The Static Speaks My Name

A controlled form of obsession can help people become really good at something, but that rarely happens to be the case. In fact, OCD can be a gruesome affliction, especially in its more severe forms. Everyone has things they have a special interest in, on the other hand, which means that it’s sometimes difficult to draw a clear line between hobby and obsession.

The Static Speaks My Name is a short story game in which you play the role of a strange man from the moment he wakes up one early morning and starts his daily routine. This is more of an interactive story than an actual video game, mainly because you can only look around and interact with a very short list of objects over the course of the events.

The story is pretty disturbing and weird, but it’s not shoved down your throat. You choose not to looking into certain aspects and just enjoy the ride, but you obviously lose a lot of substance in the process. The game only features around ten minutes of gameplay, so there’s certainly not a lot of extra content added just to round the numbers. In short, you are a man obsessing over a painting, who also happens to keep a man locked in a cage for unknown reasons.

The general atmosphere is quite pressing and disturbing, even if there are no voices or jump scares to give you a reason to shiver. Most of the creepiness is generated by the story and the sound design, because you are truly immersed from the first second of gameplay. Some of the events can be unsettling as well, such as when you have to eat live shrimp from the aquarium instead of breakfast.

The graphics quality is simple to say the least, but it is actually not at all important for the game to make its point. Objects are very low-poly, and most modern post-processing effects are entirely missing, but you won’t have time to pay attention to such details anyway. As long as you can stomach the story, everything else should fade into the background from the first seconds of gameplay.

The Static Speaks My Name has the right idea, but it’s a bit short. However, the ending indicates that it might go on sometime in the future, which would be wonderful. Thus, you should definitely give the game a try, especially if you enjoyed classics like The Stanley Parable.