Stick RPG

Stick RPG is a silly game not worth taking too seriously. You find yourself incarnated as the main character, a blue stick figure in a 2-dimensional world that's a dreamlike pastiche of our own. It's located on a floating island in the shape of a square. Everything you need is there, from its singular fast food restaurant, a local bar, even a pawn shop full of weapons. It has all the basic amenities of a town but it's almost completely devoid of civilization's most essential ingredient: a citizenry to keep it all operational. Throughout the course of the game you interact with a very limited amount of characters, and none of them are developed with any particular sophistication.

The first you're likely to notice is a kid you can give cigarettes to trade for his skateboard. He'll die if you give him too many. The two others you can encounter on the streets are a homeless man you can give money and beer and the town's local coke dealer. He charges 400 dollars a gram, it's a complete ripoff. The only other character I came across in my playthrough that I could actually see was the clerk of a convenience store. I don't count the people you can get into drunken fights with at the bar. All of the other characters in the game are only painted through short dialogue boxes or the tiniest bits of personality added to flavor text. Most of these you encounter as messages on your answering machine.

Stick RPG is a remarkably unsophisticated game, but that's where I find its charm. You develop routines as you play. The first one I found myself in was starting out as a cook at the local fast food place before earning enough money in one day to pay for enough classes to apply to be a janitor at the town's only building that comes close to resembling a skyscraper. In its self imposed game loops one finds a bizarre freedom. You're never told when to come into work, you can work for as little or as long as you want depending on your goals for the day. The game is almost utopian in this regard. A bare impression you can get of this society's internal tensions are the fact that it's just as easy to get a university education as it is to buy a gun and rob the town's only convenience store.

The second loop I found myself was playing with the game's stock market. I made enough money to buy a bigger apartment and that let me buy a computer at the furniture store. After looking around at the market I had the brilliant idea to buy every stock that was only a dollar because I figured that's as low as they would ever go. I was right and it was the easiest way to make enough money to buy everything in the game. From there you can buy everything, all of the real estate, all of the furniture, all other objectives become pointless. According to the game's logic, you've won. You stand on the stick island as a stick god. But even god gets bored and decides to kick the shit out of people in a filthy bar and go off to Las Vegas to try to sell off 10 grams of cocaine only to slip on a used condom and get robbed by squirrels.

Life's simple, sometimes you just want a chocolate shake, a triple cheeseburger, or a slushee from the gas station. You wish you could wake up without the need of an alarm clock or caffeine pills and go to work whenever you want. You wish you could just sit around while 2 million dollars collects compound interest in your bank account so you can spend all day watching dating shows and exercising, or going to university just for the hell of it. We all want to live in a castle.

656 words.