I could sum this review up pretty quickly in one word, “Mindf**k”, but I won’t even though that is exactly what this is. You play Stiles. A lonely kid who has little to nothing to live for. His life is utter trash and so are his relationships with pretty much everybody at school and at home. Stiles has an escape though. Stiles has LSD…
The game begins in a high school restroom stall just as he is starting to trip. From there begins a downward spiral into the dark recesses of a genuinely troubled psyche.
The puzzles can’t really even be qualified as puzzles, but rather narratives that unfold in their own ways which only serve to take you farther down the rabbit hole that is your own mind. The hallucinatory terrain is wildly convincing and feels like it was designed for a VR platform. VR however would take this to all new levels and that dear readers would be truly horrifying.
What Happened will likely not be a popular title, nor should it be. It does deal with some hard social issues however such as depression which hasn’t been legitimately addressed in games, but I feel that the approach here is intrinsically flawed. It somehow feels too real if that can really even be considered a criticism.
The game also lacks any clear goal and is 100% intuitive. Just as Stiles spends a lot of time literally stumbling around, so does the player as you search for clues to help explain what the hell is going on and what exactly you are supposed to be doing. From the very first scene, before entering actual game play, you will likely feel lost, and I think that may in fact be precisely the point. There is after all a certain sense of dread in not knowing “What Happened”.
3.5 out of 5
