RANDOM GAME # 2
***ZERO STARS***
When I was a stressed and insecure teenager, I used to twitch to calm my nerves. One of my worst habits involved drumming my palms against my thighs at slightly different tempos. They would begin in sync, drift apart, form a strange backbeat, then eventually realign—briefly—before slipping out of harmony again. Over and over.
It was madness. And now I’ve finally found a game that lets me relive that exact mental anguish.
Gauge, from the deranged mind of Étienne Périn, starts by asking me to control a single gauge. Soon after, it adds a second. By holding the Space bar I raise the first gauge; releasing it makes it fall. The Ctrl key does the same for the other.
The rules are brutally simple. If either gauge hits the top or bottom, I lose a life. My task is to keep both suspended somewhere in the middle. They rise and fall at different speeds, forcing me to tap the two keys in competing rhythms. The closer I hover to the upper limit, the faster my score climbs—and the faster the game escalates. It’s tempting to push higher, but that also brings me closer to inevitable failure. I imagine this is how Icarus felt, right up until the wax began to melt.
The experience is wrapped in an aggressively distracting layer of psychedelia. The screen flickers with seizure-inducing flashes while my speakers blast what can generously be described as music—something rave-adjacent, loud, grating, relentless. It has a beat, and that beat occasionally helps anchor your rhythm. That is the extent of the game’s generosity.
Beyond that, Gauge does everything it can to sabotage your focus. Taunting messages and looping videos of cute cats appear in the periphery, deliberately pulling your attention away from the gauges. Without warning, the game alters its own rules: the gauges fade into the background, the entire screen begins to drift, or the gauge itself narrows until the margin for error is microscopic.
A handful of game modes exist, though their purpose is unclear. One is labeled “baby,” presumably easier. Another is marked with an infinity symbol, which I assume means play until collapse. The rest might as well be abstract art.
I have never played a game that affected me so viscerally. My hands cramped. My head throbbed. My eyes burned from refusing to blink, because blinking meant distraction, and distraction meant death.
It’s a game, so it gets a score—and this is the first time I’ve ever given one a zero.
Gauge exists to aggravate. Perhaps Périn despises players. Perhaps this is a thesis on how much sensory punishment we’re willing to endure for the illusion of mastery. The Steam page claims there is an ending, even an achievement for reaching it. I genuinely doubt it exists. Including an unobtainable goal would, frankly, be the game’s most coherent design decision.
I’m not epileptic, but I was genuinely afraid of becoming one during my brief time with this game. According to Steam, I played for 56 minutes. That is already far too long. I stopped not out of boredom, but fear—fear of headaches, eye strain, and what prolonged exposure might do to me physically.
When parents worry about their children’s screen habits, this is the nightmare scenario they should imagine. Not just violence or pornography, but this: raw, senseless assault on the nervous system. It’s not so much a game as it is violent pornography of stimulation—thumping, relentless, and empty.
That’s it. That’s the entire experience. Didn’t I say it was madness?
You quickly fall into a bizarre internal duel, as if your brain’s hemispheres are fighting for control of your body. Maybe that’s what childhood felt like—competing impulses struggling for dominance until one side finally won and decided who you’d become. And perhaps the people still locked in that struggle as adults are the ones drawn to sensory punishment like this.
The thought alone makes me grateful I found my balance long ago.
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