Ethan survival sim

tl;dr: nice game mate make more levels

Thoroughly cheeky and uncompromising, this game stands firmly in the long line of ironic games.

Irony, of course, is not self-sufficient. If we take the pinnacle of the genre, The Town with No Name, we see it built around parodies of cowboy tropes; other examples likewise work as a a political or artistic satire. Without them, the ironic game is as vain as a 'this is so sad can we get 420 lieks'.

Ethan Survival Sim lands as a satire, even if its runway is rather narrow. The player has no direct frame of reference or even interest. Ethan the character ends up serving as a satire not on himself, but on people like himself. This is where the game garners the most of its potential, and this is where it is also lost.

A young empty-minded student is a famous archetype, and a great deal of British art is devoted to this deplorable yet undeniably funny archetype. Indeed, it feels at times that all that could be said was said; and this game fails to contribute or even discuss that wide corpus.

The elevator joke was the only one that worked for me - otherwise, it reaches for the setups, but provides no punchline to the character (except for all those things the character actually punches). Still, if this husk is ever filled with any message, I would be eager to revisit it.