Play (Pt.1)

The sound of a slow broken fan and the white noise of a late night television program entertain me on the boring night. My room fills with heat as I type away on my keyboard reading about the latest trailers and release details for upcoming games. The Georgia humidity is seeping through my barely insulated windows causing sweat to protrude from my brow. I look over and see a balloon left over from graduation night lazily floating around my ceiling. The sound of crinkling cellophane annoys me, so I tie the balloon down. As I get up I become motivated to play my PlayStation 4. I grab my warn in white controller, switch to HDMI 1, and see what offerings my console had in store for me tonight.

As I scroll through my library of games I quickly feel bored by my selection and I go to the PlayStation store to see what Sony and there many dev teams have to offer. I scroll through the indie titles, then the triple a title to see nothing I like. While I was scrolling through the menus I stopped on demos to see if anything was worth taking up hard drive space. As I pass demos for Terraria and such, I see a thumbnail for a game that I’ve never heard of. The game was simply titled “play”. I grab my laptop to try and find information on the game but I couldn’t find a single page of information on it. Being the curious connoisseur that I am, I quickly downloaded the rather small 2 GB game.

My giddiness made time seem as if it were moving at slug type speeds. As my game is downloading I check to see if any friends are online to spread the word about this mystery game. To no luck, only one friend was online and he was on idle, so I presumed he had fallen asleep. A little black box pops into the upper left hand corner of my screen, accompanied by an amusing “bing”, telling me that my game was successfully installed. I scroll over to the newly created application and tap x on the rather un-appealing thumbnail. It was only a black box that said “play” in pix-elated blue letters. As the menu screen pops up it shows a couple options. Play, options, and exit. All the options screen had were the options to brighten the screen and picture orientation. After those were customized to my liking, I backed out and hit play. While a loading screen popped up, I thought to myself how weird it was that the menu was devoid of all music. The only noise I heard from the game were slight beeps as I scrolled the menu.

When the loading screen goes away, I am introduced to who seems to be the main protagonist. All I see are a pair of human hands holding a torch. The graphics weren’t as detailed as you would expect from a current gen console, but since this was a demo I figured it was only an early engine build. The controls were basic. Move with the right analog stick, use your field of vision with the left, and click in L3 to sprint. The buttons and triggers didn’t seem to yield any use, I had no items besides a torch so thought nothing of it. The setting is what seems to be a dimly lit corridor in some form of house. I stumble around with the somewhat unresponsive controllers and eventually find myself near a door. Opened the door and ended up outside. There is no music, only ambient noises coming from the desolate area I was in.

Due to the nature of this setting I was immediately expecting a survival horror game, a genera I have come to enjoy in my older teenage years. So I reached back and turned out the light and put my headset on to increase immersion. As I explored through the area, I became to vaguely recognize the area I was in. the signs made it more apparent. I was in Daytona Beach, my home city. I found this odd, but enlightening. As I chugged on through my little journey, I came across a vehicle. I started exploring it and after enough fiddling around with the controls, I made it into the vehicle and started driving around. Doing what anyone else with a sense of fun would do, I drove fast and dangerously. This was an easy thing to do considering the fact that there seemed to be no computers anywhere around. After fiddling around with the car I tried to see if I could pause this game, when I hit pause a rather detailed map came up. There was just one confusing thing. The map had a waypoint set, I think I have my first objective. The objective read, "go home"..