Backlog Bingo 2025: About An Elf

About An Elf is a 2022...uh, let's check with the developer on this one.

point-and-click-ish, visual-novel-ish game of gigantawesome proportions

Sure, it's one of those, whatever genre that is, from Meringue Interactive.

This game was on my card because of youtuber ThorHighHeels (congrats on your egg cracking, in the vanishingly unlikely world that you're reading this), specifically because I watched her video essay about it with my girlfriend. Said girlfriend would then stream the game in its entirety in one stream, an absolute fever dream that I missed most of but which she reliably describes as one of her favorite streams she's ever done.

I could spend some time talking about how About An Elf is the story of Dam, the elf princess, trying to bring back the mythical kingdom of Elftopia, assisted by her level one BraveCat assitant Roland, who is just an actual cat who walks on two legs, but...describing this game is meaningfully impossible, so I'll let Past Ammy do the talking:

Ammy, [Aug 31, 2025 at 8:17:50 PM]: I'm going to ask this in the most hinged way possible how much more of About An Elf is there if I'm at the birthday party looking for the doohickey to move the OSHA-violating teddy bear wrestler away from the MagiCola without waking it up so I can use it to free Dido from the glue trap?

Or, perhaps that is not convincing? Here's a context-free screenshot:

Narratively, this game is the truest form of "I am reasonbly sure I never actually left the hospital after bottom surgery and I dreamed this entire experience up in a child's snow globe or something". Mechanically? It fucking sucks! The only gameplay to speak of is in combat, which consists 100% of "the game shows you an image and you choose what element that image is most closely associated to"; instant win for guessing right, instant loss for guessing wrong. A candle? Yeah, that's fire. Birds sitting on a power line? Electricity! A cat nose? Uhhhhh...waaaater? A lightbulb? Well, that could be light or electricity...

You get the point: literally no one should play this for the gameplay, it sucks and is honestly kinda actively annoying. But if you want a game in which things happen at you for about three and a half hours, with writing that is consistently beyond total surrelity, boy do I have a game for you. Unfortunately, I didn't end up actually enjoying this very much: I think I absolutely would have been better served watching the entirety of Proxy's stream, joking along with her and the community, experiencing the firehose of weirdness surrounded by cool animals. Playing it alone just kinda left me at "yeah this is incredibly bizarre but there's no one to go 'haha how weird' with, and it seems to want to be weird purely as a challenge to the form" (The game goes so far as to directly say this is dialogue, in fact. :p)

About An Elf is 1000% a great game for someone, or for me in a different set and setting. But for current me, in this set and setting, Bingo 2025 has mostly ended not with a bang, but a whimper.