I have to admit, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from Essays on Empathy. I knew it was a collection of short games, mostly from game jam-type situations, and mostly targeted towards interesting and unique methods of storytelling. Upon booting it up, I bounced off it pretty hard to begin with — an early softlock here and there, and some awkwardly translated text threw up some real “indie jank” vibes that were hard to ignore. But after spending a little more time with it, and slowly taking in each experience, my opinion of it has changed drastically. What first felt like an underbaked collection of okay-ish games quickly transformed into a deeply personal experience unlike anything I’ve experienced in the past. 

Opening up Essays presents you with a grid of games, each with its own cute little vertical slice thumbnail. Clicking on one brings up a little synopsis of the game, telling you a little about the story, gameplay mechanics, and crucially, a little history about the game itself and where it fits into Deconstructeam’s history. Deconstructeam is perhaps best known for The Red Strings Club, an utterly beautiful master class in narrative storytelling, and part of what makes Essays so compelling is seeing that highly polished narrative prowess looking, well, a little less polished, a little more raw. 

Each of the games in Essays has its own unique focus and gameplay implementations. For example, Underground Hangovers — the first, and oldest, game in the collection — is a Metroidvania with very minimal dialogue, and has you mining ore using a growing collection of strange tools. The synopsis tells you that this comes from a different time, a different place, in the company’s history, and that’s pretty evident when you play it. It’s also a game in which I frustratingly got softlocked in two separate ways when trying to play it, an artefact of the project’s roots as an entry in Ludum Dare, a two- to three-day game jam held every few months. Initially these softlocks kind of annoyed me, but as I progressed through the package and experienced other games, I came to appreciate that these games haven’t been updated and polished and fixed. They’re a moment in time, a piece of history in not just developers’ portfolio, but in their lives. 

Another game, Zen and the Art of Transhumanism, was a delightful treat for fans of Deconstructeam’s work. It’s a game in which you play as a transhumanist organ designer, and solve people’s problems by crafting them a technomagical new organ on a lathe. These organs can help someone gain a social media following, improve their sex life, make them stronger, or any number of different things, and determining which organ is best for each situation isn’t always straightforward. If that sounds familiar to you, that’s because this exact gameplay loop would later appear in The Red Strings Club, and it’s incredibly exciting to see this early, beta version of one of my favourite parts of one of my favourite games. Sure, the controls are kinda janky, and controller support inexplicably broke about halfway through, and if you make a mistake while carving an organ you have to start over entirely… but, you know, it’s history, and the concept is as solid here as it was when it was included two years later in The Red Strings Club. 

It’s not all fun and games though, even though this is a collection of games and most of them are enjoyable. Other experiences in the collection deal with much, much heavier themes, and are a lot more personal to the creators. One deals with grief and the feeling of uselessness after a crippling injury, one deals with the stress and anxiety of picking out a gift for a family member that you don’t really see eye-to-eye with, and another has you taking the role of the stay-at-home housewife in a relationship with borderline abusive power dynamics, dealing (barely) with a growing collection of stressors and spiralling further and further into depression. It’s these heavier, more grounded experiences that give Essays on Empathy its real hook — they’re personal, affective, shocking stories to play out. If you’ll forgive the clumsy metaphor, it’s a little like reading through a stranger’s private journal; deeply compelling, a little bit terrifying, and difficult to forget. With each new experience, I felt like I was delving further and further into people’s lives, finding things they wouldn’t want me to know, unraveling the minds of people I don’t know and would never meet. I felt guilty, intrigued, concerned, disgusted, worried. There were times I wanted to reach out and offer help, to somebody, anybody, and times where I had to stop myself from playing because it started burrowing into my own anxieties and experiences in an uncomfortable way.

One game in particular, De Tres al Cuarto, is exclusive to the Essays collection, not previously released and not made as part of a game jam. I won’t go too deep into it, because it’s something you really need to experience for yourself, but it’s a game made as a sort of therapy for the creators after the deep stresses of 2020 — something I think we can all relate to. It’s a unique little deck-building game about small-time comedians, and while that might sound like a fun, jovial experience, it cuts deep. Sure, it’s a game about comedy, but it’s also about struggling to find success as a creative, about the time and work you put into your passions only to find that nobody is quite as passionate about it as you are. As a writer and an artist, it hurts to see this laid out so bare in front of me, to push those buttons and click those cards that I know won’t find an audience. But after a hard year of pain and suffering and isolation, it’s also a nice feeling to know that I’m not alone in my struggles. The surgical precision with which De Tres al Cuarto cuts into the heart of every creative is mindblowing, and I can all but guarantee you won’t walk away after its 90 minute runtime without needing a little bit of time to process it all.

Each game in the collection also comes with a gallery of planning documents, concept art, sprites and inspirations, a nice touch that, as far as I’m aware, wasn’t really content that was accessible to most people previously. There’s also a video that comes with each game, a behind-the-scenes interview with the devs that tells us how the game came about, what it means to Deconstructeam, and how it influenced future works. It feels a little bit like extras on a DVD, but that kind of additional, explanatory content is rare in games, which is honestly disappointing. More games should come with developer interviews, with an insight into the minds of the people that pour their hearts and souls into what is, at the end of the day, an entertainment product. Perhaps, just maybe, if more games did this, people would be more inclined to think about the creator behind the product, too. 

Essays on Empathy might not be your traditional game, or collection of games, but it is an experience worth trying. It’s a museum of Deconstructeam’s history, a narrative thread of the twists and turns that an indie developer makes in the process of finding their voice. It’s clunky, and beautiful, and rough, and fascinating, and just about everything in between. If you care about games as an art form, or just want to learn more about the people and processes behind some of your favourite games, Essays on Empathy is a must-play.