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dkirschner's Do Not Feed the Monkeys (PC)

[January 31, 2025 01:18:58 PM]

This game has some cool ideas, and I liked my brief time with it, but it becomes repetitive and frustrating. The game describes itself as a "voyeur simulator." You sit in your apartment watching live feeds of other people's lives ("cages" as the game calls them). This was really interesting. Each cage has a different self-contained story. One guy was an accountant moonlighting as a cross-dresser who is doing some shady business dealings and threatening people who want to expose his double life. Another cage was a room full of overeducated writers slaving away on a self-help book credited to a media mogul. Another was a field that gets a mysterious crop circle. Another was a janitor trapped in an elevator who had made an imaginary friend out of janitorial supplies and is writing his life story on the wall. Its darkly humorous, sardonic writing landed for me; I liked its vibe.

So, your job is to monitor an increasing number of cages and learn things about the people in them because you have joined some organization that wants you to do this. You're occasionally given tasks to deduce something about the cage (what is the name of the person in cage 10; what is the address of cage 3; etc.). You are rewarded with money for getting these answers correct. You need money because you are also managing your own hunger, sleep, and health levels. If you don't eat, sleep, or keep your "health" up, you'll die. You also have to pay rent, and you have to pay the shady organization employing you in order to move up in the organization. To earn money, you have to take jobs. To eat, you need to buy food. Everything costs time, which is a huge constraint. The clock ticks away regardless of what you do, which means you're always getting hungrier, your landlady is closer and closer to demanding rent, and so on.

This wouldn't be too hard if you just needed to watch a few screens, but it gets up to (as far as I got) 25 screens. This is practically impossible. You can't keep track of what's going on, you can't follow the stories, let alone trying to sleep and work and everything else. So, the game became about skimming the stories, clicking as fast as I could through information to try and solve the little puzzles, trying to stay alive as long as I could. I did one playthrough, but I think that's enough. If I start over, I'll have to just mindlessly click through stories again looking for keywords to file away until I have what I need to solve puzzles to earn the money necessary to stay fed and rested and housed until whatever the end game state is. I gather that there are more scenarios I didn't see, but each one blows through its content quickly, so it really would be just seeing the same short, repetitive scenes playing out over and over, with a few new ones tossed in.