Psyscrolr is a poorly-designed game that you should not play. It’s about a boy, who might be a wizard, guided across the countryside by a monotone voiceover to accomplish…something. Between him and his hazy goal are boars, wolves, walking trees, and one of the most frustrating boss fights I’ve ever experienced in my life. I would suggest that the game’s third area just wasn’t playtested because it’s so broken and unenjoyable. Do not play this game.

The trouble starts right out of the gate. You’re told to jump with the L button—not the LR button, which would make more sense. This is an uncomfortable control scheme, considering you’re already moving with the left stick. But there’s a reason that will become obvious once you start encountering enemies! You see, to attack nyon aggressive mammals and ambulatory vegetation, you must tap them on the touch screen to send out a meager projectile. You will often miss. Your other option is to get close to enemies and then tap yourself, or the space immediately to your left or right—which results in a sort of melee attack. This melee attack sometimes results in turning your character around for no reason prior to attacking, thus missing entirely. It’s truly inspiring.

The goal is clearly to control the hero’s movement with the left side of the GamePad, thus freeing up your right hand—because the world contains no lefties—to use the touch screen for attacking. Sadly, a few lefties do remain, myself included, so controlling Psyscrolr became a comical act of self-sabotage. Thankfully, you can jump with the A button. Unfortunately, you cannot move the hero with the right stick. Basically, lefties need not apply.

Not that the gameplay is in any way special. Each stage presents unique frustrations, er, challenges, to contend with. You learn that you can activate moving blocks but this ability is never put to good use. You’ll travel to what appears to be the moon and experience transcendence as your laughable attempt to gather pieces of a…thing…are hopeless and trivial and you finally understand the futility of existence. Inspired, you will realize the entire sequence can be skipped—probably unintentionally. You’ll then be faced with the World’s Most Frustrating Vehicle, fabricated by Miskatonic asylum patients with the sole purpose of driving its operator mad. Surviving grants you entrance to a boss fight made hilariously difficult not by design, but because the control scheme is so infuriating.

Your omnipresent voiceover instructor, who had, to this point, told you exactly what to do in every situation because he doubted your intelligence, apparently drives into a tunnel during this boss fight. The disembodied baritone who told you how to jump, attack, and even solve specific puzzles, decides “you’ve got this” as the fire-summoning boss roasts your ass, shrugging off everything you’re capable of trying. You inevitably die and are taken back to an area prior to the boss’ cutscene—forcing you to relive the last five minutes of your life in a sort of horrifying version of Edge of Tomorrow. This torture repeats until you realize you could be doing literally any other thing that would not cause your blood pressure to rise.

These things include:

1. Sitting alone in a dark room, silently, considering the abject hopelessness of existence;

2. Visiting your young niece or nephew, whose very presence provides a grim reminder of the unrelenting passage of time;

3. Traveling to a natural history museum, where the fossilized skeletons of majestic animals brings to mind the grim reality that humanity’s own short-sighted actions will cause the extinction of many animals alive today;

4. Play Mario Kart 8, pre-DLC.