provide. You decide to go along with it anyway. What’s presented is an hour of plausible reality inside of relaxing environments, stressful commuting conditions, and bizarre instances of mania. Defective Holiday is a collection of fleeting first-person moments loosely connected together by indifferent sequences that vaguely approximate the edges of a tropical vacation.
From the beginning, technical resource limitations are projected as artifacts of Defective Holiday’s dreamlike world. You’re on some kind of hilly, rocky mountain path, but everything within a 20′ radius is composed of cloud-like grey shapes and images of an extended environment. It saves the author the trouble of rendering a complete world and it saves the player from veering off course and finding nothing of substance. Defective Holiday uses this device for all of its outdoor environments and it reinforces the fluctuating authenticity of its reality.
Defective Holiday shifts gears at the top of its first area, a mountain path. You stumble into grave site. Then you’ve dug it up to find a coffin. Then the coffin opens to reveal, well, not what is typically found inside of a coffin. This event functions as a thesis for the remainder of Defective Holiday. You’re somewhere that feels both real and imaginary, and there’s something off-balance with your presence in this place. There’s always one element that suggests this is not reality and the implicit challenge is to discover what, exactly, that may be.
These collections of experiences move at a fairly rapid pace. Once the player finds the centerpiece of whatever situation they happen to be in, Defective Holiday fades out and transports them the next phase of the vacation. It is difficult to tell if these events are happening in sequence, if the player is returning to familiar locations, or if some sequences are different takes on the events of the past sequence. A general lack of exposition can feel unwieldy and alienating, especially for players who aren’t accustomed to more abstract and art-minded approaches to game design.
Defective Holiday exhibits a collection of themes and objects that I never quite understood. Coconuts, a machete, and a man in a Hawaiian shirt are in many sequences. Things happen to them and with them and I don’t know why. Sometimes Defective Holiday seamlessly cuts to full-motion video footage of airplanes, palm trees, and fruit shucking. I don’t know why. This is fine, I don’t require exposition or resolution, but I felt like Defective Holiday short changed me on a few clues. It all adds texture and dimension, sure, but I never felt like I was smart enough to determine what much of it was doing there.
I was better able to relate to the sequences of pure mundanity. Looking out the window of the backseat of a car was a familiar feeling. Wandering through a desert and seeing a leg sticking up out of the ground is something I actually did once, (while on vacation). A more haunting reality of Defective Holiday is present when getting off a plane and finding yourself greeted by a nurse in scrubs holding a forehead thermometer, which, as I continue to work during the COVID-19 outbreak, is part of my reality every day.
The point of Defective Holiday, I assume, is presence. This manifests literally through a hotel late in the game, but it’s also the only point of connection I had to Defective Holiday. It felt like I was playing a VR game without it actually being a VR game. The sinister edge of the uncanny valley was there, but it was offset by a specter of unease and foreboding. I could never shake the feeling that I was in peril even though I was never in danger. The rescue that Defective Holiday demands is one that, despite some philosophy-flavored text it sometimes concedes, it isn’t quite equipped to deliver.
I will also confess to not quite understanding the title of the game. Defective only has negative connotations. I concede that there is value in products with flaws, just as there is value in humans with shortcomings, but it’s a weird modifier for holiday. Through a meta-level reading, Defective Holiday may describe its own weaknesses. There are times when it feels like a surreal dive into the unknown and an experience built to connect with the player’s subconscious. There are also times when it feels like a bunch of art assets have coalesced around an indistinct theme. I would err closer to the former, but even the latter reading doesn’t stop Defective Holiday from being a polite way to spend $5 over the course of an hour.
Defective Holiday seeks meaning from the isolated moments of its mundanity. The ideal traveler believes either witnessing or imagining extraordinary phenomenon can produce identical reverberations in their mind. This drifting opacity goes against the traditional idea of a relaxing getaway, but emerges as a scattershot method to capture surreal spaces between ordinary places. True to its name, Defective Holiday is a capricious but endearing vacation.
