When I first started playing the demo of Yet Another Exhausting Day, I careened headfirst into a pillow and died. This, I believe, is what is known as a Big Mood.
Yet Another Exhausting Day bills itself as “a 3D crawling platformer about ordinary people’s exhausting lives.” In it, you play as a noodle-limp worn-out husk of a person who needs to take care of basic tasks like getting out of bed, using a phone, reading a book, and doing household chores.
You do this by rolling, slithering, and occasionally dashing in various directions, collecting coins that keep you from falling into a near-comatose state along the way. And while Yet Another Exhausting Day is, in its own words, a platformer, you rarely come unglued from whatever surface you’re on, even when walls and ceilings are involved. Your tiny person is so tuckered out that not even physics can keep them from laying down on the job.
In addition to the unreliable nature of your own defeated limbs, there are also treacherous obstacles that get in your way—for example, pillows and bottles of milk that threaten to knock you from mostly unconscious to entirely unconscious. You can, however, temporarily avoid their effects with power-ups like energy drinks.
The handful of levels I played in the game’s demo were clever and funny, if not particularly challenging. One inspired bit saw me writhe around on a giant smartphone, mashing my head against icons to accomplish dreary tasks. In the middle of it, I paused the game to delete Facebook off my real-life phone. My life has already measurably improved.
Given that I was able to reach that level after only 20 minutes or so, I’m excited to see where the full game—which does not currently have a release date—goes. For now, I very much recommend the demo, which is free on Itch. It may not beat falling asleep after an endlessly exhausting day in our endlessly exhausting world, but then again, what does?