I finished Actual Sunlight several days ago, and have then spent the rest of my available time doing my best to find reasons to put writing this review off. It should be the easiest thing I’ve written this year: as a game, it’s only a handful of hours long, completely linear and built off an RPG Maker engine. Nothing about it screams complexity, and I should be able to spit out enough content, then pad it out to meet the ethereal word count we all pretend doesn’t really exist without trouble. So, this should be a breeze – but it isn’t, and a significant part of me doesn’t want to explore why.
That’s because Actual Sunlight is the focused tale of Evan Winter. Evan is an articulate, intelligent person reaching his early thirties who is angry at the world for his myriad failures. He hates his job; he hates his life; he hates dragging himself out of bed just to face another day packed with disappointment. In being witness to the chronicle of Evan, you are a powerless observer, and what you observe is nothing less than the gradual deteriorating of a man’s reasons for existing. His journey is filled with bleak absolutes, of bitter internal rampages and contradictory understandings of his festering hypocrisy. He is a white male; he is employed, educated, sheltered and well fed. He says so himself in the first of many essays of his you will find littered around the game’s world.
Credit: Will O'NeillActual Sunlight studies three chapters of Evan’s life, each seeing him slip further and further into a downward spiral entirely of his own making. It’s easy to dismiss him as a hopeless loser and leave it at that, but the wit and insight he offers into his situation through his writings turn him into an introspective critic of his own destruction. His humorous take on DIY instructions end with an indifferent shrug, suggesting that clothes will just be hung off random furnishings and it’s not like there’s going to be any prospective girls coming back to his room to be put off by the mess. An apathetic chat with a therapist reveals that he sets his alarm for 5am every morning then hits the snooze button for two hours because, though he knows he should get up early and exercise to fight off his growing obesity, it’s easier to momentarily kid himself into believing that he’ll start tomorrow.
Credit: Will O'Neill
Credit: Will O'NeillThe only time Evan ever displays any glimmer of hope, the only time he manages to shrug off his bitterness and spiritual rotting, is when the subject turns towards his own suicide.
This is the tenth time I’ve stopped at this point to reread what I have written because I’m desperate not to accidentally advance a piece of pro-suicide writing, not only for the obvious reasons of not holding that stance, but because that’s not what Actual Sunlight is about. Game maker, Will O’Neill, smashes the fourth wall early on with a personalised note to the player explaining how Evan’s situation is unlikely to mirror anyone else out there, pointing out how his loss of hope is due to his reliance on dwindling excuses and the extremity of his delusions and concealed depression. He demands no one look at Evan and see how his path and his solutions should fit into their life. It’s a heartfelt plea and ends on a point-blank demand.
Don’t you fucking dare.
This demand is made because Will knows what he’s produced. It’s a portrait of perfect self-destruction, of stripping away the self-manufactured illusions man wraps himself in, and forcing Evan to look at the life he’s wasted, deconstructing his excuses one by one until there’s nothing left to blame but himself. His carefully rallied attacks on corporate waste and ignorance are not incorrect or initially self-serving. He talks, with no small amount of bile, about middle management training seminars where, for almost a week after an expensive course, everyone is convinced the company’s lack of growth is due to poor communication. For exactly one meeting, everything is plagued with flow charts listing every suggestion forwarded with bullet points of any corresponding brain storms that follow. Long after this is abandoned, despite the unbridled enthusiasm it was initially met with, upper management decide the office’s biggest issue was with all the overpriced management seminars taking place. We all have stories similar to this from various workplaces; we all suffer incompetent bosses that, we tell anyone who’ll listen, have lost sight of the woods through the trees. Sometimes, we’ll smile knowingly at likeminded colleagues; sometimes, we’ll silently rage at the ineptitude of it all. Evan soundlessly digests it all, and places the dead end that his life has reached squarely on its shoulders.
Credit: Will O'Neill
Credit: Will O'NeillAgain, I pause to reread what I have so far because it’s important to note that I’m going to recommend Actual Sunlight as an experience of worth, but the arbitrary X/10 nonsense I’m forced by aggravating convention to record at the end of every review simply has no place here. Evan’s heart-wrenching journey towards his own prophesised annulment is all the more painful because of the promise he shows but chooses to ignore, of the unheeded talent obvious to everyone but himself. Of the people around him who clearly care, but he ignores in his crusade against interaction. No one cares about him; he’s a fat, worthless lump and the world would be better off without him. Evan repeats this mantra over and over again until it becomes, in his twisted reckoning, the only truth of worth left. Then the only path left for him to follow becomes clear. And everything, in every sense of the word, ends.
