An indie game in which you control a truly tired-out game developer, literally sleepwalking your way to the finalisation of your title, as deadlines for publication loom. We can’t help feel that the developers of Exhausted Man might be projecting just a little bit!
Coming to us from developers CandleMan Studio – formerly of platformer Candleman – the inspirations for Exhausted Man are quite clear. Immediately I’m reminded of the physics-based movement of 2017 indie darling Snake Pass, and the similarities between Exhausted Man and flash-game QWOP also shine through.
Instead of moving around the game world like a normal guy, the protagonist of Exhausted Man snakes his way around, slithering across the floor and up the walls of his incredibly cluttered bedroom. The goal? Well, our hero ArtB/ade needs to complete his newest game, in order to meet the deadline for the upcoming Game Fest. The issue? He’s bloody tired; literally too tired to walk!
Following a short tutorial section outlining the core controls and navigational abilities of your hero, your goal is to complete a number of activities (known as ‘events’) in order to accrue enough points to finish the game ArtB/ade is creating. Slithering around is actioned through the left-stick, whilst a press of any of the face buttons will control one of your limbs. X and Y move your arms, allowing you to grasp onto objects, whilst A and B cause you to kick out with the legs. Kicking objects lets you move them out of the way when things get cluttered.
You’ll then pick an event, choose which objects are involved in the event, and then complete a set of objectives. These range from placing objects in a certain target, orienting others in a given direction, or sticking one object on top of another. All the objectives are easy to understand but, of course, difficult to complete given your movement restrictions.
After completing an event, you’ll add in some more objects to your room, which may be utilised in later events. CandleMan Studio likes to emphasise the ‘design your room’ aspect of Exhausted Man, and those wishing to design their own man-cave will certainly find some joy in this area. Playing out in a very colourful, Play-Doh-esque artstyle, visually Exhausted Man is striking, and conveys the playfulness of the game as a whole.
Exhausted Man encourages you to rest and recharge by completing a different set of events that boost ArtB/ade’s energy. Having low energy will cause ‘yawn bubbles’ to emerge from objects, which when contacted with the head will immobilise you briefly, and cause you to drop any items you were holding. This is a particular hindrance when objects start moving around the environment, and must be caught. On the flipside, having high energy will grant you a boost to both your general speed and to your pulling strength, with the intention of helping you to finish events quicker.
Set across three ‘toy boxes’, each taking around an hour to complete, Exhausted Man can easily be finished in an evening if you so wish. However, that’s if you choose to work your way through what quickly becomes a slog – despite not taking long to finish, within an hour of Exhausted Man you’ve seen all it has to offer. That’s because, despite setting itself across three toy boxes, the only difference between them is the layout of the room you find yourself in, and the objects you can add into the room. The plot, minigames and ‘events’ that you take on are all the same, and there’s no way to replay toy boxes after finishing them.
This repetition is especially egregious when it comes to the four minigames that you must take on within each toy box. Three of the games are just pretty boring, instructing you to move across a surface to collect items. The fourth minigame gets you to build a ladder from objects in the environment, in order to reach a goal. I let out an audible groan every time this minigame sprung up, as it epitomises the worst of Exhausted Man – repetition and jankiness.
A game of this sort lives or dies on the fluidity of the physics-based movement, and I’d put Exhausted Man at a B grade here. With the likes of Snake Pass still the gold-standard, when the physics-based movement is flowing, you get into a really nice groove with Exhausted Man. However, this is infrequent and short-lived. You regularly get the feeling that any issues with placement of objects and the like is rarely actually your fault, and instead a product of some weird design quirks. Why do certain objects grow and shrink at random intervals, ruining your hard work? Why did a yawn bubble spawn out of nowhere, forcing you to drop your items? Why have his arms got all tangled, making ArtB/ade completely change his direction of movement? Worst of all, why do random pieces of philosophical speech emanate from items, clouding up an already busy screen? Ultimately, for too much of the time Exhausted Man feels closer to Frustrated Man, and this is going to turn many away early-doors.
The strange design choices continue beyond the core gameplay systems. After completing each event, you gain the ability to add new items into the world. Additionally, taking a nap on certain objects in each event will grant you coins, which will increase the number of items in the room. The adding of items is clearly set up to be a reward, yet it quickly becomes obvious that the fewer items you have in your room, the easier it is to navigate and work through subsequent events. This contradiction led to me just piling up the smallest items I could find, in a corner of my room, ensuring they didn’t get in the way.
Similarly, the encouragement of restoring energy in order to receive a speed and strength boost, too makes little sense. Whilst it is desirable to remove the yawn bubbles from the game world, especially in smaller rooms, the speed boost makes things even more finicky, especially when trying to tell the game exactly which item you wish to grasp. Where careful and deliberate movement is the name of the game here, adding a speed boost goes against this wholly.
Despite its short run-time, I’d be surprised if the majority of Exhausted Man players manage to get through the game in its entirety. And whilst the core movement – the most important element of the game – is decent when it works, there’s just too much jankiness, repetition and monotony to allay the constant sense of frustration. Exhausted Man is a real hodge-podge of mixed ideas that don’t always work together – the contradicting gameplay elements, the fact that any ‘rewards’ are in fact detrimental, and that within the first hour of gameplay you’ve seen all this one has to offer.
