ENA: Dream BBQ - Days-old game cracked open like a boss egg.

honestly there inst much to say about this, if you liked the ena character and videos youll probably like this game, which is to say its totally nonsensical has no story, no message or deeper questions about being, its not funny or challenging, the world and dialog is just as coherent as to facilitate gameplay which is to say very little,

i can tell any nay sayers here that ena is not trans because a tranny would take every single opportunity to use their art to spew forth messages about faggorty, this has none of that so you can safely assume this is made by a man
 
Rudy Coleman said:
honestly there inst much to say about this, if you liked the ena character and videos youll probably like this game, which is to say its totally nonsensical has no story, no message or deeper questions about being, its not funny or challenging, the world and dialog is just as coherent as to facilitate gameplay which is to say very little,
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Honestly that's why I like it. So many "weird", "quirky", "surreal", games or series will get lost in their own sauce, either becoming overly serious for no reason, trying too hard to be funny, pandering to coomers, or, worst of all, explaining absolutely everything about the story, setting, and characters.
ENA fascinates me because it's just silly and bizarre without any artifice. It's not an art film like El Topo where the creator is trying to convey some kind of message that only sounds deep when you're on LSD, it isn't like Dread Delusion where the game's demented visual style is ruined by being otherwise generic and overly lore-heavy (and barren, but that's a different problem).
ENA is just absurdism in its purest form, and all of the youtube faggots who obsess over the """lore""" of ENA are missing the point. Or at least I hope they are. If JoelG ever decides to make the "lore" pay off in any way I'm going to erase him from the Akashic Record.
 
I gave it 20 minutes and it just feels like zoomer bait shit. People speaking Japanese and Korean, a male-female main character, animated scenes out of CD-I Zelda. At least with traditional dream simulators they don't take away your control every 5 seconds to be extra quirky.
 
I liked it. You can easily "finish" it in under two hours if you rush, but there's plenty of secrets to find if you take your time; I have ten hours in the game with only half of the achievements. Considering the times, I can't blame anyone for having an extra sensitive troon alarm, but as far as I can tell the series has none of that shit and Joel G simply wants to make cool surreal shit for the sake of making cool surreal shit. If this were made 15 years ago the male voice would have been considered just another strange detail in a strange series, but it is the Current Year™ after all.
Also Meanie ENA is great.
 
Tablet County said:
Unironically Picasso is trash.
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When a nigga says something so uncultured you gotta hit em with that
image22.webp

ENA is just picasso for coomers.
 
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I will say for the record; as much as I like Ena and JoelG in general, in terms of surreal original web series with avant garde art styles and bizarre visuals, Safe Mode mogs the shit out of Ena any day of the week.
 
I'm sorry to announce that this game is a TV Tropes reference. TV Tropes says that Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory when the audience is trying too hard to find a deep meaning in a fictional work. Dream BBQ has clues that the setting is a place where dead souls let go of their sins to go to Heaven, and that ENA lives to be punished by this system in their stead so that it works, so in other words, she is Jesus in Purgatory.
 
Cnidarian said:
when the audience is trying too hard to find a deep meaning in a fictional work.
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On that note, reading some of the comments on ENA episodes of people trying to cobble together deep meaning in ENA's surrealism just grinds my fucking gears. Why can't surrealist media just be interpreted as is anymore? Why can't ENA just be ENA?
 
Patrick Bait-man said:
On that note, reading some of the comments on ENA episodes of people trying to cobble together deep meaning in ENA's surrealism just grinds my fucking gears. Why can't surrealist media just be interpreted as is anymore? Why can't ENA just be ENA?
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People are starved of meaning and religion is uncool. What could’ve been priests are analyzing fiction instead. *moves the Bible to the fiction section* :neckbeard:
 
Patrick Bait-man said:
On that note, reading some of the comments on ENA episodes of people trying to cobble together deep meaning in ENA's surrealism just grinds my fucking gears. Why can't surrealist media just be interpreted as is anymore? Why can't ENA just be ENA?
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Because thinking about things abstractly is fun. You can put literally any art in front of me and I will interpret it in multiple different ways. If that grinds your gears so much you can mind your own business I don't know what to tell ya.
What even is "interpreting surrealist media as is"? That just means you like neat visuals and colors and sounds, like jingling keys in front of a challenged kid.
 
Catfag #9000 said:
Because thinking about things abstractly is fun. You can put literally any art in front of me and I will interpret it in multiple different ways. If that grinds your gears so much you can mind your own business I don't know what to tell ya.
What even is "interpreting surrealist media as is"? That just means you like neat visuals and colors and sounds, like jingling keys in front of a challenged kid.
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There's also the fact that there have always been some consistent elements/details in ENA, and a developer commentary bit in the supporter edition even off-handedly mentions the series has "lore" the game designers needed to adhere to.
 
I think there's a big difference between the souls-effect on indies where everything is "schlorpo's scabbard" with two paragraphs of flavor bullshit and creating a world for all these new characters you've made to live in. Someone compared this game to lynch and while I think that's incredibly off the mark, people still love picking apart his work even if some of it isn't conducive to cohesive analysis.
 
Catfag #9000 said:
Because thinking about things abstractly is fun. You can put literally any art in front of me and I will interpret it in multiple different ways. If that grinds your gears so much you can mind your own business I don't know what to tell ya.
What even is "interpreting surrealist media as is"? That just means you like neat visuals and colors and sounds, like jingling keys in front of a challenged kid.
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AbduluCthuluZulu said:
There's also the fact that there have always been some consistent elements/details in ENA, and a developer commentary bit in the supporter edition even off-handedly mentions the series has "lore" the game designers needed to adhere to.
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I'll reword it: I'm tired of seeing some retards try to interpret ENA as anything other than intriguing surrealism, attempting to apply the "everything is not as it seems!!!" trope or attributing muh mental / trauma allegory to the series. People today are obsessed with attaching deep lore / meaning to every piece of media and I'm beyond sick of it, not everything has to be taken beyond the surface level.

ENA isn't (and shouldn't be) deep. Simple as.
And yes I like the neat visuals and colors and sounds, fuck you.
ENAlove.webp
 
Paul-Denton said:
I think there's a big difference between the souls-effect on indies where everything is "schlorpo's scabbard" with two paragraphs of flavor bullshit and creating a world for all these new characters you've made to live in. Someone compared this game to lynch and while I think that's incredibly off the mark, people still love picking apart his work even if some of it isn't conducive to cohesive analysis.
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I think its an acceptable middle ground that there's fast and loose rules for how the world operates on a basic level not just for story, but for game-play reasons which are just as important if not moreso. Doors are always blueish structures that stand out color-wise from the background; "chocolates" wasn't just LOLRANDOM but gets confirmed as legitimate currency that they use alongside the value of hourglass dogs. Since it re-contextualizes certain scenes and dialog in the web animations ("oh, those blue things are doors, that's how they get around"), it makes re-watching the web animations fun with more context to go off of. It's not meant to explain everything, but just enough that you can get a basic grasp on the situation and have fun watching the rest of it. In the game, I'd think it was a good way to teach the player what to pay attention to in their environment since you're going through new areas 24/7 ala walking simulator and don't do much aside from using tools to navigate over/through obstacles and pressing E to see a short clip.

I will say though that theories like the game being about abortion and ENA being a war veteran spewing from the all-consuming and all-spewing anus of Twitter and Reddit are looking for non-existent meaning in something that's always been more vain (in the "experimental art" sense) than groundbreaking. People in current year seeing developers having any fun using non-literal imagery or fucking with the audience's expectations on purpose always interpret it as "MUH SERIOUS REAL-WORLD ALLEGORY". Why? Who fucking knows, people want their favorite media to be a sequel to the bible, namely the parables, despite how obnoxious it makes them and said property sound when they're both obsessed with and shun escapism. I don't really think that Joel intended to ever make it seriously profound as a creator, since his thing has always been either porn parodies like that deleted Splatoon animation and the old Dora parody. Or "mildly attractive woman in a weird world" going off his previous work like 2 Ants 1 President, Deadline, and Hands Up. A lot of people on his team are still those he's worked with pre-ENA too, but I think it's worth noting that Joel on a stream mentioned he doesn't like having a presence on social media and avoids it on purpose. If he's at the helm of the project as an intentionally obscure ESL, that probably makes it much harder for people to stick their fingers into the pie and fuck up the original direction (for now). So in leiu of that, people have to make up asinine theories so it's more palatable to them rather than figuring out what is and isn't a game mechanic.
 
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