[Game Review] September 1999

This review contains spoilers - as much as you can call it that.


98Demake's September 1999 blurs the line between game and tech demo, mood and meaning.  I can't tell if I think it's brilliant or just an interesting idea with potential.  The game lasts exactly 5 minutes and 30 seconds, and consists solely of a small, shabby bedroom and a small, shabby hallway.  It's a pocket of horror meant to be a flash of something horrific, a lead for your brain to naturally take the game's events and run with it looking for meaning or context.  But there really isn't any, and I couldn't tell you if that's a good thing or not.  At the absolute least, it was interesting and, P.T. influence notwithstanding, rather original.

The game's true star is its execution.  The game feels as though you are a camera man, filming with a commercial camcorder from the 90s, with VHS horizontal distortions, color misalignment, and an iconic date stamped in the lower third.  You film what you see, and as a player, you want to see everything.  This is rather clever, using your nature as a projection of character.  You look at details - empty alcohol containers strewn about, the bible and crosses populating the hallway, the boarded up windows, the odd pictures of budgerigar, the locked doors - and find yourself as documentarian without even thinking about it.  It feels like awful lost footage, forbidden stuff that should be locked away in some drawer at the police station.  On a timer, every once in awhile the "tape" will cut out to a black screen, and then cut back in a day or so later, the environment changed.  More alcohol bottles lie on the floor, and the lamp next to the bed is going out.  There are footsteps somewhere else in the house, but you have no way of inspecting them.  Again, the game puts you in a character without you realizing, because as players we realize we can't go anywhere quickly, but as a character - who would be so disinterested in odd movement in the building they were in?  The game shifts time again, a day or so later, and the lights are all out.  The window next to the front door is boarded up now whereas it was the only window that wasn't before.  You can see cop lights peaking through the boards, and you can hear them knocking on the door, radios squawking.  You don't hang around the hallway long though since there is nothing to see.  You go back to the bedroom, also dark, and lying on the bed is a body, wrapped in a plastic blue tarp.  The body is wheezing, like the tarp is suffocating them.  The tape shifts again, a day or so later.  The lights are on in the hallway, but the floor is covered in blood.  At the opposite end of the hall from the bedroom, a man can be heard weeping, banging against the other side of a locked door.  There is blood leaking from the other side.  There is blood everywhere.  You go to the bedroom, and find a clear plastic tarp laid out across the room's floor and walls.  Underneath the tarp, leaning against the wall is the mattress, stained heavily with blood.  On the ground are body parts, wrapped in plastic bags.  The tape shifts again, this time to the end of September, and you no longer have control of the camera.  It lays on the ground in the hallway, staring out of focus at some floor trim.  You hear the sound of a chainsaw being revved up, and then cutting.  And the game ends.

Placing you as snuff filmmaker in such a natural way is inspired, but I worry whether the game's ideas may outweigh the game's content.  It feels as though it was made as a proof of concept for 98Demake's experimentation with old video aesthetic more than it does anything cohesive, but even if that was his intention, my attention is on the details.  There is something odd at the core of this game, a weird displacement from self and a focus on fragmented horror to give our brains something to run away with, even though with such paltry servings we really don't have far to go.  The game is free on Steam, and as long as a song, so I can't really give it too much flak.  It's a horror oddity worth checking out, and I'm excited to see more from 98Demake, even if he only ever releases oddware like this. 



 6.0