There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension doesn’t like you very much, but that’s okay. I’m not talking about the Dark Souls school of player hostility, of course—the manic narrator of this not-game isn’t going to slice you in half with a giant meat cleaver. No, instead he locks you behind increasingly elaborate puzzles as he assures you that there is indeed no game to play, nothing to see here. And, in a way, he’s right.

If it were a game, I would say that There Is No Game belongs to an increasingly popular microgenre of puzzle titles that delight in subverting player expectations and taking a buzz saw to the fourth wall. This group includes crowd-pleasers like The Stanley Parable and sleeper hits like Inscryption. However, unlike those games, There Is No Game isn’t a high-concept metafiction—if anything, it’s about as low-concept as you can get. And that’s what makes it so entertaining.

At the start of There Is No Game, the title screen instructs you to click a lit-up button that says “this way!” After a few prompts, the not-game then asks if you’d like to exit. Having played a number of similar experiences in my time, I expected this to be a harmless joke—much to my surprise, it actually exited the program, giving me a courtesy achievement for my trouble. This sets the tone quite well for what’s to come. 

Doing anything in There Is No Game requires you to go against the direct will of the program, which is embodied by its narrator. Lovingly voiced by the not-game’s solo developer Pascal Cammisotto, this narrator is a perpetually frazzled (and increasingly desperate) force that constantly reminds you that you could be doing literally anything else with your time like reading a book, watching a movie, or playing a game that’s actually a game. 

Though the not-game’s voice is ever-present throughout the experience, it’s also a physical actor in the proceedings, slamming doors in your face, building barriers between you and your goal, shunting you down bizarre side avenues, and even occasionally crashing itself to prevent you from making any progress. And as you try to figure out a way out of each bizarre trap, the narrator continues to talk, telling you that it’s a good time to update and reset your computer. If you really cared about climate change, wouldn’t you just shut it off to preserve a little electricity?

It’s perhaps fair to say that There Is No Game is essentially one gag played over and over in as many different ways as you could possibly imagine. While that is technically true, by the end of its short five-hour runtime, I was quite surprised by its creativity and eventual complexity. There are a lot of decent joke games out there, but there aren’t that many that make me laugh consistently, and this not-game delivered on that front again and again. It’s not just a dumb meme—or perhaps it’s the dumbest meme of all. Either way, it’s worth your attention.

As a whole, There Is No Game is a specific kind of experience that I think video games do better than any other: an offbeat passion project made to fit the tastes and whims of one obsessive developer. It’s also best to go in knowing as little as possible, so I’ll leave it at that. If that kind of thing sounds fun to you, it’s definitely a game worth checking out. (Or at least that’s what I would say if it was a game, of course.)

There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension is available on the Epic Games Store.