‘9.03m’: A First Person Walker Critique

A day late, but I wrote a critique of a game I bet you’ve never heard of – 9.03m – and its stature in the first person walker genre.

While I may or may not have come up with the term first person walker (and I’m more than a little disturbed I remember reading something that apparently doesn’t exist) I have apparently made it a field of study, for lack of a better way of putting it. Last year, I did a short series of posts on the few examples of the minimalist genre that existed. Since then we’ve been graced with a few more examples.

I didn’t know what 9.03m was or what it was about. It was 50 cents on Steam Sale in the indie section so I figured why not. It’s worth the experiment. I didn’t know anything about it when I played it. I didn’t know it was an empathy game to memorialize the victims of the 2011Tohoku  earthquake and tsunami. And the game doesn’t really do a good job of it. It has the pieces there. They just didn’t come together.

I figured it was somewhere in the use of form that somehow didn’t connect to the emotional core. See what you think. I recommend the comments, I had a pretty good discussion, further elaborating on the failed connection.