Cellar (2022)

Unironically one of the best free games on steam ! Not for everyone true, but a very interesting story with compeling characters. Discovered CELLAR by checking the dev other games after playing The Incident at The Galley House, would love to see more from William Rous !

One of the best games I've played in a long while. Everything in Cellar is so precise. The long pauses between each line of dialogue, the different points at which characters choose to reveal (or not reveal) more about their lives outside, everything is tuned to create the sort of tension between paranoia and trust that can quickly develop in isolation. Fair warning, its a game at least partially about mundanity and the psychological effect it can have on people, so go into this expecting less fun mystery like Type Help and more of a purposefully drab experience like a SOMA or Pathologic. I used to work in a packing barn in the middle of nowhere for one month out of the year, and this game really captured that sense of repetition rotting your brain along with quickly becoming very close friends with people I'd probably never talk to normally. A great reflection on torturous isolation can be, and how even a bunch of strangers can be enough to get us though it. This having 6 reviews on Steam is a crime. It's literally free, try it out y'all.

It's very hard to recommend this game. If you know what you're getting into, I believe you can judge for yourself, if you're up for it or not. First and foremost: The story is intriguing and it is what has kept me going. I want to understand where I am, learn more about who I'm locked-in with and watch the different personalities cope with their situation. I love it and I'm hooked! But... The gameplay is a drag. Purposefully, I assume, to make the player feel the same emotions the characters must feel. Mundane and meaningless chores while waiting for your turn on the machine, which in itself is nothing to look forward to, will eventually make the player feel irritated and annoyed at the game itself. Handling the machine is a nightmare. The counter ticks down quickly and mistakes are penalised harshly. Getting back from a drop down to red with sirens going in the background is stressful. In fact, I never understood why NPCs would call their time on the machine boring - personally, I found it intense but not in a fun way. While playing Cellar, I noticed I was begging for an underlying story to unravel. Hidden puzzles for the player to find to help uncover the mystery of this pla…

Cellar is a hard game for which to write a review without spoiling it for new players, but I'll give it a go. Basically this game is about the monotony of routine, much of it apparently pointless and without explanation. This leads to growing distress amongst the game's six young characters (who must undertake 30 days of this routine before leaving the locked environment) - surely there must be some purpose behind the facade of pointlessness, but what? Having no answers, growing increasingly weary, and experiencing the gradual deterioration of the environment around them, brings each of the six to an emotional crisis, through which the others must try to help and support them (or bully and coerce them). The player controls one of the six characters in Cellar. There are two types of gameplay: undertaking a random and largely tedious range of "household" tasks (cooking, cleaning, washing, etc) for most of each day; and operating the special random number machine once per day. Errors operating the machine have consequences for the player (the session is extended indefinitely until a certain level of accuracy is achieved - this can be very stressful, particularly if an error is …

I'm giving this a positive review because it's very good at being what it is but what it is is also NOT FOR ME. It is literally a game about mundanity, isolation, repetition and data entry and I think if I kept playing I would absolutely lose my mind and go insane.

TRY AGAIN OPEN YOUR EYES TALK TO NO ONE CLOSE YOUR MIND