March
What do you really need out of life? Instant gratification? Money? Fast cars? UncleBig2D's March is a short but beautifully executed little interactive art piece that plays like an arcade game and takes you through one boy's life in a series of short stages. All you have to do to play is click, and while there isn't a whole lot of replay value after the few minutes it'll take to play, and some may find the representation of the message a little too cookie-cutter, the core of it is heartfelt and earnest, not to mention presented in a simple but evocative retro style. It's less a "you need this specific thing" thing, and more "you might miss other things if you only focus on the material things" thing... thingy.
It's cute, but I was disappointed that
you couldn't really control the outcome by doing things differently. I tried replaying it and avoiding as many coins as I could, in order to "choose love over money" but the game played out the same way.
Anyway, I don't think it's trying to pretend it's something deep and complex, so for what it is, it's very sweet.
Do YOU want to enjoy boring straight dudes having deep, meaningful insights about life and love, but just didn't have the patience for, like, most media? boy is this game for YOU. you too can be treated to a tedious, shallow, heterosexual aesop where YOU control the main character!
It's somewhat cute, but very simplistic. It's not very involved... which means I got bored a while in.
It would be nice to interact with various environments beyond -leftclick-leftclick-leftclick- ad infinitum, but there is a message (albeit one seen time and time again).
Worth a look, but not stellar.
Nice graphics. Really liked the irrelevant grid that only pertains to the actual pixels some of the time, especially not when movement was involved; that's not sarcasm, it gave it a pixelated look without having clunky, awkward movements. The change back to B&W at the end completely contradicted the tonal shift of the story, like he's still upset even though the plot shifted to being in his favor.
Message is a little of the usual "don't let life pass you by!" that we see more from creators who haven't lived out their life yet, so there's an overrepresentation of people who made it to the end of their life and regret it more than people who made it to the end of their life. There was even more hokiness added to the story when it
either played on the fears of dying alone to force the character into a relationship after a classic "vision of your lonely future" or literally involved time-travel.
Gameplay is quite tedious, especially since there's not even a score and the player doesn't effect the outcome. Might as well be an animated short, there is absolutely no reason this needed to be a game.
While I agree with csmithpub above about how shallow, tedious, heterosexual and cliche this is, I don't see any problem with the creator confining himself to a point-of-view similar to his own; basically he's acknowledging his limits of experience. I also don't see how it would benefit from being from the point-of-view of any other type of person being the main character: it would still be shallow, tedious, and cliche.
As far as suggestions go, should the dev ever read this (ha!): turn it into a flash short instead of having it masquerade as a game, that makes it no longer tedious. Shallow isn't really a problem since it's not attempting to be a complex narrative, and not everything needs to be. Cliches aren't really a problem except when they're overused by an individual work, which this doesn't do since it's only one big one.
It was better when Passage did it.
Update