As of a few hours ago, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about ENA, the cult web series created by Peruvian animator Joel G. But now, it’s safe to say that I’m obsessed with it. I’m currently peeling through the backlog on YouTube to get deeper into the lore, and eyeing up the Fangamer-produced merch. How did we get here?
Well, a few years ago, while scouting cool indies for potential inclusion in the Future Games Show — easily one of the most exciting parts of my freelance workload — I came across ENA: Dream BBQ on Steam, promptly added it to my wishlist, sent it to my coworkers… and completely forgot about it. Then, earlier today, I received an email noting that it had suddenly launched on Steam. Chapter 1 is free-to-play, and also macOS compatible (another score for Mac gamers), so I figured why not hop in on my M4 MacBook Air and see what all the fuss is about.
Brother, there is some fuss to be had. ENA Dream BBQ is one of the coolest games I’ve ever played, and I can’t wait for the rest of it to come out. It’s like they turned Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Technodelic into a playable experience. To give you a quick reality lowdown, this is, for lack of better descriptors, a quasi-open-world adventure game, played from a first-person perspective. You are ENA, a humanoid… salesperson?! who is split down the middle, both polygonal and smooth, nice and mean, all-here and glitching out.
After going to sleep in a dim, fly-ridden street, you wake in a dreamlike casino, and walk to a hub platform populated by eye-popping characters both hand-drawn and 3D-modelled. Your job? To clear the smoke in the air to get to The Boss’s secret hideout. Two doors flank the central plinth, the Lonely Door and the Horse Door, and there’s another door, the Crowd Door, which is downstairs in the casino’s slot machine-covered reception, currently out of order.
Doors, in the ENA universe, function as portals to curious realms full of esoteric NPCs and silly side quests. They’re a bit like the painting portals in Super Mario 64, if the ROM file had been intentionally corrupted by a team of delightful creatives. For now, the Lonely Door is the only accessible world in the game, and it takes about two hours to explore and complete it.
Passage is negotiated by the door itself, a blue figure that devours ENA and spits them out in the Uncanny Streets, a mystifying sector lousy with imagination-imploding asset and character designs. Let’s start with the quest-giving wizard, who lives inside of a walrus carcass-come-circus tent and looks ripped from a CD-I game (or The Curse of Monkey Island, I can’t tell). There’s also a fellow who lives inside the cranium of a gumball machine — and sells you mayonnaise — and an Italian tracksuited gatekeeper who dies mid-conversation. Yes, you have to revive him. The voice acting is hilarious throughout.
As you engage in cutscene-d conversations, you’ll pick up a series of side quests that appear tracked in ENA’s brochure, the game’s menu. There’s also an overriding goal to find the door’s Genie, some kind of realm deity. As you proceed, you’ll be interrupted periodically by a plastic cup on a string dangling in front of your eyes — which ENA picks up for an inter dimensional chat with Froggy, who acts as an informant and wry sidekick during the events of Chapter 1 of ENA: Dream BBQ.
The name makes total sense when you think about it sincerely. Dream BBQ actively feels like a cookout in your subconscious, with all the most bogus and brain-tingling ideas brought together to chat and chow down in glorious unison. The irreverent writing style feels distinctly Motherian, so fans of Itoi, Fox and co will be comfortable here.
Like any good funny game, the script dances between all manner of emotions, from contextual, observational humour — “They can’t kidnap our free will to go the bathroom,” to life advice “You can’t live your life trying to make everybody happy!!” The latter is delivered by a flame-chested Australian, wound up by a ninja. Look, just go play it, right? It makes sense in motion.
Internet aesthetics abound throughout ENA: Dream BBQ, but there are also hallmarks here from seemingly every type of adventure game. Rendering and texturing styles span decades of video game history, from crunchy trash cans to ornate bowls that wouldn’t look out of place in Riven.
Simply walking around, encountering oddities and fulfilling criteria is riveting, brain-expanding stuff, persistently complemented by a range-finding soundtrack and a salvo of effects that interpolate the sounds of yesteryear into something new and profound. The audio design pulled me right back to my youth, and the fond memories I have of clicking on everything I could see in one of Humongous Entertainment’s Putt-Putt games and being rewarded for my persistence.
In the same way, Dream BBQ is tremendously busy with secrets, with heaps to unravel in the many nooks and crannies of Uncanny Streets. I’m already planning another play through to explore Chapter 1 in greater detail, but what I found in battleships made out of office buildings and megazord taxi cars defied reasonable explanation — in the best way possible.
Eventually, though, you end up on a linear path towards the credits which locks you out of the open-world but presents a series of newly ambitious levels that introduce cute puzzles, incredible characters and a bit of platforming trickery to conquer. If this is the new model for contemporary adventure games, so be it — it works like a charm. The only issue I encountered was an audio-based puzzle, which ended up being a bit tricky with my hearing loss, due to my inability to pick out directionality and the location of specific sounds. Either way, I managed eventually, and buckled back in for a thrill ride that lasted all the way to the finish.
I was crestfallen to see the credits roll on ENA Dream BBQ Chapter 1, but happy to know that I now have a playlist full of ENA content to tide me over. I’ll be ready and waiting for what’s next from this bracing crew of dreamweavers, whenever that may be. Really though, it is so inspiring to play a game this brave and unusual, which leans into its own madness and finds, as one tends to do, a patch of steady footing. Above all else, ENA Dream BBQ is an ode to imaginational indulgence, and by far the best game I’ve played this year.
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