From their massive open worlds, unfathomably large download sizes, and seemingly endless checklists of collectibles, missions, and side quests, games are so much nowadays. It’s really no fault of the titles themselves that this formula works–it’s tried, it’s true, and it sells. But it does mean that I appreciate the occasional break from this exact mold of game. And Roger, a narrative game that can be completed within an hour and manages to do so much with so little, offers exactly that kind of break, and I’d love it if it became the standard rather than the exception.
I’m not too interested in giving away the most explicit details of And Roger right here and now. For just about five dollars on your PC and/or Switch, you can see all it has to say over the course of a slightly long lunch break. I’ve nothing to gain from telling you what it is, but you’ve got everything to lose by not just experiencing it firsthand. It covers a lot of ground in a pretty short amount of time, and its gut punches are as hard as they are dizzying.
And Roger plays like an interactive graphic novel–think 2018’s Florence, which depicted the highs and lows of the titular character’s romance and journey of self-discovery across comic-like panels and minigames. And Roger appears to take some cues from the award-winning narrative title, communicating its story largely through brief mechanical interludes that break up its often distressing narrative. However, where Florence basked in the glow of new love and the ennui of uncertainty, And Roger drops players into the confusing perspective of its main character and leads them on what can only be described as an expertly crafted emotional rollercoaster that tightly skirts the boundaries between different genres of stories.
For example, you’d be forgiven for thinking that And Roger was a horror game at first blush. Its opening certainly leaves that impression on the player as a brief examination takes a sharp turn for the bizarre and unsettling. And in truth, many of the events that come to follow–like the protagonist coming to and finding a strange man on her couch–do inspire a bit of terror.
But as you close in on and make your way through the second chapter, And Roger adopts a significantly lighter tone. Without giving too much away, the main character’s life changes for the better, and the horrific sequences that make up the first chapter seem to fade from memory as they push forward into this new era. The break in tone almost appears disjointed from the rest of the narrative that preceded it, but it’s really all quite intentional how the game keeps pushing the player through sometimes disorienting turns through the character’s life.
You see, And Roger just gets it right. What do I mean by “it”? I mean most everything about the game is finely tuned in a way that bloat often obfuscates. The ambitions of its story are scoped precisely, allowing for gameplay and mechanics that align with it perfectly. Scenes where the player must focus the character’s blurry vision on a clock face, smash a button over and over to get out of bed, and even just brush their teeth seem like mundane tasks, but they compound in such a way that the story is able to show more than tell, all the while building narrative tension that eventually explodes. In brief, And Roger doesn’t feel like it loses sight of itself in pursuit of some mechanic, feature, or detour that wouldn’t otherwise fit this tight experience, and while I’m sure much of that that stems from the precarity of indie development, it is also simply refreshing to play something so clear-cut and precise.
Because these pillars of And Roger are in such harmony, its pace, which could be misconstrued for brusque at an hour-long runtime, is actually pitch-perfect. And Roger is just more economical about how it tells its story and how it is conveyed to the player, proving that games don’t have to look or feel like the standard we’ve grown used to in order to tell meaningful tales or even evoke a sense of satisfaction from the player.
And Roger doesn’t have as many things for the player to do as, say, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a game I enjoyed a great deal and completed earlier this year after about 70 hours, nor does it share much in common with Elden Ring, which I’ve replayed a good chunk of recently and whose massive expansion I just wrapped up. It also doesn’t set itself up to rival a game like Slay The Princess, which at least shares a propensity for narrative over mechanics like And Roger does, or a visual novel like Date Everything. It doesn’t need to, either, because I was just as satisfied (not to mention, quietly devastated) by And Roger’s ambitions and execution as any of the aforementioned games. In some cases, it even worked better for me.
My point is not that one way is right and the other is wrong. Games making is not binary in this way. But games like And Roger continue to crop up as proof that they don’t all need to fit a predetermined, and lets just admit it, generously-sized mold. Games, like art in any other medium, can and should come in all shapes, sizes, and forms. And Roger functions as a near-perfect rebuke of the thinking that games should grow bigger in order to be better and due to that, it gets it just right.
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