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A beautiful and tragic game, a masterpiece of good experimentation., August 11, 2023You play an (older?) gentleman doing some late night groceries after a long day. Most of it is pretty mundane and uninteresting, until you see some fresh gnocchi in the pasta aisle. Your mind can only think of the last time you had those, in Rome. Around you, the shelves block your view to the other aisles, and a brunette woman stands a few meters away, filling her trolley with pots of sauce.
And in this aisle you stop your trolley, waiting on what to do next.
Though I never found more than a few dozens by myself/with the French IF peeps, there are over 136 actions producing an ending in this game. 136! Whether you interact with yourself or your environment, there are a lot more you can explore with this very restrained environment.
Even if the experiment of one-action-the-end is truly amusing and insanely entertaining (who doesn't like a treasure hunt for all 136 endings), it is the writing that shines the most in this piece. The game is humourous, and dark, has bits of lightness, and becomes incredibly sordid, it is sad and genuinely touching... It can say so much with so very little. Truly incredible.
Through the endings, a backstory forms around the PC. Or maybe two or three. He had a wife, went to Rome with her, but something happened (death/illness/something else?), and he was left alone. It is not truly clear what happened to his wife, or the PC's involvement in said disappearance/death, but what is certain is the pain and the guilt the PC still feels after all this time (has it be years, by now?), making him unable to form new connections with people, leaving him truly and completely alone. What stays is his fond memory of that trip to Rome and those gnocchi he ate there...