On May 19, a game by the name of “Left On Read” was made by Weston Bell-Geddes. This game from a gameplay standpoint wasn’t anything special and was lacking, but the story of the game was phenomenal and even explains why the gameplay itself is what it is. This game speaks to us during these trying times.

“Left On Read’”s gameplay is severely lacking in terms of games. You play as a square that jumps on to text messages to make choices throughout the game. That’s as complex as the game gets gameplay wise, but this is really all the game needs. The story for this game takes place during the 2020 quarantine and you are the thoughts of the nameless character in this game. Due to said lack of name, we will call him Blue. Blue likes a girl who we will be calling Grey. Throughout this game we watch Blue and Grey interact with each other through quarantine and learn about who they are, but more importantly that we are Blue’s self conscious. The choices we make aren’t always what we want and the ones we do want are either harder to reach or Blue just changes them all together. The game design is the most important thing about this game, as it perfectly depicts the game’s atmosphere; lonely and empty. The game’s background is black in contrast to your white square that has a glow to it; the text messages you jump across also faintly glow. This gives off a sense of emptiness especially when this game is put in realistic mode. Since the game works as text messages, these text messages have time stamps on them. Realistic mode does exactly what you’d think and follows the time stamps. This makes the game long, dreadful, and lonely, but in reality doesn’t that capture how quarantine has affected us. You truly feel the game drag on and wither away at you. In theory, if you are to just sit there instead of doing something then it shows how you are wasting your time, but if you do something while waiting like a hobby then it will pose less of an issue. Why say this? The game teaches us that instead of just sitting there wasting away at our phones or waiting for a single person to respond, we should take action and find things to do ourselves. On top of that, the story itself delves deeper into people and our internal insecurities in the modern day about relationships, which is especially prevalent during quarantine. Not being able to socialize with others inhibits the ability people have to communicate.

This game’s story delves into topics of relationships and on a more meta level it teaches you to be more productive. Though the gameplay is minimalistic; it fits very well with the design and story. For these reasons, I highly recommend this game if you have some free time while locked inside for a meaningful story and all around good game. The game is around an hour and a half long and is free on “Steam;” if you like story driven games you may just love “Left On Read.”