1UP’s Oddcast features a segment called “Recession Gaming” where they talk about cheap or free PC games. This is how I found out about classics crap like Don’t Shit Your Pants or legitimate gems like Captain Forever. While those two titles are great examples of how to pass time or work toward a higher and higher score, Flash games usually fail at completing my favorite aspect of videogames; immersion into another world. I love pure gameplay and I could play R-Type or Lifeforce until I die with little complaint, but I’m particularly fond of being absorbed into a world of intended escape. An engrossing atmosphere or a message without pretension can easily transform a game from a fun waste of time into an experience worth my while, and the last place I expected to find that was a Flash game.
And then I decided to give Every Day the Same Dream a shot, and I found exactly what I was looking for in the most unlikely of places. The initial impression was a little bland; I woke up, got out of bed, got dressed, talked to my wife, drove to work, and sat at a desk. With only the space bar and two arrow keys in play, I didn’t see what was so riveting about the mundane two minute activity I had just completed. So then I woke up again and did the same thing. The next day, like a suspicious Phil Conners, I decided to start to change my apparent habits.
I turned off my alarm clock and TV, which did little other than suggest I had some degree of control in my world. I also went to work without pants or a shirt and neglected to talk to my wife on the way out the door. The end result of that day? My boss told me to go home, and then I woke up again. Then I started doing other things on different days. I got out of my car and met a nice cow, I turned left after I got out of my apartment and talked to a woman in a graveyard, and I admired the subtle beauty of a falling yellow leaf. Each day the woman in the elevator was telling me how many days left I had until there was a new me, indicating that I was indeed stuck in a Groundhog Day-esque time loop, of sorts. So on the last day I decided to kill myself by jumping off the roof of my office building, which completed the dream and rewarded me with a new world free of the bullshit that had previously kept me enslaved (including my wife, apparently).
Somewhere around that point my real life brain ejected from my skull and exploded all over the ceiling. A free Flash game with four shades of grey (literally) and a looping ambient melody had just conveyed a message more profound and engaging than anything its 20 million dollar, 200-person team console have attempted to offer. It was short and far from a commercial product, but its ability to execute on its principle (“a little art game about alienation and refusal of labour. Made in 6 days for the Experimental Gameplay Project”) deserves to be recognized and commended by anyone with even the slightest esoteric taste in gaming. Flower, Braid, Colossus, and Ico were all fairly successful at creating an “art” game, but Every Day the Same Dream might be the current pinnacle of the esteemed subgenre.
And it’s free. Go play it.
