Update One Hundred and Fifty: 2 April 2018

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Replica is another interface game. I correctly predicted it would fit in between Orwell and A Normal Lost Phone as a piece of art. You’re looking through someone’s phone… so you can collect personal information on them and misconstrue a high school student protester into a terrorist.

It’s heavy handed, and I’m not sure how successful it is. The blows it lands are more often accidental rather than purposeful. The pain of an innocent high schooler framing another innocent high school protester for being a terrorist takes on a much different tone playing this game now in America. This game’s ‘Big Evil’, though, is the government being obviously, boorishly, openly evil, like it’s authoritarian from above. The experience I’m seeing my country, though, is that this kind of framing, this authoritarianism, is more sinisterly planted and cultivated in the populace, or certain parts of the populace.

Homeland Security doesn’t NEED to illegally arrest, detain, and disappear about 300 people to suddenly label innocent high school kids terrorists - the populace does that. When wide swaths of the populace decry teenagers who survived a school shooting that left 17 dead as ‘crisis actors’ because those teenagers are now hardcore protesting for gun control in my country, The Big Bad Obvious Meanie Goberment seems like a cardboard villain compared to where the real evil lurks.

I dunno, the game’s just a little goofy and a little too much of a retread on Big Brother themes without anything really new to add. And, Formidolosus, it’s not horror at all, it’s pure thriller (though with a pace so slow it’s not suuuper thrilling). Not a scary-scary game. Maybe an intellectual-scary game. It can get tense.

Next up: From the dark - to the light!

See you soon!