And if you sit back, unclench the tiny, rippling biceps in your trigger finger, and just enjoy the ride, you'll find a whole, whole lot more than you'd probably expect. And yet, I've finished it three times now – partially because every playthrough is randomly generated, but mainly because Proteus is what you make of it. Even less if you just race between seasons without stopping to smell the pixel blobs that are either roses or some kind of demonic lamprey species. A playthrough will only last you about an hour. Its art style looks like it'd be more at home inside a dusty Atari 2600 cartridge. Which object or animal made which sound, and how would it change the soundtrack's backing track? It is personal.

I found it enjoyable to try and figure out how everything fit together. It's oddly captivating to just walk around and let it wash over your surroundings. The simple act of moving creates this slowly building, suddenly crashing tidal wave of music that always feels like it's right behind you.

This pretty much applies to every sound in the game, too. In the end, I was completely soaked, but I felt every single drop. It was like diving into the deep end of a pool, but in slow-mo. Brittle whispers of synthesized sound chipped away at the silence as rivulets of green, yellow, blue, and pink filled in the valley beneath me. Then I peeked out over the colossal rock's craggy lip and heard the faintest fluttering of music. I was at some nexus point of perfect silence, deaf and blind to everything except what was right under my nose. Seriously! The first time I did it, I trudged to the top of a random sandy landmass and immediately noticed something: the sound dropped out entirely. One of the coolest things you can do in Proteus is just run down a hill. I mean, honestly, what are these creatures? Is that, like, some sort of plunger mushroom? Yuck, why is it making that sound? I want to go home. On some level, I'm sure the art style comes from a place of necessity (Proteus was created by only two people), but – intentional or not – I think it creates a better sense of mystique than the faux-realistic look of a world like, say, Skyrim. There's even a little warmth beneath its sawtooth maws of jagged polygons. It's foreign, sure, but not altogether uninviting. It's kind of like you've taken a rocket ship to Game Boy Planet. Music's distorted by slightly unsettling bleeps and bloops, and once you get up close, creatures look, well, not of this world. There's a certain alien-ness to the island.

And, melodramatic though it might sound, feelings. Mysterious towers, lonely shacks, breathtaking mountains, dreary valleys – cloaked in mist and wet with a mournful rain. Instead of solving arbitrary, content-gating puzzles or going Far Cry 3 on an island's inhabitants, I just took in my surroundings. While you might think the lack of traditional action would render everything else pointless and boring, it's actually liberating. The greatest triumph of Proteus is its confidence in its own identity as something way, way, way off gaming's typical beaten path. There's a beauty in Proteus' unmatched simplicity and it knows it.

Prodeus eve