Drywall Eating Simulator

The joke of over-ambiguous titles was funny exactly once two decades ago when Snakes on a Plane crash-landed in cinemas around the world. Yet the playfulness of the term simulator, when used in contexts other than just flying aeroplanes or driving cars around realistically, was funny on about as many occasions. Goat Simulator grazed what little green grass there was, and that was that. In contrast, incoherent narratives consisting of "I'm chronically online" references and social criticism formulated by a twelve-year-old have never been funny. Bugs that bring the game to a grinding halt and force you to start from scratch have never been fun. But okay, let's take it from the top.

Drywall Eating Simulator starts in a dark room in front of a phone that informs the player that you are in a simulation of life on earth. The who, why, how and again, why are never answered. You are then asked to exit through a door that materialises in the room, taking you to your apartment in the simulation. Gameplay then consists of talking to your neighbours, colleagues and various people. Get angry at things they say, break a wall and get angry at the next person. In the three hours or so it took me to smash all the walls and eat all the plasterboard, the game crashed three times. In one of the crashes, all the prompts to progress disappeared, forcing a restart.

It's clear that the development team is keen to identify with the kind of ironic resignation to modern society that characterises the average Reddit user. Late stage capitalism, brain rot, children screaming 67, AI thinking for people, bosses prioritising profit over employee welfare, etc. All the generic and hackneyed terms are there. Of course, disjointed and without context. There is no overall story, no connection between characters. Every person you meet is in a vacuum, like a tweet that no one shares. For a game that tries to criticise the present, it's comical that all it achieved was an AI-like mimicry of internet drivel.

It also doesn't help that the presentation feels like a school project coded together using punch cards and tape. The animations lack weight, the environments are clinically empty and the soundtrack oscillates between non-existent and annoying. All of this might be excusable if the game had something to say, but there's no humour, no anger, no reflection - just posturing cynicism. The game wants so badly to be a biting contemporary satire, but consistently lands in the same level of insight as an angry comment online.

There is an irony in all this. Just as the game developers lack the skills to write a decent script, they also lack the skills to produce a game that doesn't crash at the drop of a hat. Is it perhaps ultimately a joke in itself? That the criticism of modern society consists of an unimaginative and largely unplayable product that we are tricked into paying for? Drywall Eating Simulator is a game that talks about the present without understanding it. It's not subversive, not provocative and definitely not funny - just tiresome. So by all means, stay as far away as you can from Drywall Eating Simulator, don't even get it for free. Spend what little time you have on this earth on something more sensible.