Curate of Curiosities

Our next game is Every Day The Same Dream, released in 2009.

According to its description, it was specifically made to be an art game, and boy does it show.

It's short, monochrome, and has an important message about today's society to tell. Sound familiar?

Anyways, you start off as a man getting ready to go to work.

As you might have been able to guess from the game's title, the game wastes no time establishing how its main character is stuck in the same routine, day after day.

Every day, he gets stuck in the same traffic.

Every day, he's yelled at by his boss.

And every day, he slaves away at his cubicle.

However, the game presents him with an opportunity to become a new person, to break away from this drudgery. This is the game's main gimmick--in order to finish the game, you need to do five different things that are outside of the normal routine.

First, you can get out of your car while driving. It wasn't immediately obvious to me that you could do this.

Even though we're going to be late for work, there's no harm in walking over to the local farm and petting some random cow.

And while we're at it, let's go see what's at the exit to the office building.

Oh, just a balcony where you can jump to your death. Yay.

I'll give you a minor spoiler here: we never find out what this old lady's deal is.

The next thing you have to do is go left instead of right after leaving your apartment.

Somewhere quiet? I'd say the office is pretty quiet already, but okay.

Between this and the suicide option, this game has a bizarre fixation on the notion that death is your only escape.

Your next step is to do the same thing as usual, except without putting your suit on.

So, if we were just in our underwear and a tie, it would be okay?

This had better be good, the way you going on about it every time I meet you.

What you have to do this time is wait for a leaf to fall of the tree, then pick it up.

And that was the final step.

After completing all of the steps, you wake up like normal. Not only do you not feel like a new person, but your wife isn't there.

Neither is the elevator lady, even though she's the reason we went around doing all this nonsense.

Neither is your boss.

Neither are the other workers.

You just find one of your coworkers (or is it just another version of you?) jumping off the balcony from earlier.

And that's the end of the game. There's no explanation, you just get booted back to the main menu.

Quite a step down from Oiligarchy, wasn't it? First, it has nowhere near as much visual appeal as the former game. Then, there's this whole hopeless vibe about it. Not only does this have a fixation on death, but the ending has the message that the only way to escape the endless cycle of modern work is to kill yourself.