Beautiful and simple.

User Rating: 8 | The Plan PC
This incredibly simplistic game puts you in control of a fly. You start the game by taking off from the rock from which you've been resting while staring at the menu screen, featuring only two options, start and quit. You fly upwards and probably either to one side of the screen or the other, and find that nature and the physical laws of the game, that is, you may only travel on a 2 dimensional plane, lead you to fly on a predetermined path. You are essentially fly upwards the entire time, slowly rising above the forest and occasionally are pushed back or to another path by the wind. Throughout the game the camera gradually pans away from the fly, allowing you to see more of the world. [spoilers]Minutes later you rise above the forest, into the sky and finally, you hit a bug light and the screen snaps to black.[/spoilers]

The Plan is beautifully created. It has been created with a strong sense of enhanced realism. The conifer forest appears very real albeit obscured by peripheral blur and depth of field. Before you reach your final destination, you witness a nebula in the background, before you become aware of a source of light directly above, as evident only from a shadow you cast below. The Plan makes astounding use of Unity, an engine which isn't known for its graphical capabilities.

The Plan's website states it is a game 'exploring issues of death and meaning'. It is a personal experience and one may infer their own meaning from the game. For me it explored a deterministic view of self; the inability to sway from one's path, the futility of our conscious goals, the pointlessness of our legacy and our inevitable, our meaningless death but also, the beauty we find around us and the ironic, ever increasing void in meaning to our lives as our knowledge increases. To some extent, in a less metaphorical and considerably less pretentious sense, the perils in exploring the unknown.