Downerquest Review

Hey, me again, Great Value Archivebro back with another review. This time it's StoryQM's Downerquest!

Downerquest follows Fido Ballthrow, titular downer and one of the only people who can feel that the world is going to end. So, in the last five days he and everyone else supposedly has to live, he intends to do whatever he can to stop it if possible, though mostly he just manages to make himself and everyone else in his life have a bad time. Like Versequest, the QM's other and perhaps more well known project, Downer is a drawquest with more emphasis placed on dialogue and the drawings than verbal imagery or flowery language. This, I think, serves the quest well: the simple art of the quest and verbal ambiguity give it that trademark dream-like surrealness that Versequest readers will undoubtedly recognize, and despite the simple artstyle, the drawings can sometimes be surprisingly effective in conveying the dark themes and tone of the quest.

Speaking of themes, Downer is able to cover some really dark stuff-- mental illness, isolation, depression, self loathing, and the impact a person's actions can have on others-- with surprising maturity and about as much taste as one could manage in a quest format without completely neutering all impact. The characters are all believable and well written, even the ones that are more extreme and conventionally unrealistic. Making sure that the readers genuinely like the people that Fido cares about is, in my opinion, one of the most important tasks that a quest like this has to make work in order for it to have the proper effect on the audience: we need to feel guilty when Fido hurts his loved ones, when WE hurt them, in order for any of Fido's despair to really bleed into the reader.

Technically, there's next to nothing wrong with Downerquest, but if I had to mention something about it I disliked, it REALLY lives up to the name. While there is the occasional moment of levity sprinkled throughout the narrative, it feels... escapist. Like you're avoiding something important that you really should address, trying and failing to deny reality to have a moment of peace despite knowing full well that nothing is fine and everything is either going to shit or arrived at that destination a long time ago. It really does accurately capture the feeling of being depressed-- the undercurrent of dread and guilt and shame is completely inescapable, and as a result it really is a slog to read through and watch Fido make the same mistakes over and over again.

That said, it is (pretentious as it sounds to say) genuinely valuable as art. I really would recommend it to anyone who wasn't immediately scared off by the title of the quest.