Every Day the March to the Grave

Review of Every Day the Same Dream

by Matthew Hall
Molleindustria creates politically-oriented games: Phone

Story focuses on the ills of the

tech industry with a heavy-handed flair. The Best Amendment

takes aim at gun-rights advocates

in the US. McDonalds Videogame and
Oligarchy tackle fast food and the oil industry,
respectively. Every Day the Same Dream fits into a slightly subtler set of games, focused on

alienation (in the Marxian sense) and refusal of labor -- the creator also includes his games
Unmanned
and Turboflex in this genre.

The idea of Marxist alienation simply means that labor -- our main character in Every
Day

the Same Dream -- becomes separated from the results of his work. Note that a normal day
within the game, which involves getting dressed, getting in the car, and going to work, ends with
working in a cubicle, then waking up in bed the next day. There is no reward. If anything, if we
think of how respawn and checkpoint systems work in other games, going to work kills you and
forces you to start again from the checkpoint.Even the woman in the elevator fails to update her
dialogue, the woman acting as the only indicator of progression in the game.

In this, the game takes on a pessimistic tone featured in other Molleindustria works. Not
only does the main character die and respawn in their bed after going to work, but they also die
and respawn after visiting a graveyard, getting fired for showing up to work naked, and
committing suicide. The cycle continues. After all, your main character is visually

interchangeable with every other representation of labor in the game. Your refusal to participate
in the labor system by repeating your trip to the cubicle does nothing to change the society. At
the end, you walk through a dead, empty world, drained of the humans populating the system,
before watching a coworker commit suicide, as you did before to reach that ending. Then the
game resets. Nothing has been advanced, much in the same way that Phone Storys narrative
infinitely loops. This hopeless cycling, or concept of endless struggle, permeates throughout
Molleindustria games; the games themselves are meant to model a reality that cannot be solved
or fixed internally.

A moment that reinforces the oppressive theming may come early in the experience.
After stepping outside of the apartment, the player can choose to move right or left. Right, in this
game, tends to be the correct direction that drives one either to their mundane job or,
eventually, to suicide. The game thus toys with an idea presented since World 1-1 in Super
Mario Bros: right is the path
that one is trained to take, but in Every Day the Same Dream, most
of player advancement comes from defying that system, either by going left or by lingering on
the screen. Super Mario Bros discourages lingering with a ticking level timer, and further
prevents all movement back to the left. The player meets a vagrant -- a symbol also featured in
Turboflex -- by moving left, who says, I can take you to a quiet place. The homeless man then
takes you to a colorless graveyard. Silently, you observe, before respawning in the bedroom.

Every Day the Same Dream creates a cyclical world continually referring back to death.
The light moments of pleasure the player receives when unlocking a new interaction only lead

back to death, and the endstate of the game features labors symbolic suicide. Ultimately, while
the world of the game without alienation is bleak, the ultimate message is that resisting the
machine does little more than add variety on a left-to-right conveyor belt to the grave.

Word Count: 600