First of Endings

A look into and Roger

Last Time On Dragonb…

Oh. Wait. This isn’t that. This is just my substack.

If you read my last post, you’ll know that I am making my way towards completing more video games this year instead of playing the beginning of a lot of games. I want to actually finish the games that I pick up, at least the single-player ones. You may also recall that I had decided on my first game to complete this year would be an indie title called and Roger. So that’s exactly what I did, and exactly what this is going to be about.

What is and Roger?

Simply put, and Roger is an interactive story. The gameplay is minimal and intuitive, but the real focus is on the story and the emotional pull. There is also little voice acting. Mostly it takes inspiration from the adults in Charlie Brown; gibberish while the lines appear on screen for you to read with the occasional human noise to show someone is emoting in some way. The music and sound design also play a big part in how you feel as you read the words and take in the simplistic but effective art style.

quick Thoughts

Before I go too much further, I have one thing to say. If you like interactive stories, just play it. Pick it up for $4.99 on Steam or Switch 2, or whatever other platforms you may prefer that it’s on, and play it. It’ll take you like 1-2 hours to complete. You can find the time and justify the cost.

but Spoilers

This is the part where I won’t spoil anything. I’ll keep story elements vague and try not to give away too much of the gameplay surprises. So if you want to know a little more, but still plan on playing it, here you go.

You’re probably going to cry. I did. My wife could hear me a few rooms over, despite me trying to hold it in. It’s a sad story with an uplifting ending. Also, there is some religion splashed throughout, but for someone who considers himself agnostic, but was raised as a christian, this didn’t bother me. There are three chapters to this game and I was teary eyed pretty early on because I took a guess what it was about and then once Chapter 2 started, I realized I was wrong and my eyes watered for a completely different reason.

The gameplay, sound design, and music are all expertly crafted and work in concert to really showcase the depth of this story. It is a game that is really hard to talk about without ruining all the details of the story and gameplay. Most of the time you’re looking at the images, clicking your mouse, or moving it around trying to figure out what you need to do to progress. There was one moment where I genuinely didn’t press anything because I didn’t think I was supposed to and then I popped an achievement, laughed, and then found what I needed to do. The gameplay is really simple, but so effective. It instills a sense of anxiety, joy, anger, confusion. All of these things are shown in the way the buttons appear or move, the way the images change or shift perspectives. But without the subtle sounds of the button presses and movements, and without the score none of it would really work.

My wife and I talk about films a lot, as she has a degree in film, and one thing we use to distinguish between a general film that everyone will enjoy and a film that is made to say something or to tell a really grounded story that is shot well, acted better, and written superbly; something that really makes you feel and think about your life and loved ones and the choices you’ve made. The latter type of films we refer to as “Capital F Films”. With that knowledge, and Roger is a capital G Game. It is not a spectacle, it is not brimming with action, or reliant on your quick reflexes and pattern recognition, it is not asking you to fight a dragon. It is simply trying to tell you a story that may or may not resonate with you in a unique and distinct way.

Okay, now time to spoil it. You’ve had enough time to sit with the basics.

and Spoilers

Seriously, don’t read this section if you want to go into the game mostly blind. Have you played it? Oh you don’t care about spoilers? I guess that’s your prerogative, have it your way then, but I warned you.

I’ll start with the gameplay, so that way if you’re reading this on a large monitor, by the time I get to the real meat of the spoilering then you’ve really dug in and I don’t accidentally spoil the major stuff for those that don’t want to have it spoiled but whose eyes can’t help but drift to the bottom of the page, that’s certainly happened to me and I was upset. So about this gameplay.

Like I said before, the primary way you play this game is with a mouse. It genuinely starts you out like in most games; You have to agree to the terms and conditions, and then you have to create an account and, oh wait, no. Actually you just click some buttons and the screen cracks and. Well okay, have you ever played Stanley’s Parable? No? Huh, you really should play that. It’s a riot. An excellent walking sim with great humor. Anyway, when I started the game, before I got to Chapter 1, I genuinely thought that this game would be similar to that, but it’s definitely not. I also thought these were normal screens: set your audio levels, change your brightness, create an account etc. That was, until I got to the username creation and I couldn’t actually type anything in and, in the top left, every time I started to type something it would start to parse out, one letter at a time, “Please press the button” or at least I’m assuming that’s what it was saying. I didn’t let it finish before I laughed and started smashing the button overlapping the text insert field as the screen began to break.

It’s little moments like that, which also appear between chapters, that really mess with the dopamine levels in your mind. You can tell after a few of these that appear before the start of the first chapter, that this game is going to go in an interesting direction.

and Story

You start as a little girl who wakes up and is a bit confused about things. She’s uncertain she’s in her own home, but eventually figures out she is. She searches for her dad. But each click of the button and the quickening pace of the music lead you to believe her dad is not there. It is in this first sequence that I really thought about what this story could be. As I advised at the beginning of this, you should go in blind, and that’s exactly what I did. I had no idea what this was. I started to tear up here because I thought her dad was dead and she was going through the denial stage of grief where you still look for the person around every corner, or expect a phone call that will never come again. I have been through this and it sucks, and this game made me think maybe this will be more personally devastating than I thought.

Then she arrives in the living room and there is a man on the couch. At first, she thinks that it is in fact her dad. But after a moment she looks harder, as the image shifts in and out between a man with a hat and a man without a hat, eventually solidifying into a man with a hat. That is odd to her, her dad doesn’t wear a hat. Who is this man and why is he in my house?

It was at this point that the game started to show what it would really be. The art style and subtle gameplay shift and change as these scenes play out. Eventually you are trying to run away from this man. But all you see are footprints that you’re trying to follow while avoiding the gaze of the man and you have furniture to hide behind and you need to wait for the right moment to press the button quickly to move and reach the front door. The music and lighting of the scene and the sound effects of the footsteps all meld into one cacophonous scene that gets your heart racing as you wonder what’s going to happen if you get caught.

For me, I’ve played sequences in games like this before, so I wouldn’t say it was difficult. I made it through to the door without being caught and only knew you could actually get caught because an achievement popped up for not getting caught.

Anyway, this scene ends with you finding your way to a bakery and the employee there calling your dad. Your dad shows up and the lighting shifts and you are saved.

We skip ahead for the next chapter and find the girl in adult life. You go to the same bakery and fall in love with the person behind the counter. It’s in this part of the story that we really discover that this is not just a story about a girl who had a traumatic moment, this is a woman who has dementia. You are playing a woman who has difficulties remembering how to do things, like brush her teeth, eat, cook, who her husband even is (it turns out to be the man with the hat in the first chapter).

What a terrible disease dementia is. I’ve seen it up close and for the loved ones it’s heartbreaking, and I can only imagine what it must be like to be inside of it. The story of and Roger tells the latter story through the eyes of this woman who has dementia and is having all of these issues with her memories as you relive some of the moments in her life. The gameplay, as mentioned above and glimpsed in the trailer, does a superb job of escalating the disease by making tasks harder and showing one sequence where she is in the bathroom and you realize you’ve gotten pee everywhere and made a mess of the sink and toilet paper, despite thinking you’ve done everything correctly.

It culminates in a visit from someone you don’t recognize, a literal black squiggle of a person while you’re not in your home. You just want to go home and go to your dad. But then you age up as you talk to this man and eventually you recognize him as your Roger, in this rare moment of lucidity, and you reminisce about your life together.

First of Endings

Then it ends in that happy place. That memory of recognition. I was bawling my eyes out for most of the second half of the game. There are some very sincere moments of Roger and his thoughts and feelings where he’s telling you about what he’s been going through as he watches the woman he loves slip away from him that really punch you in the gut.

I sat with this game for a little while before I started writing this. The thing that really hits is that living through this, on either side, but from the POV of Roger moreso, is genuinely one of my worst nightmares. I have been with my wife for 19 years this June, and we’ll have been married for ten of them on the same day. I can’t imagine looking at her and not knowing who she is, or worse, her not recognizing me. It truly is a terrible disease and I hope some day we can find a cure so that nobody has to experience either perspective of it again. Fuck dementia/Alzheimer’s.

and Then What?

This was a lot of words about a game that only took me about an hour to reach the credits. But that’s one of the reasons why I started this adventure in the first place. I wanted to complete more games and I have completed one and shared my thoughts and feeling about it with you dear reader. It felt good to finish a game and even better to get to write about it. Even though it was only an hour of my time, compared to most other games, which will likely take 10-50 hours to complete a playthrough, it is a step in the right direction of finishing games I’ve started and sharing my experience.

If you’ve made it this far, maybe think about following me or liking this article, or perhaps if you’ve played and Roger tell me your thoughts in the comments. I’m not sure yet what my next game is going to be but probably I will be revisiting a game I started but haven’t yet finished, of which there are several to choose from. Hope to see you there. Oh, and apologies for the lack of photos. I don’t like grabbing pictures from the internet and don’t support genAI slop and I forgot to grab screenshots because I was too focused on the experience. Next time there’ll be more fun pictures to look at, probably anyway. Okay, thanks for reading. Bye.