My computer is a graveyard. Thousands of characters have died and been deleted during my gaming life. Each one of them banished to Random Access Memory. Even in a non-violent game, like Peggle, where does the ball go after it lands in the bucket? RAM.
Jason Oda’s latest game, Continue?9876543210 follows that fate further. You play a deleted computer game character as they try to eke out a little more existence before the computer wipes them from RAM, at which point they’ll be lost forever.
“You are a dead, failed video game character wandering through the recesses of the Random Access Memory, trying to find peace in the final moments of your existence before being deleted forever…,” writes Oda in the game’s Steam description. “…but forget that. The real story is that Continue? is an existential metaphor that explores the finite nature of existence and the beauty and tyranny of our desires within it.”
“In the garbage dump of the Random Access Memory, you travel from town to town, meeting people who offer you their lightning and their prayer. Lightning clears the way for you to move forward and prayer builds shelters in a distant town where you must frequently hide to avoid being deleted into nothingness by the garbage collector. Along the way, you are thrust into many battle challenges, the outcome of which effects your shelters. There is ultimately, no way to escape the garbage collector, but running from it buys you time to think, wander, contemplate, and hopefully be at peace with the inevitability of your deletion.”
There’s an element of randomness each time you start a new game of Continue? The game randomly assigns you one of six characters and populates your world with six areas from a pool of eleven. So, unless you play through the game a lot, you’re unlikely to repeat the game in quite the same way.
If you’re still not sold on Continue? you should try out Oda’s other game, Skrillex Quest. It’s free and a little like Zelda.
It’s available on Steam and is currently discounted by 20%.