There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension
Posted: Sun Sep 06, 2020 3:37 pm
The less you know about There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension, the more you'll enjoy it. The fun is in discovering what it is. If you want to go into the game cold, you shouldn't read past this paragraph. Though I'll warn that while its reception has been positive ("overwhelmingly positive" on Steam), I found it fairly tedious. And while it did make me laugh at times, I think the humor will appeal more to kids and teens.
So I'll now describe the game and what I liked and disliked about it, without giving too much away.
You can think of it as a retro 2-D point-and-click homage to The Stanley Parable. It's a metagame laden with jokes and secrets. The narrator is high-strung, passive-aggressive, and mispronounces many words with his throaty Russian accent. I eventually rather liked him.
There is an incremental hint system that I used fairly often, as the puzzles can be pretty challenging. They sometimes require good timing and modest arcade skills, too. There is a lot of satire of gameplay mechanics that often annoy us in other games. Unfortunately, the game employs those same mechanics to an aggravating degree. It took me 7 hours to beat the game, and I felt it overstayed its welcome.
Not that there weren't bright parts. Chapter 5 in particular was innovative, emotional, and quite funny. It was almost worth putting up with all the game's faults. While I'm kind of down on this game, most others seem to like it. I didn't even like the widely adored Stanley Parable, so I'm probably not the one you want to trust. But if you like comedic metagames, you should like this one.
So I'll now describe the game and what I liked and disliked about it, without giving too much away.
You can think of it as a retro 2-D point-and-click homage to The Stanley Parable. It's a metagame laden with jokes and secrets. The narrator is high-strung, passive-aggressive, and mispronounces many words with his throaty Russian accent. I eventually rather liked him.
There is an incremental hint system that I used fairly often, as the puzzles can be pretty challenging. They sometimes require good timing and modest arcade skills, too. There is a lot of satire of gameplay mechanics that often annoy us in other games. Unfortunately, the game employs those same mechanics to an aggravating degree. It took me 7 hours to beat the game, and I felt it overstayed its welcome.
Not that there weren't bright parts. Chapter 5 in particular was innovative, emotional, and quite funny. It was almost worth putting up with all the game's faults. While I'm kind of down on this game, most others seem to like it. I didn't even like the widely adored Stanley Parable, so I'm probably not the one you want to trust. But if you like comedic metagames, you should like this one.