Super Sad True Love Story

Until recently DEFCON held the super special title of The Most Depressing Game I Have Ever Experienced.

I'm so sorry, Brasilia DF.

And when I say depressing, I don't mean 'badly made' - the race for the first place in that category is very tight indeed. The photo finish is so crowded that you cannot see the finish line. A riot erupts and someone breaks the photo finish camera and punches a baby in the face.

By depressing I mean so well made that it incites a feeling of sadness for the characters or the events of the game. In DEFCON there are no characters as such beyond the raw numbers of casualties and the familiar shapes of continents and the locations of the cities you have been to or have read about. All of the game's violence is in your head when you imagine the number of people you just made disappear - represented by a flash of light above the landscape.

DEFCON casts no moral judgement whatsoever - it is a simulation of nuclear war, pure and mathematical - and that is why it has guts and a soul.

So what could possibly surpass a game where a sobbing woman is part of the unobtrusive soundtrack?

This

Meet Andrus Poder.

Cart Life by Richard Hofmeier is a "retail simulation" in black and white and I will tell you, my imagined reader, about it in the next entry because I am sleepy now. You disappear into a cloud of non-existence.

http://richardhofmeier.com/cartlife/