A Long Weekend
This could be the most important three days of your life. This could be the weekend your life changes - or ends.
Or nothing could happen at all.
Very little actually happens most of the way through A Long Weekend, Nathaniel Becker’s slice-of-life deep-dive into a troubled mind. You play as a twentysomething Londoner who spends most of their days at an unspecified - but definitely uninspiring - job. Your closest friend - the one you’ve had an unrequited crush on for ages - is away on vacation, so this three-day weekend finds you at loose ends. Should you sleep in late, spend the morning scrolling through social media envying your acquaintances whose lives are actually going somewhere, or take a shower and tidy up the house? But it’s not all sloth and gloomscrolling: perhaps you’ll meet up with a friendly acquaintance and see where things go - or maybe you’ll find yourself returning to self-destructive habits to numb the pain.
A Long Weekend isn’t perfect; the phenomena of depression, anxiety, and loneliness are deeper and more diverse than a game this size can adequately explore. Becker has chosen to personify the PC’s pain as a voice called Achlys, named after a spirit of misery from ancient Greek literature; it was obvious to me that Achlys was a poetic representation of intrusive negative thoughts, but some readers have assumed the PC was having auditory hallucinations. There are moments in this game that feel a little too textbook, as if this were a public service announcement rather than a story. Worst of all, Becker never touches upon the possibility of an organic etiology for anxiety or depression; they’re treated as errors of thinking that can be unlearned.
But for all its flaws, I appreciate this game. If you want to know what it’s like feeling trapped in a dead-end life with your own self-loathing as your most reliable companion, how sometimes getting through the day feels like a less desirable outcome than the alternative - this here is it.
This here is it.