There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension
PC
Were we to follow our subject’s lead, we’d tell you this isn’t a review. Nor is this a magazine you’re reading, and in fact you should go away and do something more productive with your time. Paymasters forgive us, but that’s actually not bad advice: this is the kind of game (for despite all its protestations, it very much is) that’s best experienced without any prior knowledge or warning. Just glance down at the score and know that this is one of the most consistently inventive games you’ll play all year. And then come back and read the rest, obviously.
Confused? That’s kind of the point. At first, you’ll hear repeated exhortations from a French-accented voice telling you there’s nothing to see here, while arrows point you towards the quit button, and you’re encouraged to switch off when the save icon appears to maximise the chance of corrupting your file. All of which makes you more keen to rebel, ignoring what you’re told as you click on suspicious objects to defy this increasingly exasperated narrator. You’ll grab a letter to play Breakout, bouncing the rest away, before a further blockade arrives and you dislodge another letter to unscrew it. Then you’ll click an icon to mute this determined guard, grabbing his mouse pointer as it races across the screen so you can pop a balloon holding up another barrier. It’s witty, clever stuff, a variation on the kind of meta trickery we’ve seen in the likes of The Stanley Parable and Pony Island but with a distinctive flavour of its own.
And that’s just the warm-up for a sustained assault of giddyingly creative ideas, as developer Draw Me A Pixel takes a wrecking ball to the fourth wall. You’re transported to a parody of a LucasArts point-and-click adventure which is presented as a theatrical set within a cathode-ray set. Here, you manipulate both the TV settings and the props, while dismantling the interface to solve puzzles whose off-kilter solutions sound even more unlikely than their inspiration. Then we’re into a 16bit Zelda- like adventure followed by its own F2P clicker remake, before a playable credits sequence that by no means heralds the end of the game – and in fact includes several games within itself.
Not everything works. Despite some fine jokes and a couple of ingenious twists, the mobile game parody too effectively evokes familiar frustrations and ultimately outstays its welcome. A few timing-based tasks are needlessly fiddly, especially for a game that would otherwise be ideally suited to less experienced players. But once we’re into the head-spinning FMV endgame, all is forgiven. Cramming more surprises and ideas into five hours than many games manage in
50, There Is No Game is a brain-scrambling treat.