ENA: Dream BBQ

I almost dropped this game 10 to 15 minutes in because I thought it was just too weird and random, but, I reminded myself of how great the reviews were, and told myself that I needed to just LET IT COOK... and boys, it did. This game is beyond comprehension. I have no idea what happened or what the point of it all was, and I've never watched the original animation made by Joel G and his team. Regardless of that, this game was a wild ride, and I think that you should play it. Nothing about this game will make sense at first, but you just need to go into the game with that in mind. I don't think that there is any other game that I can say represents the idea of "videogames being art" than this game, Of course, that's to be somewhat expected considering this was made by a team of people who are primarily animators, and the character interactions and dialogue are coupled directly with animated scenes throughout the entire game. The music, the colors, the sound effects, everything you're seeing and hearing really does come together here to make you feel like you're in an insane fever-dream world. It's creative and beautiful and surprising enough throughout, that I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the world here and playing through the game from start to finish, despite the fact that the gameplay basically boils down to this being a walking sim with some characters to talk to. It walks a fine line between being so absurd that you can't understand what is going on, and being grounded enough with humor and dialogue that it doesn't lose you, without ever going too overboard to the point that it becomes pretentious. It's really impressive. I'm not sure where people are getting more than 2 hours of gameplay out of this, unless they're just playing it over and over again. I felt like I walked around quite a bit, explored everything there was to explore, talked to almost every character, and tried to really see everything the game had to offer, and I still ended up finishing chapter 1 in just under two hours. Bear in mind that this game is currently not complete. Only chapter 1 is released at the time of me writing this, and apparently, the game is currently in production for part 2, and it has yet to be announced how many parts there will be when the game is complete. I'll be looking forward to playing this again when the full game releases, because this was awesome.