Youtuber 98Demake has seen quite a bit of success making animated shorts that reimagine modern games as PSX classics. I've been a fan of his for some time, so when I found out he had made a few games also utilizing the PSX aesthetic, I didn't hesitate to pick a couple of them up. I did hesitate, however, in getting around to playing any of them, because for a long time I couldn't really tell what I was in for by pictures and description alone. OK/NORMAL, it turns out, is a hallucinatory PSX styled game that lasts 45 minutes. The basic premise, if you can call it that, is that you are a marble statue walking around platforms of checkerboard patterns. It invokes vaporwave style without any of its tone. For the most part, you are tasked with collecting food and pills, then pills and syringes, then keys, and then the game decides to fuck off and do what it wants for the final 15 minutes or so. What you do in the game is pretty uninteresting, being an impression of PSX platformers until it gives way to a couple mazes at the end. The game seems more interested in being a technical and stylistic experiment, although there does seem to be some thematic throughline. The PSX had a few notorious graphical issues that have since become rather iconic. Anti aliasing was nonexistent, giving polygons a jagged look to them, and the way the PSX rendered the polygon's vectors was inconsistent, leading to the ground and walls becoming "wavy" as you moved. These little graphical ripples are used to great effect in OK/NORMAL, stretching and warping to disorient your movement or sense of space. Your checkerboard platforms are falnked by floating fetuses, glaring skulls, and abstract imagery, draped in low resolution psychedelic vomit (not necessarily a criticism, as much as a feeling). As you progress through the game, the visual style becomes more and more antagonistic, making it more and more difficult to tell what is going on let alone complete your goal of "find the end of the level". One of the final levels in particular, a red, warping labyrinth with slow moving walls with little to no indication as to where to go, was particularly patience testing.
If I were to stretch a bit, I could read this game's themes as an expression of depression, where you collect food and drugs to overeat and get high in order to deal with what is apparently some sort of severe mental instability. You are followed by a little rain cloud companion, who teaches you how to play, tells you your goal, and occasionally doubts your competency. Not particularly subtle. Each level requires you to collect more and more food/drugs, which is a traditional difficulty curve in theory, but in execution feels like a commentary. At some point, the number of collectibles needed to end the level becomes unreasonably large, even growing as you progress the level until it spits out an error message and the level ends. There is certainly a theme of substance abuse, of self destruction, and of looming dread or rag dolling into disorientation at play here. But considering this game as being overtly thematic is virtually pornographic, because the only value of thematically analyzing such a game is in fetishizing how much meaning I can make out of plainly abstract material. There is intention in there, but even as an impressionist look it feels too abstract to mean anything substantial. OK/NORMAL is outsider art, through-and-through, meant as a shotgun blast of barely held together experimentation for effect but not purpose, and it largely succeeds at this.
In my summation of Little Inferno I said I had fun with the game, but disliked its thematic inconsistencies and shallowness. For OK/NORMAL, I feel almost the opposite. Themes don't matter here in a valuable way, and the game isn't anything close to what I would describe as "fun", but its brief run time helps it to be appreciated as the technical and stylistic experiment it is. Much like Little Inferno, I can't outright recommend OK/NORMAL without some caveats. Picking the game up on sale is more than likely just shy of free, and if you are into outsider art or short games like I am, then it is an interesting diversion, albeit one with little else outside of its oddity appeal. As excited as I am to try out 98Demake's other game, September 1999, this game has me wondering if it is even much of a game at all. OK/NORMAL feels like an idea of how to say something, but not what to say. It's like an inflection without the words.
5.5
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