Vacation Island has you collecting souls and people in an eerie old island town, and all while looking out at the world from the inside of a monstrous head.
You just need to bring eight humans and some ghosts to a mysterious stone head. Seems like an innocent task. Nothing ominous about that, right? Anyway, you head out to a gloomy moonlit island to gather some lost souls and people. These ghosts are just floating in spots, seeming as if they’re just waiting for your presence to unmount them from this perpetual unliving existence they’re trapped inside. Something about their cute, animal-like forms gives their vacant looks a sense of terrifying possibility. It hints at some awful end where they wasted away and somehow ended up like this, forgotten and abandoned.
The people that are here look even worse. Their eyes flicker in their heads, and they’re far too realistic-looking for this world. Something about those gazes feels deeply disturbing, and I don’t like having to gather them up and travel with them. Then again, looking out from my own head in the game is pretty creepy as well. You’re not looking out through your character’s eyes, but rather out from the inside of your skull. It’s like you’re pulled back just a bit too far, and that you can view this sickening face that’s peering at the world. I get a feeling of detached disgust from looking at the face, for some reason. Like it’s looking at things that are beneath it as it gathers their souls and bodies.
Vacation Island is purposely vague with its meanings, leaving a lot of room for you to wonder about why you’re gathering the people who exist in this scary Animal Crossing-like world. I feel there’s a message about the cruel ways we pick up and abandon these digital towns and treat the people within like collectibles, but perhaps you’ll feel something different.
Vacation Island is available now (for whatever you wish to pay for it) on itch.io.
