The blonde girl, she’s stuck. Not in a fun way, not at first. The dungeon is this ugly, grey maze of bricks and I kept pressing the wrong key to attack. The controls are at the start but who reads that? I just mashed. She swings her sword, it’s got this pathetic little arc, and a slime thing just hops on her. I thought I was winning but then the health bar was gone and the animation changed. It’s not a game about escaping, is it. The description even says it, she’s not finding an exit. It’s a monster hunter game where the hunter is the one getting hunted, and the monsters are very, very direct about their intentions.

There’s like 20 of them. I got to a plant thing that wrapped her up and I just watched. The stages, four of them plus a bonus one after you clear the fourth, they all look the same. Grey bricks. Sometimes a different colored slime. I wish there was a map or something, I kept walking into dead ends and then a wolfman would just appear. No warning. The sound is just these wet slaps and her little gasps, it got repetitive but I didn’t close the tab. I was on my phone, switching between this and Twitter, and I forgot what I was doing. The combat is clunky on purpose, I think. You’re supposed to lose. Losing is the whole point, like that old flash game where the elf girl fights orcs. You know the one. This is that but with more stages and a blonde who never learns.

The replayability is weird. I went back to see the other enemy types. There’s a minotaur. It’s exactly what you expect. The game doesn’t pretend to be anything else, it’s a sequence of losing screens with different monsters. I got to the third stage and my hand cramped from the awkward key placement. Why is jump on ‘W’ and attack on ‘J’? My fingers are not that long. I never beat the fourth stage, I don’t know what the bonus stage is. Maybe it’s just more grey bricks. I’ll probably check tomorrow. Don’t tell me.