Game Review: the static speaks my name (PC)

the static speaks my name is a very interesting game.  Partly because the game is free through Steam, but also because it took me 19 minutes to play, being about nine minutes longer than the developer (Jesse Barksdale) says it takes to play the game.  I like to look at things though, although the ceiling and the floor were by far the things that I ended up looking at most frequently and not on purpose either.

First off, my one and only complaint about the game was that I was unable to invert the y-axis on the mouse, which meant that moving the mouse up made me look up and moving the mouse down made me look down.  I've talked a bit about this in past articles so I won't get into it here, aside from what I already said.  And this: I felt somewhat hampered and bothered that when the y-axis is not inverted, I found myself looking up whenever I turned a corner; not sure why, but I noticed it happening pretty frequently.

Because the static speaks my name is such a short game, talking about the game without giving anything away will result in a shorter than normal article about reviewing the aforementioned game.  You would almost be better to watch the trailer, which takes up just about 1/10th of the amount of time it would take you (but not me mind you) to play the game.

Shrimp.  Because why not!?

The shrimp actually do play a part in this story, but I will not tell you as it might be a spoiler.  It kind of would be even if I associated an emotion about the above shrimp.  But there are shrimp, which is something that I don't know if I have ever seen before aside from, maybe, an item on a restaurant menu (in game).

But seriously.  Aside from my complaint about the lack of control settings, I really enjoyed and appreciated the story that was being told.  I even had hope that there would be more game, but sadly, 19 minutes was all that was given to play.  And honestly, with how the game ends, I do think that I could actually last playing this game for hours on end. And thinking about it, 20 minutes per sitting, if the game extended beyond that length, would probably be the perfect amount of time.

Now, I don't think that I would classify the static speaks my name as a horror game.  It's definitely disquieting and unnerving, similar to how I felt, for a time, playing Gone Home. And now that I think about it, it is a bit like Gone Home, in that you are a single person exploring a home, presumably your own home. But unlike Gone Home, I didn't feel a sense of joy and relief at the end.

We can always hope.

Oddly enough, I cannot recall anything about the music, although I am 100% positive that there was some type of ambient drone music going on in the background.  I do not think that there was any melody to the music, which would have immediately felt out of place, even without knowing what the game was about when you start playing.  It's just not that type of game, which is probably why I think the music was unobtrusive and ambient.

If you have 67 MB of free space on your hard drive and less than half an hour to spend on playing a game, I would highly recommend the static speaks my name. but for the love of Freya, do not let your children play this game as it is very strongly M rated due to some text/dialogue, or would be if it had been rated by the video game industry.  It's true that the content of this story is very mature although I don't just mean in the R rated sense.  It is a successful attempt at a story that is very rarely covered by video games and there's probably a good reason for it.

You know what, I'm just going to stop "talking."

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

A Crushing Force of Weight