'Nest' Is Both Glaringly Obvious and Uncomfortably Clever

Nest, a game made for Ludum Dare 37 by Jonathan Whiting, is a game of three very specific moments.

In the first, you will go to move the mouse and realize that the game does not have freelook. Weird, you'll think. The left and right arrows turn your character ninety degrees in that direction, like old dungeon crawlers, and you'll grasp this as you begin to move through a brightly colored, flat-shaded room. The particular motion will feel obstructive, unnecessary. The single musical chimes that accompany each moment will feel a little jarring.

You will cross the room in about thirty seconds.

The second moment will hit as you reach what lies at the end of the room, and it will make you laugh. All of a sudden, both the game's movement system and its strange sounds will make a sort of horrible sense.

You'll play for about ten or fifteen more seconds and then the third moment will arrive. At this point, the exact implications of moments one and two will become clear, and you will laugh a lot. Shortly after that, you will probably quit the game.

I am being circumspect, and I apologize for that. Nest is a game, though, that is at once both glaringly obvious and extremely, uncomfortably clever, and to arm you for its central trick would be very unfair.

In fact, stop reading now. It's about four megabytes. You can sit back in your chair and sit forward and then it will have finished downloading. Give it five or ten minutes of your time and come back to me.

There is a genre of games that I love, and it is those that hate their player. Or, "hate" is perhaps the wrong word; these games instead seem to view the player as an itch that should be scratched, as an imposter in their worlds. I love Catacombs of Solaris, which tries to make the player uncomfortable. Or Zebra, which tries to make the player actively ill.

These games create a gulf between them and the player and attempting to cross it is often overwhelmingly difficult. But isn't it fun, sometimes, to dangle our feet over the edge?

You can download Nest for free, on PC and Mac, from the designer's site.