Continue?9876543210

Before we continue we must ask ourselves: what is an experience? Not what is a game, because that is almost too broad to bother trying to put into words. But what is an experience? What is something you enjoy experiencing? I cannot define this for all of you. An experience changes for each person- it is a variable that makes each person who they are. Continue?9876543210 (wow that was fun to type out on the keyboard, I slid my finger down the number keys like some sort of badass) is definitely an experience. Whether it is a good one or a bad one is up to you. I personally felt like it made me think a lot about my life and what I take out of it, but I personally do not feel that much of the game other than the thought it provokes lives up to the price I paid for it, even at this discounted price of 8 dollars I paid for it. I personally think thinking should be free. What should be paid for is how the developer makes you think- either through visuals or audio or even story and gameplay....

Continue?9876543210 is a remarkable milestone in the history of gaming: the videogame equivalent of Vogon poetry.

A rich experience focused on the inevitable. You follow your main character's journey on the acceptance of his deletion by traveling and consulting with the inhabitants of other locales moments before their Garbage Collection. You have two primary options when speaking with the villagers, lightning or prayers. Lightning will help you escape the current level, or access secret areas that will aid you achieve your closure. Prayers will create a shelter based in your own town, which will protect the player from the deletion storm - literally lightning that deletes objects. Your ultimate goal is to survive long enough so the main character accepts his fate. The attitude at the time of their deletion depends on which villages you have been to, how many, and any "secret" areas you have been to which includes objects from your past and present. The combat is fairly varied, but not overly complex. It does require skill, and this is certainly not a game you can skate by on without thinking wha...

I'm a sucker for the TRON-like digital afterlife concept. So I went into C?9-0 eagerly expecting a deep, affecting experience. And for the first five or ten minutes, it seemed like it just might deliver on that... Sadly, it very quickly descends into a qurky, poorly designed pile of...bits. Instead of feeling like a solid, well-thought out game, it feels more like an overly ambitious Digipen student project. The biggest problem is, you're thrust into a bizarre, abstract world without any sort of guidance. "DEAREST FRIEND, YOU WILL BE CONFUSED AT FIRST, BUT BE BRAVE, IN TIME YOU WILL UNDERSTAND.", the game assures in a large, ubiquitous, fatiguing-to-read typeface. Part of me wonders if this line was a lampshade put in at the 11th hour of development to assuage confused newcomers. I've spent more time than I'd care asking myself "what the hell is going on?!". Given the concept, this MAY be a conscious choice by the developer, since you're no longer in a 'game' and you're figur...

Despite the big thumbs up, I wouldn't recommend the game at its full price. It's good but you can get a lot more with $10 on Steam. As for the content itself, its atmosphere sort of reminds me of a 3D Sword & Sworcery. However, I found Sword & Sworcery to be little more than a collection of pixel art and mysterious but ultimately meaningless dialogue whereas I found Continue to have genuine meaning that you can connect to your own life. The gameplay is not the focus in either game, but it is at least entertaining in Continue. Where it really excels is in its metaphorical meaning, It is more art than game, designed to make you think as you race against time to build up what resistance you can to a fate you ultimately cannot escape. There is little replayability; you will discover most of what the game has to offer in a few short playthroughs. But I wouldn't call that a fault considering the goal of the game is to explore a theme, not to provide hours of entertainment. If that doesn't ...

Continue?9876543210 is a surrealistic adventure game that is somewhat stylized like an old RPG game. Or something like that. Continue is a very strange game; The basic idea is that you play as a video game character who is at the end of his life. The classic, 'Continue?' screen of arcade games of old has passed, and no quarters were inserted. And so, you have 'died', and enter into a realm where all data from a previous game goes to be erased, wiped clean for the world to start anew again for the new player, and New Game option. In this desolate space, data is assimilated into bytes and data, and you having not made your peace yet struggle to survive in a climate made to delete you. In the game, you start on a level that is representative of some gameplay trope, IE town, field, ruins, etc. There are a variety of NPCs and locked doors. You can talk to the people, who will either try to sell you something, give you a hint of some sort in the level you're currently in, say something abo...

Not worthwhile. As much as I like strange "artsy" games like To The Moon, Antichamber, etc., I found myself struggling to like this one. I was really interested by the initial idea of Continue?9876543210, but in the end it delivers nothing but a load of horribly vague, cryptic, "2deep4u" nonsense with an absolutely bizarre excuse for a playable game. Very few things are explained or made to make sense. The idea of "shelters" being the worst as far as the gameplay goes. How many of those freaking things do you need? I "died" from having 4. Okay, then I'll just go for more. But having over 14 shelters didn't save me from getting zapped. And then I had to sit through the agonisingly long cutscene yet again, to start at the beginning again. To do what differently, exactly? This is far too "contemporary art" for me to think that it'll be enjoyable for most people. Whatever this is, the artist has picked a bad medium for it. If you want to tell a story that can turn out differently or have...

This is a tough game to describe in a review, it's not really like anything I have played before; But in a good way. This is the type of game you have to experience for yourself to truly understand it and even then it takes some time. At first I was lost, the game just kind of throws you into the world and asks you to figure it out on your own. It took me a good 30-45 mins of playing to start to understand that a lot of the things shouldn't be taken quite at face value and most things seem to have a deeper meaning than at first glance. It's not an easy game, but it's not a hard game. It's a game that require's player mastery through experience. You won't "complete" this game on your first go at it, and likely not your second or third either. The subject matter keeps you interested and often times will make you think. It's really a journey for the player character to make peace with the fact that their death is inevitable. This certainly isn't a game for everybody, but I say if the...

Continue?9876543210 is literally the most depressing game I've ever played. I don't mean it's just sad, or disheartening, or bad, or deep. It's one of the only pieces of media I've ever experienced that, without fail, makes me feel worse every time I play it. I can read tragic stuff, I can watch sad movies, whatever- occasionally I might even feel teary-eyed- but only Continue? actually makes me feel actually mentally distressed. In Continue?, you play as the data ghost of one of several failed video game characters, destined for deletion by some sort of cyberspace garbage compactor. In order to survive, you must flee through these strange recycled realms, where everybody talks in an eerie, vaguely poetic dialect of english, mixing terms of faith and hope with computer and video game terminology. Your currency is "Foo" (or possibly "fod", given the somewhat ambiguous font); your extra lives are "Spare Parts". And, most importantly, you are frequently given the choice between two optio...

Emogame and Emogame 2 were staples of my adolescent experience. They turned me on to a slew of music that I wouldn't have appreciated otherwise and managed to be both hilarious and thoughtful throughout. When I saw that the creator of those flash games, Jason Oda, had developed this odd-looking title, I was intrigued. So, I'll lay out the negatives first: unskippable intro (that you will have to sit through many many times), boring and awkward combat, unintuitive gameplay mechanics. With that in mind, the game is a remarkably beautiful meditation on mortality explored by proxy through slain video game characters facing deletion and finally oblivion. If you go into this expecting a hack and slash dungeon crawl, you will be sorely disappointed. This is more of an interactive poem than a game, and it excels in that respect.