Description
You’ve had it. Seriously, you can’t stand this dead end town for one more second. You’ve packed your bags and tossed them in the back of your beat-up car. Tonight’s the night. You’re leaving.
But someone else is supposed to come with you. Your best friend said they were in, that they’d stick by your side no matter where you end up. Only they were supposed to meet you a while ago, and they haven’t shown.
As the minutes tick past, you think about your life and how it got to this point. You’ll give your best friend a few more minutes, but then you’re gone.
Will they show up? Or have they abandoned you?
Sometimes, solo games give us a lighthearted reprieve from the seriousness of our lives – we become a bookselling fox, a knuckle-tatted wizard, or a late-night DJ. Sometimes, however, we choose darker themes. We engage with failure, fear, and abandonment. We choose stress on purpose, out of curiosity or to validate our past experiences or simply as a way to sit with difficult feelings in a safer way.
Something’s Always Wrong is a solo journaling game for those who want to lean into a painful setting. Realistic and modern, your character has lived a life filled with challenges – parental, social, academic, financial. Their childhood memories are neither warm nor nurturing and are peppered with cruelty, loss, and strife. Now your character is grown – they work a shitty job they hate, they’re tired of this town, and they desire more than anything else to escape and begin life anew. They’re ready to go. They should be leaving any time now, but the one person who promised to come with them hasn’t shown.
Combat hopelessness, helplessness, and disappointment. It’s true, something is always wrong, but perhaps you can find a glimmer of hope in possibility.
- A5 size, 20-page B&W zine
- Content note: themes of loneliness, abandonment, substance abuse, pain, poverty, depression/anxiety, failure, and physical abuse (human and animal)
