16. meccha chameleon
around the release of this game things started to dull a bit. i stopped feeling my assault was something immediate, a new and shocking calamity that i would battle until it fell or i fell, and more as just a part of living.
i didn't really care too much for meccha chameleon. by friendslop standards, it was more slop than most of them. only a handful of levels, 1 being "the backrooms" as featured in "the backrooms" inspired by "the backrooms." it was carried more than any money-costing game should be by its custom content, which added much to the replayability but was itself riddled with broken collisions, lighting issues, and maps that just really don't work well for hide and seek.
though i didn't pay for meccha chameleon myself, i am stuck questioning its value as a product. the means of evaluation will vary from person to person depending on...well, everything. how much is $6 worth to you? how much is your own time worth to you? what experiences are meaningful? what experiences aren't? to what extent would you rather be doing literally nothing? that last question is usually one that comes up for me when evaluating a game.
i played meccha chameleon just shy of 10 hours and i think i would call it fine. playing with friends over a few sessions spread across maybe a week and a half, it was probably better than doing nothing for at least half of my total playtime. for $2 more, peak lasted me 19 hours of fun and engrossing gameplay, but i also played peak at a different time.
a general dissatisfaction with your day-to-day nothingness is a great way to become art-concerned about video games. when a game doesn't reach out to you as obviously good, ask yourself: is playing this game better than the alternative nothing i could be doing? would i, genuinely, be more content to stare at the ceiling, rather than play this game? i've asked myself this question a million times over the years! it's the metric by which i deemed peak such a huge success.
this metric was made complicated for me this year.
"something" and "nothing" are both a lot weightier for me now. i'm exhausted with the idea of doing something, be it going to work, talking to friends, or playing video games. if you've been reading these in order, you already know that. i have no way of knowing when i'll have to relive that night again, but whenever i do, it will inevitably be made worse by the fact that i was doing something. doing something carries not the risk, but the promise, that i will at some point, have to juggle doing whatever that something is with the extreme terror and regret that drenches me like a fire hose a thousand times a day.
conversely, doing nothing ain't what it used to be. do you enjoy wallowing? i used to fucking love wallowing. the little suboptimalities of living - a shitty work schedule, a big payment coming up, whatever - can be overwhelming to dwell on, but ignoring all that in favor of the big inescapable malaise that comes bundled with being undistracted can be almost comforting, in a way that might be more fulfilling than a bad game, but is almost never as fulfilling as a good game. this feeling used to characterize the nothing i would experience. this was the nothing i would compare to playing a game i wasn't particularly enjoying. would i rather play this game, or wallow? would i rather do something or nothing?
recently the nothing has become extremely loud. i cannot enjoy any aspect of it. it is impossible to focus on the nonspecific sadness because i do actually have a huge, inescapable problem. something bad has happened to me, and it can't be undone, and nobody can help me, and it can happen again, and sooner or later it will.
this is ultimately how my ruin informs my day-to-day experience. will it be easier, today, to attempt to focus on something while this bad thing that happened to me beats down on the back of my head, trying to drill its way in, or will it be easier to stare for hours at the ceiling while letting all of it spill out into my bedsheet-cocoon.
every session i played of meccha chameleon had at least 2 instances of terror. it was, to my memory, better than nothing about half the time.
