Ultra-Indie Daily Dose: The Way Down Is Way Too Weird (In A Good Way)
Hello, you glorious gluttons for all things indie horror! Are you just starving for the newest of the new, the most unknownest of the unknown? If so, you’ve come to the right place. Welcome to the Ultra-Indie Daily Dose! In this series, we’re going to pick a new game every day from an indie horror creator you’ve probably never heard of. No million-dollar budgets or factory productions. This is the space for the little guy with not but a developer toolkit and a dream. So if you’re down to roll the dice on something different, then stick around and check it out!
Today’s daily dose is one of the weirdest game’s I’ve ever played. It would be wise for you to do a sanity roll before reading on. Created by Samuel Leigh, indie developer on itch.io who has made some strange games, The Way Down is an “interactive fiction” that could surpass all his others in terms of weirdness.
The Way Down is sort of a virtual novel with animated scenarios, run through a pixelation filter to give it an extra dose of bizarre. I really enjoyed the contrast between the chunky pixel visuals and the sleak modern text. It reminded me of a time before games strived to be retro and nostalgic, but used whatever visuals were most convenient. It brought me back to the age of Newgrounds games, ironically pretty nostalgic itself. Anyways, the visuals are not important, and certainly not what makes this such a Kafkaesque game.
I don’t even know how to describe The Way Down. You start out the game by leaving your house and walking though a flat plane with a black sky. Every few seconds you encounter a new scenario with strange figures. Each of these encounters, which you seem to find in a random order, is a mini vignette of something outlandish or absurd. There’s not much of an ending, but the journey is really the main drive of this game.
It probably takes 5 minutes to “beat” the game, but it’s worth playing through a few times. The Way Down can be played for free. You can download it by visiting this link.
