The product of three brothers from Spain, Don’t Feed the Monkeys takes some of the most pressing fears currently circulating through the zeitgeist and transforms them into a delightful indie game.
You play as the newest member of an elite secret society (at least in the words of the mysterious recruiter that contacts you at the beginning of the game), who give you access to a suite of hidden cameras and compromised webcams. While electronically peeking through stranger’s windows, you begin to harvest pieces of information relating to some nebulous ‘investigation’ that builds as the game progresses.
Of course, as in any good surveillance thriller, it’s not just a matter of passively observing. While your handler (and the title of the game) exhort you not to interfere with the lives of the people you’re observing, you’re given countless ways to do just that. Early on, alongside the software that gives you access to the ‘cages’ you’re watching you’re given access to a chat program, the primary way your recruiter gets in touch with you. Eventually, though, you’ll be able to exploit that software to break the Primate Observation Club’s central rule (the ‘don’t talk about fight club’ of the POC) and reach out to the subjects you’ve been observing.
And it’s not just chat. You can also have deliveries made to the homes you’re peeping into, and even find more direct ways to insert yourself into their lives. Of course, these actions aren’t without consequences, and a large number of the divergent branches of the game’s (quite deep and surprisingly compelling) story are a result of the choices you make when presented with the temptation to interact.
It’s easy to get lost in the action, particularly when you start learning more about the people you’re studying or becoming more directly involved in their lives, but you’ll also need to tear yourself away from your bank of monitors to take care of more mundane concerns. The Club insists you continue buying more observation cages on a strict schedule or they’ll give you the boot (ending the game), but you’ll also need to stay on top of things like paying your rent and feeding yourself. The light survival sim aspects are a great way to break up the long periods you’ll spend observing your new ‘friends,’ though you may find yourself unwilling to stop your constant flickering between cages long enough to deal with your banal human needs.
In an age where practically everyone has a video camera on their person at all times and where oversharing is the norm rather than the exception, Do Not Feed the Monkeys plays into a number of the issues that are defining our culture. Privacy, data harvesting and manipulation, and the fear of being constantly on stage, constantly under the eye of the anonymous other, create a menacing undertone beneath a game that on the surface is buoyed by charming pixel graphics and some hilarious dialogue.
Anyone who’s spent any time with the publisher’s previous project, Beholder, will see a lot of parallels in Do Not Feed the Monkeys; Beholder was a game anchored by the idea of spying on your neighbors and digging through their figurative dirty laundry. And launching just over a week before Halloween (on Steam on October 23rd, 8:00pm PDT) feels very appropriate given the spooky implications of a world where you’re never properly alone.
