Dujanah

A baffling art project that moves casually between challenging extremes.

You get boring walking-simulator-style exploration with intentionally infuriating controls, but then you also get very specific quests. You get grotesque parodies of gaming, and then suddenly good and earnest mini-games that have more gameplay than some complete games. You get stream-of-consciousness poetic masturbation, but then also an actual narrative structure with sharp and contemporary political commentary. You get alien, futuristic vistas, but also sequences dripping with local nostalgia. The video and audio have elements of vaporware glitch, but then also hand-made, authentic claymation. It takes itself seriously, but also doesn't.

And it all does work together. The presence of the narrator is constant, sometimes explicitly so, and it reassures you that you are in good hands and should just keep exploring. There, there. Everything is going to be OK.

My only complaint is that it is a bit too open. I missed one of the markers, but don't feel like exploring the whole map all over again to find it. Things like this should be more linear. Or maybe I'm supposed to just deal with my fear of missing out?

Anyway. I bought the soundtrack because I found it to be often excellent.