Dementia Gill

A game about consumption that consumed its own playtester.

I paid $35 on a gig-work site to have a playtester play my game for two hours. What followed was an accidental psychological experiment.

Dementia Gill is a short, aggressive game heavily inspired by Subway Surfers, TikTok, dropshipping, and brainrot (endless, repetitive loops designed to steal a user’s time and agency). By sheer coincidence, the playtester testing it was trapped in the gig economy (an endless, repetitive system of digital contracts designed to extract his time for a flat fee). He literally couldn't close the game because the platform's timer demanded his ongoing engagement.

Because he was on the clock, he played a five-minute game on loop for two hours, desperately trying to find a secret to unlock more content. There wasn't one. At one point, the game flashes a subliminal message: "YOU CAN STOP." Instead of stopping, he put the footage into Adobe Premiere Pro and scrubbed through it frame-by-frame, assuming it was a puzzle. The game explicitly gave him permission to leave, but his real-world contract wouldn't let him.

During the game, cheap Temu packages rain down to crush the player. The tester didn't know what Temu was. Stripped of its real-world context, he concluded that "Temu is some kind of god or deity in this universe." He was right.

There is a Chinese poem in the game. Its final line translates to: "Dear customer, your soul has been delayed in transit." After two hours of torturous repetition, translating foreign poetry, and forensic video analysis, his soul was literally delayed in transit. Defeated, he looked at the screen and said, "I actually feel like I have dementia."

He closed the game, uploaded his footage, and collected his $35.

The transaction was complete.

"I think the sole purpose of the game is to infuriate me as a playtester."
— Paid Reviewer

"I think Temu is some kind of god or deity."
— Same Reviewer

CONTROLS:

• Arrow Keys: Hop
• Left Click: Throw Hat
• Aim Down: Launch Up

(Note for streamers: Use Window Capture in OBS, not Game Capture.)