Kevin(1997-2077) (2024)

This is one of the strangest “games” I have played in a while. There is no explanation for what the whole thing is about or what you are supposed to be doing. All you can do is click on the icon that takes you to a large map of Earth filled with strange symbols. The first image you see is a tutorial on how to move, and you can view more by scrolling down. Actually, you can scroll all over the place, but you cannot zoom out or in. This makes navigating extremely difficult because you never know where you are heading. To avoid becoming entirely lost, hitting number 1 returns you to the tutorial section. If you find something fascinating, you can use one of the remaining numbers to set down your own quick-travel points. Because you do not have infinite options, you can rewrite those points if you discover something more intriguing. The only additional tools are a multi-colored pencil and an eraser. After a while, you realize that symbols represent words, and your overall goal is to understand these symbols while following Kevin's story and journey. As you wander across the map, you will notice icons. If you press a key, you will see an image with more strange symbols. Each icon…

I went into this expecting a wee bit more, I'm afraid to say. I fear I might be something of an outlier to the target audience (I assume?). I didn't notice or take to heart what the dev wrote in the very description at the top of the Steam page - namely, that one Chinese sentence he put in there. I speak Chinese myself and as soon as I started translating the symbols you see in the game to Chinese (because there isn't really enough room to write out English words there, so I naturally gravitated towards using Chinese symbols when making notes), I immediately noticed how most of what you see is just Chinese, redrawn into some bootleg symbols that for the most part uncannily resemble their Chinese counterparts. For example, the mouth you see in game, which is meant to mean "to say" is inspired by the ancient Chinese (文言文) character 曰, which really literally just means "to say" (and is meant to represent a mouth shape in itself, so he sorta just used the crude Chinese characters' predecessors you can find in those old ass dictionaries). This might be a bit of an unfair criticism towards the dev, who obviously put the work down to make this game, and I feel bad saying this out lou…

this is about as obtuse as games as a medium can get. this game is basically just a huge schizophrenic notebook with a fully functioning language that you have to decipher with just the mouse doodling tools you get. it's so insanely interesting to me, a concept cool enough to give me shivers, but i think im too stupid to ever crack the code. i highly reccomend this game to people smarter than me/those into linguistics/probably people who enjoyed Chants of Senaar

It has the qualities of a rather unusual mystery, but the game is just very poorly optimized. Very simple things like a zoom function to see more area and determine what to do are not even available in a core component of the game. Scrolling is slow and methodical leading to intense frustration just trying to get back to a riddle you've already contemplated or connected. It's an unfinished school project; with a very complex and well thought out code to decipher. If you can overlook the extreme tediousness of poor optimization there is a riddle of language to decipher.

RIP Domino.

and the award for best soundtrack goes to... KEVIN! /joke, even if i admit this is an awesome idea. the game(?) is really cool otherwise too. well... i doubt most people would get much from this. honestly doubted i would either. but i have gotten quite a bit. it is a rather unique, and sweet, experience.