A Living Room Review

You know how some old blokes are sort of cute? Like, you just want to squeeze their little wrinkly, grandaddy cheeks? Don’t give me that “bro, it’s just you” look, I know you know what I mean. Right? Whatever, the Living Room guy is one of those, anyway. I’m not sure what it is about him, whether it’s the chibi-like proportions, the lovably miserable demeanour, or the fact that he squeaks like a dog toy when you click on him. Whatever it is, he’s good. I like him.

In A Living Room, we have a mad mix of comedy sketches, early 2000s Flash games, and point-and-click Requiem for a Dream — and it’s as weird as that sounds. It’s safe to say that our morose main man is going through some stuff, to the point where he asks his couch whether it offers therapy sessions. Replyeth the googly-eyed sofa: “I’m not here for your mind, just your behind”. Definitely one of my favourite lines in the game — delivered, by the way, via some pretty dry and weirdly engaging voiceover, as is the rest of the dialogue. 

So you’ll click around the room to interact and converse with things, shuffling the old geezer along his nihilistic and surprisingly blasé descent into madness. The developers describe the game as an “existential comedy”, and while I found it to be more whacky than laugh-out-loud funny for the most part, it’s certainly entertaining, and it does do a bit of philosophising — if somewhat vaguely and without really committing to anything in depth. Not that that’s a bad thing, but I did have to make a conscious decision about exactly how much thought I should put into the ostensibly more cerebral moments. 

As an example, I picked up what looked like a bible at one point to find the text jumbled and swirling. “Ah!” I thought. “Could this be a representation of the character’s unfolding crisis of faith?” Dunno, was my conclusion, and also, I’m probably not supposed to think about it all that hard. It’s the kind of story that’s vague enough to be interpretable in a metric arse-load of ways, and you can absolutely do that if that’s your bag, but I get the sense that it’s intended more as a surreal, interactive little one-man play that’ll give you a giggle and maybe a couple of interesting philosophical nuggets to ponder.

There’s less than an hour of content here, but at the low, low price of free, it’s certainly worth a bash if you like a bit of WTF in your point-and-click non-adventures. And now that I think about it, the last line of dialogue very nearly gave me an actual lol, so y’know what, I’ll endorse that “comedy” tag after all. Life’s too short to be stingy. How’s that for deep?