How To Be Born
Finished: ✓An incredibly short, weird, and interesting game.
The game is free and requires an Xbox controller, so check it out if you can.
Spoilers for the game:
There is not much gameplay at all, but its gameplay is very interesting.
Literally all you do to beat the game is hold down as many buttons as you can on your controller. The game doesn’t tell you this, but it’s communicated to you through the camera’s movements. For every two buttons you hold down, the camera moves to a new position.
The mechanical feeling of trying to hold down eight or so buttons on your controller is where interesting part is. It’s pretty difficult to do that!
It turns the controller itself into the obstacle that you must overcome. It’s so awkward to try and position your hands so that you can hold down all of these buttons. You are constantly gaining and losing progress as you struggle to do something that the controller was not designed to do.
Eventually, you hold down enough buttons and are told that it’s ok to let go, and the ending of the game starts. The ending of the game is a celebration of life and existence. The game tells you how fortunate and lucky you are to be alive and to know the people that you do.
I think that the gameplay is very thematically relevant to the game. The game is about “How to be Born” and about living in general. You struggle to hold the controller in the same way that you can struggle to get a grip on reality and your life.
Perhaps the game is trying to say that the ability to struggle and strive for things, in and of itself, is something that should be cherished.
I’m not even going to go over the visuals here. I don’t know why Kazuma Kiryu is driving this red car in the middle of space. I guess that means that he’s the one that is being born in this game?
When you beat the game, he is dancing in a baby crib while fireworks go off in the background and giant white text tells you how lovely it is to be alive.
(I have definitely spent more time writing this page than I spent actually playing this game)