Rumu

I played through the short adventure game about a sentient vacuum cleaner, Rumu, just this morning, and I felt like I wanted to preface my thoughts on the game with some general thoughts regarding story-based games.

Story in games is different from gameplay in the sense that it sort of supports more variety. What I mean by that is that for games based on good and engaging gameplay, if you find two games that both try to cater to the same audience, that both are of the same genre, it's possible for one to "eclipse" the other. Sure, there's the fact that two games aren't exactly the same, and there's some freedom in personal preference, but at least for a single individual, it's simple to find one game to be better than another as far as not even wanting to play the other game at all. This would make it easy to choose like 20, 30, 40, or some other manageable number of games, and say: "Play these games, and you've experienced the best the industry has to offer on gameplay on all sides of the spectrum. Sure there's other good games out there, but you won't experience anything new or better in them."
However, I can't really say the same about stories. Different stories of similar genre or idea don't conflict, at least not in my mind. I could read 10 different fantasy books, or experience 10 different sci-fi stories, and I couldn't really say that one or two would be sufficient reading that would also cover the stories in the other 8 books. That's not to say I couldn't decide that some stories are better. A good story is hard to write, and a great one is all that much harder, but while I can choose my favorites, they don't make the worse-but-still-good stories seem insignificant.

I could ramble on about that for a while longer, but I'd also like to talk about Rumu. See, it's not that Rumu was some really great story that created all these thoughts in me. Quite the opposite actually. I found Rumu to be enjoyable enough to play through, but ultimately it was too short, and didn't evoke too strong of an emotional response from me. See, I keep a list of the best games I've played from various broad genres. I wouldn't want to just forget Rumu by leaving it off that list, but then again, it doesn't feel like it's worth including there. I'm conflicted, because the experience wasn't super good, but it's also not replaceable.

As a short story game, there's relatively little to be said upfront about it. You play as a sentient love-based vacuum cleaner named Rumu, cleaning up messes in a house and exploring the mystery surrounding your creators David and Cecily. You can navigate some rooms, interact with the environment through which you gain clues about the story, as well as solve small and simple puzzles. The entire thing takes maybe 3-4 hours to complete, if you're thorough.

I've already explained at length how I feel about the story, and obviously I'm not going to spoiler anything that's going to happen. I absolutely think it's worth your time to play through it, but don't expect it to blow your mind at any point.


But hey, at least I'll always have Steam reviews and my custom automatic leaderboards to track the best and not-best games of all genres and types. Individuals' opinions may be terrible, but as a grand collective, humans are pretty good at filtering out what's good and what's not.