Exhausted Man Is A Very Relatable Game About Being Too Tired
Exhausted Man is a brave video game that features a more relatable protagonist and is easy to connect. An exhausted Man is a man who can’t even get up straight. This is a very serious mood for someone who has trouble getting out of bed each morning and has a shorter attention span than a bird outside.
Exhausted Man, a slow-paced, physics-based puzzler by Candleman Studio, has a limited-time demo now available on Xbox via Summer Game Fest. The demo shows an indie developer working out the last bugs in their demo game before it is released to the public with an independent game festival. It’s quite meta.
Instead of walking around a room as a normal person and then completing tasks, the gimmick has you controlling the exhausted man by crawling around the room like an animal because your body is so tired that it can’t get off the ground. You will need to slide the legs up to pick up something from your desk. You can think Octodad, but instead of an octopus, you are playing someone who needs to renew their antidepressant prescription.
Do not look at me. I renewed my license last week.
Although it is a strange game concept, you can’t help but sympathize with Exhausted Man’s core idea. Most people can relate to the feeling that you must get out of bed to make it through the day. It’s refreshing to see Exhausted Man feature a somewhat real character, even though the ragdoll physics and puzzles within the game quickly descend into absurdity.
The demo level features the protagonist working from their bedroom. However, the puzzles can be solved in rounds. You can drop items in your room periodically, such as a bed, a computer, or posters. Then, you choose a task based on what is in your room. Some jobs require the player to place objects in certain ways or hold certain things simultaneously, similar to a game like Twister. It feels half the time that the game will say “left foot red.”
After completing a few tasks, you will be given smaller puzzles. These can include collecting coins from a gigantic version of an object or using the things to build a ladder to retrieve something. This is a physics-based puzzler, so you might find it a little more difficult than you would like. Exhausted Man doesn’t seem to be an exception.
It remains to be seen if the gimmick can maintain its humor and innovative ideas over multiple levels and hours. However, Exhausted Man looks like an interesting and quirky indie puzzle.
