Developer: Sébastien Bénard
Platform: PC – Web

This post is part of a series on The Pirate Bay Bundle.

Created for Ludum Dare 21 (Escape), this has proved to be the most surprising of the bunch thus far. A Tale About Life, Death, and a Looser at first irked me thanks to purposeful misspelling of “loser”. After a while though I began to think that this character was such a loser that he really deserved the typo. Anyway, let’s get into discussing it.

You play as a red-headed guy who goes through his terribly average life. At various important moments, such as birth, college, and fatherhood, the player is presented with one of two options. They are continue or escape. Depending on what event you’re on the results of the choices will be different.

In a way the game felt a lot like Alter Ego, in which you attempt to navigate the life of a virtual human from birth to death. The main difference here is you can only be this loserly fellow and there are a lot less choices. Of course, that’s to be expected given the time constraints during creation! With that said, the pixel art is fairly nice as is the amount of screens you can see while playing.

There was definitely something that bothered me while playing A Tale About Life, Death, and a Looser and that was its sour display of women. Certainly, the entire game is meant to paint a very dreary picture for the lead character but it could have taken things in another direction. Or maybe, the plot of each woman could vary from the other rather than both of their stories converging into the same stereotyped view. Who knows?