HomeFeaturesThere Is No Game: Wrong Dimension

There Is No Game is almost too meta to be meta"If only you could talk to these creatures."

“If only you could talk to these creatures.”

You know that joke from The Simpsons, where the kids find out that cows don’t look like cows on film so you have to use horses, and for horses you have to “tape a bunch of cats together”? When I was playingThere Is No GameI kept thinking about that joke. “How do you make an original point and click puzzle adventure? Eh, usually we just tape a bunch of other games together.”

I am being facetious. There Is No Game is smart and funny and surprising, but the thing is that it’s very much “a video gamer’s video game”, if you will. I think maybe it is a small bit too much that. (Note: spoilers follow, I suppose, as this is arguably one of those “if you explain it, it’s not as fun” games).

A screenshot from There Is No Game showing a piece of pixelart of pin up poster, but it’s a motherboard wearing a sexy suspender belt. It’s labelled ‘Miss Paris’ and has an Eiffel Tower in the background to confirm this.

Eventually you break the game so completely that you end up warping through the different localisation versions of There Is No Game, and then into other game dimensions entirely.

What idiot called this ‘There Is No Jeu’ and not ‘Ceci N’est Pa Un Jeu’

A screenshot from There Is No Game showing the title screen for a French localised version of it. The backdrop is the Tricolore French flag. The words ‘There Is No Jeu’ are written in cursive script, also in blue, white and red, over the top. Croissants of various size cascade from the ceiling.

You knock over not-Link’s HOME button, and then use it as a big weight to shake the world and force him to jump. You steal all the action verbs from Holmes and Watson’s menu, and learn to think outside of all kinds of boxes. You break the conventional progress of their game such that they nearly fall out of the bottom of it, and Watson has an existential crisis. With a kind of meteoric inevitability, There Is No Game smashes through, somehow, a second and possibly a third fourth wall. There’s a chapter which involves messing about with one of the fake games' credits, that also involves a song parody. It is all, like I said, very clever and you will laugh a lot.

A screenshot of a CRT computer monitor with a broken screen. The monitor itself is displaying a point and click adventure rendered in a 90s LucasArts style, where the characters of Holmes and Watson are standing on a moonlit street attempting to enter a house. There are icons for a magnifying glass, eyeball and open mouth on screen. Outside of the screen, there is a broken shard of glass, a stamp with a cog logo on it, and a fist. This last is evidently part of the set of icons on screen, but it has been misappropriated by the player.

There are so many meta layers of meta-ing that it’s almost like a big lump ofFordite, polished and lovely and full of surprises from different angles. There are jokes about jokes about development and video game culture. The Holmes puzzle game is taking place inside a CRT screen which you can break, allowing you to look ‘behind the scenes’ of the Holmes game itself. But that behind the scenes is a set made of wood and boards and paint. When you break into the asset library, it’s a sci-fi void full of random floating things: a book, a bath, an ice cream cone. Very good. I don’t want to spoil more than I have already, but there are so many jokes and smarty pants bits that I could never get close to spoiling much.

A screenshot from There Is No Game showing the inside of a small, one-room wooden home. In the centre of the room stands a generic fantasy game hero, in his blue tunic. Above his head there floats the inventory for a shop. For 300 gold he can get new trainers, which allow him to walk at normal speed. He is saying, to the player, ‘If you need money, Gaia, I can find some coins!

This section is also full of ads, which are instrumental to solving the puzzles, and they’re very well observed as well. But they’re also for games called things like SUPERCOLD and Please, Papers. This is a post-Ready Player One world, and certainly There Is No Game is so much smarter and better than that bag of half-chewed dog toys masquerading as a book that it’s probably unfair of me to mention them in the same sentence. But there comes a point where even I feel like I’m being pandered to.

There Is No Game is very, very good and very clever. But it’s very specific. Like the joke from The Simpsons, right? If you say “eh, usually we just tape a bunch of cats together,” some people will just think you are into casual animal cruelty, while I will laugh because I get the reference. But you’ll get diminishing returns out of me, based on how many subsequent Simpsons quotes you put into the conversation, I guess.

There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension is out now onSteamfor £10.30/€13/$13