Review of:
Where Nothing Is Ever Named by Viktor Sobol
(IFDB)

If you’d like to see the other games reviewed this year, or understand my approach, head to the main page.

I’m definitely bang up for a high-concept game. Where Nothing Is Ever Named ironically names the premise and delivers precisely that. It’s a minimal escape room where the trick is that nothing has names, like being noun-blind in a parser game. Luckily you can distinguish objects from one another, so there’s a little bit of detective work. Verbs and adjectives sure work.

I was super keen on the idea of this game but only so-so on the execution. I was hoping for a little more exploration to show how much of a game you can have without nouns. The game is quite short, but even then I floundered. With such a limited premise, a bunch of things were aggressively not implemented. I was hoping to feel, smell, and taste my way to victory, but much of it was denied.

What little details remained were quite evocative, and I liked the merger of some untethered fantasy genre and perhaps an SCP-like region.

So it was neat but I was hoping for more. What exactly? Well, it’s hard to name…