The Day

Hey Kids!  This is my first post eva!  It is my first post ever and I'm totally going to spend it on this one game called The Day!  Its this flash card game where you walk around playing this stupid card game with a bunch of kids in an internment camp out somewhere!  Its by Greggory Weir, who is pretensious indy developer that makes these 'art' games that litter the internet flash scene like a plague!

What do you mean there is more to it then that?

Argh!  Fine, lets tango.

Ok, so, as I flippantly stated in the first paragraph the game is called The Day, and it was made by Greggory Weir, known for making art games, or interactive art as you will.  Now, I want to make something clear here: I don't hate art games in of themselves.  Being human I do have genres that I wouldn't dare touch with a ten foot post, but the art game genre is one of those genres that I am very careful with, as some 'interactive art' experiences are quite beautiful while others are just a hack programmer making excuses for uploading more garbage to the internet.

So, which is The Day?

A better question would be why I picked this to be the first game I ever post about in this 'review' 'blog'?

Well... its kinda odd I guess, that's why.  How is it odd, do you ask?  Well its in the mechanics.

Again, as I put it in my intro paragraph, you start the game as this little girl named Tia, who lives in some sort of camp somewhere, and shorty its your birthday!  For your birthday your dad, named 'Dad' gives you a playing card.  The card itself is called a soldier and it has 2 points, whatever that means.  Now, when you're given the card this kid shows up, whose your sister named 'Sister'... just kidding her names Lis, and informs you that the neighbourhood kids are going to give you a no risk tutorial of the card game in question, where if you win you take all the cards they played, and if you lose... nothing happens.  What a nice little neighbourhood, what with the barbed wire and surveillance cameras.

Its the eyes of satan!

You see, its pretty apparent that you're not exactly wandering in the land of Kanto or something, hells no, your in an internment camp of some sorts.  This being made more omnious when this happens before you head off to card trading glory:

Yes, you read that correctly, 'Dad' has to instruct you to not go wondering off or else the guards of the camp will shoot you on sight!  Yes, indeed, we are living in a Utopia here.

Controls are simple if you've played many a flash game before, where 'X' is an action button and you use the arrow keys to walk around.  Can't figure that out, well, how do you dress yourself in the morning?  Pants on your head?  Now, in the card game mode, its X to select your cards, up to three can be selected, and you select play and press X when your ready to play, and you get more cards off of your opponent if you win!

Now, while I was Tia for the day I was walking around talking to everyone, as I usually do in games like this, - but you will have to do so as you are going to have to find the peeps that have cards for you - I was getting the impression that the camp Tia was living in had been abandoned by whatever higher power was suppose to be looking after the camp, what with a farmer who was explaining to you that the small patch of land was the camp's only food source, and the medic informing you to not 'play too hard' because they were out of medical supplies, and every third adult giving you the same warning Dad gave you.  There was even this old man that was telling me that everything wasn't always like as they were, and that the shit hit the fan in his younger days.

The cards themselves tell an interesting story.  I did mention the starter card, the soldier, but as you play you can get cards like 'laser drone' and 'silo', each with their own point associated with them.  To win the total number of points on your end must be higher than your opponents.  Easy enough, though it makes you wonder what kind of world Tia must live in for such a game to exist, and focus on these aspects of military and war... fuck it I'm thinking too deeply on it.  Though one gripe I must note is that you have to fight everyone in a certain order.  If you talk to everyone and see what cards they play you can get a feel for who is to be challenged and in what order, and there is some amount of strategy that is to be played, as two of the cards have special aspects to them other than their points.

Overall, well... following contains spoilers.  If you don't want spoilers than go play the game and come back... or fuck off.

I did say spoilers

Ok, everyone that doesn't want The Day spoilers cleared out?  Moving onward.

Do you remember the warning that Dad gave you, about not going into the woods lest you want the guards to shoot you?

For those of the pants on head stupid variety

Well, interestingly enough, there is a bit more to the game than the card minigame you play with a bunch of kids.  No, you see, as you wander the camp, you might notice this pathway that leads into some trees.

Wanna tempt fate... punk?

Interesting... the game gives you the option to wander off and risk getting shot by rabid guards with twitchy trigger fingers aiming their sights at the nearest scrotum they can see.  Oh what is one to do?

Well, go in of course!  Maybe you can find better cards for that card playing game you are engaged in with the other children in the happiest town in the world!  Yes, maybe you can find that long desired 'nuke' card that has 20 points and can be used to defeat Lis' 'silo' right out of the water.  Or maybe something interesting might happen for the less patient of us gamers that got annoyed with talking to the elders about not leaving and that.

Up yours Dad!

Anyways, I walked out and found myself in a forest with this fence.  I start walking around wondering when those guards were going to come into play, I find a hole in the fence that I crawl though and keep walking.  Now, at this point I really want something to happen other than seeing if I could outrun the camera that seems to have a rough time keeping up with the very physically fit Tia, when I found it!

Maybe those rabid trigger happy guards are in here.

"Yes" I thought, "Something really interesting is going to happen!"

So, figuring that Tia would meet a gruesome fate here, and looking oddly forward to it, I walk in, knowing that a bunch of guards were going to have my head asplode.

Only it doesn't.

Instead I walk into an abandoned and falling apart facility that was once the guard station.  Venturing past the corpses and falling debris there was a room full of computer terminals.

And uncle Jack.  Remember him?

The terminals describe how the guards at the station were ordered to abandon the camp, leaving the internees behind to fend for themselves.  After that I exited through a back door, where I got to see the world outside the fences and walls of the camp... and it looks exactly as one would imagine it to be if you the player was paying attention.

Now, this is an interesting mechanic that I hinted at earlier in this.  The player is given two objectives that are in complete opposition of eachother and are not mechanically the same.  One objective is obvious: win the card games.  The other is more subtle: explore the woods.  The first objective is recommended by the NPCs in the game while the second is equally discouraged, reminding me of a trope used in Nintendo games where what you have to do next is whatever a nearby sign told you NOT to do.  Both teach the player about the game world by given subtle hints through the mechanics, either through the cards in the card game, or through the adventure mechanics of exploring the woods and later the bunker.

Finally, I want to talk about a part of the game that I have overlooked up to this point: the music.

In the camp the music is this calm sounding banjo playing in a manner that hearkens to a farm out in the hills or the prairies where life is simple and work is hard.  This does give me the feeling that this fenced in place with the surveillance cameras everywhere, where supplies haven't made it in and the people are trapped, is a rural home for a little girl and her friends, and it would be the only home that Tia and company would know, and arguably some of the other adults in the camp.

In the bunker, the tune switches to this eerie orchestrated score with static laid over it.  This gives the sense of despair that seeps into these moments... very fitting of a place that has the occasional skeleton in it.  The orchestra gives the dark, sobering, "I just stepped into holy ground" vibe, while the static, which according to the developer's notes came from the Jonestown death sermon, gives the sense that the place is not only abandoned, but isolated, as the static reminded me of a radio off tune and hearing nothing but white noise as a result.

Now, to the question that I first asked at the start of this: is this a good game?  As an art game, with the 8-bit pixel art which doesn't steal from the experience, I have to say that this is a game worth two playthroughs: one for the card game and one for the exploration.  There are better art games out there, but this one is interesting for its atmosphere that is reinforced with the gameplay, whichever one you go with.

Also, this is my first post, so, welcome to "Life on the Flash Lane."