The 4th Wall

I don’t really know where to begin with The 4th Wall by GZ Storm.  I guess I should start by saying that I apparently was enjoying their previous game, The Vidiot Game, until it knocked me out with a seizure.  Just to be clear, I have epilepsy so such results will not be typical, but I honestly don’t remember playing the game at all.  Brian says I seemed to be having fun with it, which is weird because I don’t think there has been a single positive review of it.  Then again, I’m a sucker for Wario Ware style games.  It’s a shame, because I might have been able to figure out what to write about that game.  With GZ’s latest title, The 4th Wall, I’m truly stumped.

What can you say about this game?  It’s a first-person, exploration-based “adventure” thing.  It’s surreal.  It’s disorienting.  It features a thirty-foot long penis that hangs from the ceiling and seems to be dripping blood.

That only took over twenty takes to get right.

Is it fun?  Not really.  I was too busy being weirded out to have fun.  There is no plot or context for The 4th Wall.   You’re placed on a field that has a white wall, another wall made of static, and arrows on the floor that point you towards a room.  In that room, there’s a terrible high-pitched hum that made my dog walk out of the room.  You walk through a door that leads to an all-black room with various eyeballs looking around.  You see a white tunnel.  You head towards it.  Then you fall back to the starting field, which now features the aforementioned bleeding dick, plus an invisible black wall.  It took me a good half-hour of wandering around to figure out that the static wall now had a hidden door in it.  You walk through that, go through a maze, and then get dumped again back into the starting field.  You stand by the white wall and it causes the field to turn black-and-white.  You chase down a ball that’s bouncing around, touch it, and get dumped back to the starting field.  Then you let the dick bleed on you and the game is over.

You can’t see him, but presumably the person you play as has “ASSHOLE ASSHOLE ASSHOLE” written all over him.

What the FUCK was this supposed to be?  Not since I played Linger in Shadows on PlayStation Network has a game left me this perplexed.  I guess the fancy term would be “post-modern” which Moe Szyslak taught me means “weird for the sake of being weird.”  No matter what you call it, I can’t recommend The 4th Wall, the gaming version of walking into the middle of a storage park, then licking a toad and trying to find  your way out.  Enjoy.

The 4th Wall was developed by GZ Storm

80 Microsoft Points are not totally sure if this was a real game I played or if someone spiked my coffee while I was playing Sound Shapes in the making of this review.

Yes, I’ve told developers to “be weird.”  I guess I should have been more specific and added “but still coherent” to that.