Selfie Sisters of the Amniotic Lens Review

Selfie : Sisters of the Amniotic Lens makes me angry. Not a lot does, not really. I’m known for being “so laid back you’re horizontal” but this pile of hipster navel gazing trash makes me want to track down the creators and immolate them. Not because of the 1980s inspired graphics and teletext art nor because of the basic concept of the game, which seems to have been hatched after a fistful of mushrooms washed down by a bottle of absinthe. It is one of the central features of the game that makes me incandescent with rage.

At the very start of the game, the player is met by the text “Shed your skin and tell me what lies beneath. What tears do you cry that are worth bottling?” when creating a player profile. This is no small thing, the game is asking you to bear your soul in text form for you to put in a virtual bottle and unleash upon this virtual world. Bottles that other players find and then are asked to respond with either “condemn” or “free”.

Let me repeat that, people are encouraged to unload their deepest darkest secrets and fears for evaluation by total strangers. Anyone who has spent 90 seconds on 4chan or reddit will know what a bag of angry snakes that is. It is no big stretch of the imagination to visualise someone using the same profile name in this and some other system (Facebook, Google +, Twitter) whilst confessing some deep dark pain and some troll spending 90 seconds on a search engine resulting in something hideous.

Putting aside this mélange of potential horrors, the very story of the game is equally disturbing. It focuses around the eponymous “Sisters of the Amniotic Lens” a cult that carved wounds into themselves in the belief that these act as gateways to another dimension.

From here things get weirder, you find yourself sat at a desk, in front of an old CRT Television surrounded by flies. Why are there flies? That might be something to do with the legless female corpse sat on a chair on your left with a machete through the sternum! By looking at the flies you zap them with the lens on the table in front of you and eventually get to tune the TV to enable access to another dimension.

This is where you follow the “no-wave” music towards a red sphere that when shot moves about between dressmaking dolls floating in space. all in wireframe. Once you have shot it three times it moves to a big wireframe TV with flies flying around it. After killing a fly you can shoot the sphere which enables you to get back through the TV to reality and that lovely lady with her missing limbs.

This is pretty much all the content in the game, the bottles float about with the secrets of people inside them in the space between the dressing dummies. Those you fly towards using the mouse wheel and shoot to reveal people's secrets.

A blog by the name of Video Games and the Bible describes Selfie as “a virtual paradise in an environment increasingly filled with negativity and outright evil” but it is not. It is a dangerous social experiment that deserves to sink into obscurity.