Man I Just Wanna Go Home by JZPS Games
Man I Just Wanna Go Home is arresting immediately upon viewing due to lexa’s striking art style. Described as, “an ‘MSPaint-noir’ visual novel with 13 endings.” Each screen is full of angles and the shapes they form being ‘wrong’, just slightly out of line with our reality. Singular color choices dominate each screen, each in a conflict with black and white to determine the true champion. Each screen captures your attention right away. This is the kind of game that gets views via Twitter GIFs (I guess we should start saying Bluesky GIFs now). I was constantly thinking of San Francisco while playing it. Despite the lack of actual downpour San Francisco receives (compared to say, my previous home in Vancouver, WA), and despite the ubiquity of trains and cabs and coffee shops and casino bars (wait, what? Casinos don't exist within the city?) with shady VIP areas within most major metropolitan cities I still could not escape the belief that the unnamed, undetailed city within MIJWGH was San Francisco. Maybe it was because I had just visited the city for a few days in April. Maybe it was because, despite never living in the city, I still find myself daydreaming about it. The struggle of the protagonist, to find their way home during a rainstorm with no funds, is also a ubiquitous struggle, but somehow more acutely realized within San Francisco, where Salesforce, the city’s largest private employer, recently posted a net income of $6.197 billion, and whose tenancy is in the city at the forefront of the war against homeless. I’ve never lived there myself, despite wanting to since I began listening to Podcast Beyond in a past life. And yet when I see the cityscape of MIJWGH I can’t match it to any view within Las Vegas or Vancouver or upstate New York or the many cities I have vacationed in but can easily match it to the countless streets I’ve walked in SF. In spite of these facts SF remains a beautiful place. The park, the windmills, the tiny, intimate restaurants (how I wish we had a chance to just attempt a Tekka dinner [the place was closed for a private event when we passed by]), the ocean, the people, especially the people, all with their own lives and thoughts and opinions and behaviors. My most recent visit to the city included taking some time in Washington Square to simply sit and observe the life all around me. MIJWGH captures this life within its small set of people: the light, breezy, immediately trusting coffee shop employee, the drunk motherly heartbroken roommate, the tired friendly concerned bartender, the sneezing bureaucratic metro ticketer, the charming smile-as-I-lie-and-kill-you Napoleonic presumed mob boss/captain. There exists a larger, deadly plot but even the player’s ability to view every permutation existing within the game cannot piece it entirely together. Not that this inhibits the pure pleasure of pursuing each variation to its (mostly) tragic end. Save points and fast forwarding eliminate any friction that may exist in this pursuit, transforming the game as a whole into a pleasurable puzzle to turn over in one's hand and head until each solution has been solved.
