A Kafkaesque suspense text-based adventure game. Boundaries between dream, reality, memory, and truth are all diffuse. Could you seize the opportunity to find your father and your Self back in this introspective journey?
SELF is a minimalist, experimental indie game that blends text adventure and rhythm minigames to tell a surreal, psychological story about a boy searching for his missing father. The narrative unfolds through dreamlike, nonlinear scenes full of strange encounters and metaphor, often resembling a journey through the character’s subconscious more than...
Although a lot of the Kafkaesque story beats, like the father-son relationship and the surreal, absurdist scenarios the boy found himself in, were unique and initially interesting; SELF just didn’t have the metamorphosis it needed to turn into something greater.
A delightfully presented text adventure that relies too heavily on replaying old dialogue — even if the actual story is good, it may not be interesting enough to make you persevere.
SELF is an unusual experience. While at first it may seem like a visual novel, the game turns out to be something else...what that is, though, is not very clear. Its main asset is undoubtedly the soundtrack and a pair of headphones will certainly make wonders but its plot turns out to be passable, dull and easy to ignore, which goes against the nature...
It's always interesting to see games used as a medium for storytelling and in the case of Self rather than working through a pre-destined story to reach a static conclusion you'll find that it has many branching paths to encourage replay to discover its different outcomes...
