Ivan Zanotti’s MyMadness Works presents a short horror adventure, NothingElse in a pixelated story of a boy who wants to read to escape his life but falls into an alternate reality and his only way out is to explore and solve puzzles.
For those who don’t know, Ivan Zanotti is an Italian developer and his most well known game would be the pixelated horror Imscared. While we have not played it for ourselves, we have seen footage on this pixelated first person meta-horror game and in NothingElse, Ivan Zanotti takes us back into that pixelated world. It is injected with simple mechanics where a boy character can go left or right or interact with objects when it is highlighted or doorways when there is a simple above it. Simple enough, right? And it is because it finds a great way to introduce the mechanics in the game by a simple description after we start the game and then the first quest is a simple puzzle of helping our character find a book so he can read.
https://youtu.be/2Rn9spgRBBo
The story itself is a little disjointed and weird. However, weird is the description that Ivan Zanotti uses to describe this experience so it should be expected. NothingElse is a short game, running at about ten minutes without any back and forth. Fact is, the puzzles are not complicated but the clues come with exploration and piecing together what we see and what we find in the correct order. It has simple sounds like footsteps and clicks to interact. For the most part, it is a quiet game. There is a slight uneasy feeling in certain parts, especially when the creature in the pixelated alternate reality comes after us and the ending has its shocking elements as well.
NothingElse is a short horror adventure experience. It has the pixelated creepy tone and is a rather simple concept. The fact that it is so short makes it a quick venture into the world and doesn’t waste our time at all. For that, it holds true to what it wants to achieve plus, an additional fun part is that the game acknowledges the exact time and date of the player accessing the alternate reality giving it a sense of reality as well.
NothingElse is available on Android and PC.