Coma is weird. That weirdness is good. Really good actually. It captures the weird uncontrolled randomness and horrifyingness your dreams can posses through simple adventure game and platforming mechanics.

In the game you play as Pete, represented by a misshapen anthropomorphic black blob. Beginning in a foreboding dark room and from there traversing a bizarre series of landscapes, everything capturing an Alice in Wonderland vibe where nothing is the right size and alien actions seem everyday to those who live in this dream land. You encounter misshapen characters like yourself that spout cryptic clues that help you on your journey to “wake up” as it appears that Pete is trapped in his own dreamworld and hints are left that imply certain insidious characters want to keep you there. 

In the actual game mechanic department Coma does not shine overly bright. Most of the game is made up of running back and forth while getting dialogue options of characters, the platforming aspect of the game though I found far to floaty. I consistently failed at jumps I had previously made with ease due the finicky controls, while these sections didn’t really cause any road blocks when playing the game they did become rather frustrating and I could easy see someone switching the game off after failing a jump they made without even thinking about last time for the third or fourth time. Though it is not the platforming I suggest people go to Coma for it’s the whole atmosphere the game creates.

The music and sound of the game help add to this aspect a great deal with the starkness and darkness of the interior house and underground passageways being brought to life with little sound at all. This is matched with a odd, folksy tune strummed out on an acoustic guitar accompanying you as you travel through the main parts of the world. Sound effects come through harshly and in overtly familiar ways as if to drive home that they are fabrications of the mind, not the real thing but only an obvious sound we interpret as a certain thing, then again they could be the best quality sound effects available on an Indie game budget.  

The dream world contains figures such as your father, little sister and mother. These aspects that appear in everyone’s dreams help echo the bizarre characteristics of the dream world. The mother and father in the game play an antagonistic role in wanting to keep Pete trapped in his dream state, locking away his little sister and actively lying to keep him there only to have various background deus ex machina defeat them. Their actions add to the already looming sense of terror and as you travel into the mouth of a giant, fanged worm and out its other end you cannot help but feel something is deeply wrong with this world and waking up is by far the best thing Pete can do.

The game’s story and characters can be interpreted in a pretty deep and complex way whether it be personnel to yourself or about the creator and his experiences, it is in it’s rich interpretive factor that Coma helps interact with the player more than in its game play mechanics.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/541124