Earthworms

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Earthworms is a Graphic Adventure that has you playing as a detective who experiences helpful visions, as he takes up a case that has him investigating the disappearance of a young woman.

Earthworms is a deeply creepy and unsettling game, and this starts with the bizarre presentation, which has an eerie, dreamlike quality, using blurry hand-painted visuals and an off-key soundtrack. It’s not quite clear if what’s going on here is supposed to all be in a dream, or some odd alternate reality, but there’s definitely an otherworldly feel going throughout the game.

Partly this is due to this game’s writing, which bounces between slightly clever and slightly… off. It’s difficult to describe, but all of this game’s dialogue feels stilted in a way that I can’t quite tell if it’s due to the game being intentionally alien in nature, or if the author didn’t know how to write natural-sounding conversation.

However, there can be no mistake that the bizarre tone of this game’s story is intentional. The first building you run into is a restaurant filled with disturbingly pale meat, and soon enough you’ll come across the body of some sort of humanoid tentacle creature in a bathtub, apparently being drugged or drained of fluids and having his tentacles lopped off for some morbid purpose. The protagonist’s response to this seems unsettled but hardly shocked or horrified, making one wonder exactly what sort of horrors the guy sees on a daily basis.

The gameplay here is fairly standard for the genre. Look around at things, grab items, use items in appropriate ways to get past puzzles, that sorta’ thing. I will say that the psychic visions are a nice touch, essentially acting as a guide to tell players where to go next, although they can be vague and inconsistent. Still, overall, this isn’t a bad example of gameplay for this genre.

Odd, unsettling, creepy, weird… for some people, these words are going to act as a deterrent, but to others, it’s bound to be exactly what you want in a graphic adventure. Earthworms is definitely not a game for everyone. However, for those people who can enjoy a surreal and unsettling experience, it may be worth checking out.

tl;dr – Earthworms is a Graphic Adventure about a psychic detective investigating a missing woman in a surreal and unsettling island. “Surreal and unsettling” describes much of what this game is, and while it’s not going to be a game everyone enjoys, those fans of the genre who want something a bit different may find this to be refreshingly unique.

Grade: C+

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