‘Strange Aeons’ Converses Over Surreal Early-Internet Hellscapes
Strange Aeons has a chat with your guide out of Hell, and if you can talk your way through several bizarre rituals, you can take your place among the living again.
This game takes you to an underworld that seems to have been born from early 3D games and shorts, as if I were trapped in an abyss of early 90’s youth television. Thankfully, you have a bit of company here to remind you that your followers have been calling out for you. There’s not as many of them as there used to be, but there’s enough to draw you from this world you’ve been banished to. In order to follow that call, you’ll need to speak the right words with your guide. You have to speak yourself back into existence, in a sense, through solving verbal riddles and finding what your cryptic guide needs of you.
There is always an overbearing sense of dread in this aging cyber hell. The world feels like it was filled with the promises of a wonderful future, but has been left, forever pristine but empty of humanity. Your guide speaks of things that don’t make a great deal of sense, and sees sides of you and your reality that confuse and discomfort. It felt like it was speaking in disturbing magical tongues, the words carrying meaning but the sentences weaving a sinister tapestry over reality. You can say what you like to it at times, but there’s always this sense that simply talking with this thing is wrong. It’s like you’re making something happen that shouldn’t. You’re agreeing to a contract you don’t undertstand.
Strange Aeons is a surreal experience, and one whose feelings have stuck with me since playing it. I feel I understood what happened, but something about the words the guide chooses and the nature of the world feels like I’ve opened a door to something I shouldn’t have.
Strange Aeons is available now on itch.io and Steam.
