Have you played The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time? I mean, you have to, right, it’s The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of all Time! Or so the video game named The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of all Time (or TROTEOTGOAT as I’ll refer to it henceforth) would present itself as, anyway, an investigative deluge of several genres that is out today.

In TROTEOTGOAT, you are not playing the greatest RPG of all time, or even really, technically its remake. You are playing the culture around it, all of which leads you down to the line of questioning, “what is the greatest RPG of all time?” Moment to moment you’ll be wandering around a Square Enix, HD-2D-esque world with a gang of characters you’d never expect to have become friends. The magic lies in the rest of it; in inspecting the game’s original manual, in listening to some director’s commentary, and in watching clips of an “unreleased amateur documentary.”

In particular I’m quite fond of the presentation of the manual. There is a sacrilegious quality to it, this precious paper desecrated with torn pages, hand-written notes and cheeky doodles, most of which are in service of helping you complete particular puzzles. The manual itself offers in-world tips on how to beat certain enemies or complete certain tasks, a relic of game manuals of old that clearly hinted at a certain sense of medium immaturity. It is all incredibly cute, and the game’s Steam page says it only runs at 4-6 hours long, a timescale that’s hard to beat in my adult, time-short life.

I’m also appreciative of having a game that looks to reflect on the questions that arise around a thing that is the “greatest” thing of a thing. I also find rankings like that quite fruitless and annoying. You can have personal taste, it’s alright, someone disagreeing with you won’t kill you. In any case, TROTEOTGOAT is available to pick up on Steam now.