Life Tastes Like Cardboard: a game that opens with an apology

Some finish it moved; others spend their first hour trapped in a room with no way out. The same few-minute walk is what splits the people who played it.

A walk that shows up already apologizing

The store page sets the tone on its own, no image needed: a portrait of boredom and self-pity, aimed mostly inward, which the creator introduces with two apologies — one in the blurb, one in the plot description — for having made the game at all. The same text confirms that this is a first for the studio Demensa, which also handles distribution. Playing amounts to exactly that: you walk, you press the interact button, and you have no idea yet what you are about to run into.

The game came out on September 22, 2019, filed under indie by the store, built for a single player — no second player in the same session — and for Windows alone. The minimum spec sheet asks for very little: an Intel HD Graphics 2000, the kind of chip that shipped in office machines, should do the job, according to the requirements notice itself.

The players who got lost the right way

You press that same interact button with no idea what it will turn up — and it is in that blankness that the two accounts recommending the game meet, describing one sensation from two angles: getting genuinely lost, not merely lost inside a story. One of them, dated September 11, 2024 and written after eight hours of play, calls the experience among the strongest its author has ever felt in a game, and praises the soundtrack. The other, from September 9, 2026, with thirteen hours on the clock, reads the game as a confession that never pretends to resolve anything — it simply lets the player inhabit the mood it stages — and singles out the soundtrack along with the grim atmosphere of the settings. That same player concedes there is little mechanic beyond walking and the occasional interaction: the strength here is not in playing, it is in being inside the thing. The store's own summary of the response settles on very positive — which is no comfort to anyone who never clears the first room, as the list of players who do not recommend it makes plain.

Stuck in the room, not in the story

You walk into a room and, with no warning, it has no way out: the only move left is to close the game from the menu and load again, hoping not to land in there a second time. That is what one player describes running into inside the game's art museum, on April 25, 2020, after an hour of play — reason enough to drop it for good. Another, with thirty-one hours logged on January 16, 2020, never got that far: switching to fullscreen froze the game, which then shut itself down as soon as it finished loading.

Anyone who survives the technical crashes still has to decide what is left over, and opinion splits there too. A player with six hours, writing on May 10, 2020, grants that the dialogue sounds natural and that the project is ambitious, yet calls most of the trip exasperating and pointless, and finds that the story, which had the makings of something heavy, does not land — this from someone who, in their own words, likes walking simulators. In Spanish, a one-hour account from June 7, 2020 describes the same walk as slow and monotonous, with environments far too big for what they hold. In German, another player, six hours clocked on April 23, 2025, puts the irritation plainly: the game does not respect the time of the person playing it, though the art, at least, wins them over. What survives the crashes, in every case, is the same absence of a filter: to the players who recommend the game it is the most honest thing they have met in one, and to the players who do not it is a teenager's diary, kept by someone who assumed there was enough intimacy to share it.

Who that opening apology makes sense for

The apology at the start turns out to be partly fair. Not for the intent: that part is sincere, and it is what wins over the players who come away moved. It is fair on the technical side — anyone who gets locked into a museum room, or watches the game shut itself down on the way into fullscreen, never got the chance to decide whether they liked it. Worth the risk, then, if what you want in exchange is a raw portrait of boredom and self-pity from someone who admits, on the store page itself, to be writing mostly about themselves. Not worth it if you want a story that ends where it promises to: among the accounts gathered here, more than one player who likes the genre walked away the same way — without finishing it.