We've been playing the latest build of Welcome to Elk this week, and this strange game about an island filled with stories is so hard to describe we've decided to have two goes at it. Bertie and I both played around with the game for twenty minutes. Here's what we made of it. (Welcome to Elk will be hitting Steam in 2020, BTW.) Okay this is an extra line I'm putting in purely so that the ad doesn't ruin the page layout on desktops. This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings

Bertie: One minute I'm on a raft, talking to a llama, the next I'm standing by a microphone, singing a song in order to send a ghost - a man with no facial features - to the other side. It's a nice song. It's a bizarre game. I'm still not sure exactly what I played. On the one hand, it's a really smiley game. Characters skip around, beaming, without a trace of negativity. It's all cartoony and upbeat. I even stuck cut-out magazine facial features on balloons to represent some guy's lost parents (and clicked on a whooping, literal Seal of Approval when I was done). And that was how Elk seemed to go. Bizarre, irreverent - a lot like WarioWare, come to think of it, little mini-games popping up here and there. But on the other hand, it's brutally sad. I just watched a video of a real guy, filmed as if on a phone in the back of a bar, recounting an account of a terrible, tragic event - one which involved characters in the game. One of the true stories in the game, I guess. Double whammy. And it comes out of nowhere. One moment, you're singing another song, a sadder one this time - but you're still smiling because the game is irresistible - and then smack!, a genuine account of something profoundly awful. What did I just play? I don't know. I want to know more though. I want to know how it all glues together. I want to know what the point is - I hope there is one. But I'm sure there is because everything else seems so assured - bizarre but assured. I'm intrigued.