This cute-looking collection of 8 bit-style games from the team at Deconstructeam lets you explore ten different mini-games; each one giving you a vastly different experience. Whether you’re after some brain-teasing, city-saving, decision making, some not-so-relaxing floristry, or some life-altering, sacrificial magic, ‘Essays on Empathy’ has hours of interesting storytelling ready for you to absorb.

The brilliant minds at Deconstructeam are as much storytellers as developers, giving us games that manage to hold our attention, whilst telling us stories that provoke a surprising level of emotion. This amazing team has built these games around the narratives, instead of the other way around. Some of these games are light-hearted fun, however, others are clearly developed to just make you think and feel. I’ll leave it to you to decide which ones do what.

When you first load the game up, you’re presented with a well-designed lobby of ten hexagonal tiles, each representing a different game to play. Upon clicking a tile, the level image zooms in, whilst the rest fall away to reveal a brief description of the game, as well as giving you 3 options: play game, gallery, and watch video.

‘Play Game’ is pretty obvious and will launch a new window in which the game loads up to play. The gallery, however, is not what you think! It shows the evolution of the sprites used in the game, as well as the early level development. For anyone interested in game design and development it’s a really cool look behind the scenes. Lastly, ‘Watch Video’ isn’t a run-through of gameplay but instead is a video from the creators around its development.

Turns out the Deconstructeam team (not a typo, just a piece of funky wordplay) is all about wanting you to understand the ideas behind each game too. I personally think that is an amazing addition, and helps you fully realise what’s happening behind each game.

With each game having different styles of play, they’ve also got different controls; however, they all tend to the basic as per the 8-bit game style. Most of the games are point and click or simple arrow buttons to move around, with little in the way of other controls. Due to the fact that most of the games are thought-provoking or storytelling, a lot of the games revolve more around reading and clicking through the speech boxes than actual gameplay.

One of the best things to come with Essays on Empathy would have to be the music. Although the games all have their own sounds well matched to the feel of the games, the whole collection is available to you from the main menu’s “Soundtrack folder”, and it’s super relaxing. Will definitely be putting the soundtrack on in the background while I relax and read a book.

The only “issue”, if you can call it that, is a lack of guidance throughout the game’s levels. The individual games don’t have a “menu”, so there’s no real help as you go through the game. It’s just constant trial and error. I’d possibly have liked a little more of a nudge along during some of the games. Maybe a help button? …or maybe I should just get better at gaming?

Overall, I loved the whole collection. I got a little frustrated at some of the games’ lack of help, but the depth of story that these games have is really incredible, as are some of the concepts that they’ve merely teased us with. Would love some of these games to be expanded into standalone games and look forward to what the legends at Deconstructeam bring us next!

Written by: HadesTheHobo