Continue? Stars A Game Hero Making Peace With Deletion

The game's full name is actually Continue?9876543210, but fitting all of that in a headline would've required a piston-powered clamp, a really big hammer, and a shrink ray. This one looks magnificently fascinating, though. You might recognize the Swords & Sworcery-esque art style from the surprisingly solid Skrillex Quest, which developer Jason Oda also infused with his glitchy sensibilities. Continue, however, is far less tongue-in-cheek, aiming for heavy heartstrings over light and flighty giggleboxes. You play as a recently deceased videogame hero wandering a world of Random Access Memories. Ultimately, you will be deleted, but as you wander a fraying, pixelated landscape behind the scenes of our favorite games, your goal is to find peace.

Continue was inspired by an actual brush with death Oda endured while lost in the mountains of New Mexico. He calls it a "quest for wonder, contemplation, and peace," which is pretty far removed from the blood-drowned holy grails of most defeated game characters (revenge, vengeance, and revengeance). Here's the basic setup:

"In the garbage dump of the Random Access Memory, you travel from town to town, meeting people who offer you their lightning and their prayer. Each prayer builds a shelter in a distant town where you must frequently hide to avoid being deleted into nothingness by the garbage collector. Along the way, you are thrust into many battle challenges. There is ultimately, no way to escape the garbage collector, but running from it buys you time to think, wander, contemplate, and hopefully be at peace with the inevitability of your deletion."

It's pretty interesting from a structural standpoint too, given that each new game randomly assigns you one of six characters and six of eleven locations. Oda hopes to offer a different experience each time - all of which will be very much open to interpretation.

Continue is on Steam Greenlight right now, and it should be out sometime next month. Assuming it's not too heavy handed, it could be quite an illuminating adventure. We die in games all the time, but it's usually meaningless, a minor setback. It's high time we start digging a little deeper.