Papers, Please is up on Greenlight now. Go vote!
Ok so I left this post in a tab open on my laptop for a long time and then totally forgot to get back to it. BUT NO LONGER:
Memory of a Broken Dimension is everything I was hoping for from the trailers and more. It's bleak and chaotic and exactly what I'd imagine a computer would look like if all it knew was Autechre and drone music while staring at pages of Stephen O'Malley's art. I felt entirely oppressed by the world but there was a warm sense of familiarity to everything I can't really explain. There's nothing quite like this out there but at the same time it relates to so much.
The world and its rules are confusing at first but once you understand what the game wants from you it becomes a somewhat competent puzzler where you are more coming to terms with how travelling between cells functions and the reason why you're solidifying rocks in the different areas. Even with a method to its madness, there's still plenty of mystery as to why things are the way they are and it only serves to make you want to progress forward to learn more. By the time the end of the demo hit, I knew I was going to go through it at least a few more times that day.
MOABD resonates with a damaged segment of me as well as plays to the memories I have of my first keystrokes in DOS - being completely lost and ignorant of what anything did but learning the ins and outs as I went along. I'll never forget when my parents understood that computers were going to become my thing, when I launched Windows for Workgroups off the DOS computer we had. They had no idea it was on there, and neither did the guy who sold it to us. Between that, my love of drone/shoegaze and glitchy electronic music as well as the generally nihilistic aesthetics the game calls to, it still remains to be one of my most anticipated games of the upcoming year. I think it has the potential to be as great of a mind bending puzzler as Antichamber, but I don't think it will get the same press attention due to its brash presentation that will turn off many who aren't into the same stuff as people like me.
It's also one of the more frightening games I've played, beating out most modern horror with a simplicity in approach. It doesn't need jump scares to unsettle.