Am I Nima
In the Am I Nima demo, you wake up tied to a chair with a stranger looming over you and no idea what is going on. The lingering discomfort of the unknown and well executed creepiness of the environment and interactions keep you consistantly uneasy through the entire duration, with the mystery unravelling – or deepening? – as you discover new thoughts.
This game feels like a fantastic innovation of Doodle God/Alchemy style games, where you combine elements to create new elements, and combine those with the new and old elements to create more. While those games are all about finding the next thing for discoveries sake, Am I Nima has a narrative reason for doing so. The screen is split and the top right corner is dedicated to Nimas brain. In there, you will receive words. These are thoughts based on the conversation taking place, or findings as you explore the room. Within the brain, you can combine words to create different words. This, in my opinion, is such cool way of delivering a story.
The words that you combine are telling, when you take the time remember that they are thoughts. Combining Nima and Dad results in grief, which must be the feeling that Nima gets when she thinks about her dad. Due to this, I know something happened. I have contextless pieces of information that allow my imagination to fill in the gaps, and the curiosity to fuel my incessant pairing of words. I can continue combining to find more contextless clues, knowing that at least some of the context will be revealed by the rest of the game as we go. It feels like the equivalent of environmental storytelling but baked directly into the gameplay and mechanics. I feel rewarded for being observant, even though it hasn’t really got me anywhere yet.
Then there is the other half of the game. You are conversing with a woman who appears to be your Mom. As she talks, asks you questions and allows you to ask questions, you can reply using the words that you have stored in your brain by dragging them down to the active conversation. I am unsure how far you can go with using any word at any time (I did unlock a lot of words but I only played the demo once so I only got to see what I chose in the first instance), but it certainly feels like you need to be careful with your choices, to get the information that you need without putting yourself in danger.
The demo allowed for a lot of word gathering but I don’t feel like I have a good grasp on how the rest of the game will go/present itself, and how I will get to use the words that I have conjured. But it did feel like a promise of an interesting experience that I would be keen to continue, especially given the intrigue of story hook we are left on.
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More Demo Impressions
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